As a small follow-up to our other articles on recycling, let's cover some of the stats for how much we are wasting each year. They can be sobering to read and are important to know so we can take action to reduce our waste.
Each year, the average person throws away 7 1/2 times their body weight. That's reaching 1,000 pounds in most cases! Of this, 30% is paper, 15% food, 15% garden waste, 10% metal, and 10% plastic.
Additionally, it's worth knowing which items take the longest to decompose in landfills. Styrofoam is by far the worst, estimated to take billions of years before it can decompose. Glass and hard plastics also may take over a million years to fully erode. Another crook are plastic bags from supermarkets, taking 1,000 years to fully go away, though all the while putting toxins into the environment.
That's all we'll have on recycling for a while, so we hope you learned enough for the time being! Check out the infographic below for more stats.
