Exercise 7. Read the information. Discuss it with your fellow students

Trash Facts

• The average American throws away 4.5 pounds of trash a day.

• To give you an idea of how much trash we generate here in the United States, imagine a hole the size of a

football field, including the end zones. If we bury all of the trash we produce in just one year, that hole

would be 100 miles deep!

• Every year we fill enough garbage trucks to form a line that would stretch from the earth, halfway to the

moon.

• Each day the United States throws away enough trash to fill 63,000 garbage trucks.

• Almost 1/3 of the waste generated in America is packaging.

• In 1986, the United States generated almost 160 million tons of paper, glass, metals, plastics, rubber, food

and yard waste. This was an increase of 80% over the figures in 1960.

• In 1996 13.3 million tons of waste were generated in Indiana including 1.9 tons from out of state.

• In 1995 27% of the United States' food supply spoiled or went unusd (48,000,000 tons).

• Man-made rubbish in orbit includes 8,500 objects and 100,000 pieces of space litter.

• 74,200 fans at Super Bowl XXX generated 75 tons of trash in Sun Devil Stadium in Phoenix, while 72,000

fans at Super Bowl XXXI generated 68 tons at the Superdome in New Orleans. At Super Bowl XXXII in

Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego, 70 tons of trash was generated by 68,000 fans.

Shopping Habits

• Americans buy 2,300.000 pairs of shoes a day - enough to cover the bottom of a 17-acre closet with shoe

boxes.

• Every year Americans buy more than a billion incandescent light bulbs. That is three acres of light bulbs a

day. A 60-watt incandescent light bulb will last about 750 hours, compared to 7,500 to 10,000 hours that a

compact fluorescent bulb that generates the same light.

• An average child will use between 8 -10,000 disposable diapers ($2,000 worth) before being potty trained.

Each year parents and babysitters dispose of about 18 billion of these items. In the United States alone

these single-use items consume nearly 100,000 tons of plastic and 800,000 tons of tree pulp. We will pay

an average of $350 million annually to deal with their disposal and, to top it off, these diapers will still be in

the landfill 300 years from now.

• Americans throw away 570 diapers per second. That's 49 million diapers per day.

• Seventy-six percent of Americans consider themselves environmentalists.

• If more people became environmental shoppers, the amount of trash could be reduced by as much as 45

percent.