Happy Earth Day!

Its Earth day! YIPEE! But man, I wish every day people would consider it to be Earth Day! Yes, I am a recycler & am starting to get a little carried away about it - but I feel so bad now when I have a can, or especially a water bottle & I go to throw it in the garbage can. Why do that when you can recycle it & it saves the land fills AND it gets used again?!? What a deal! Yes, my husband gets aggravated at me because I'm constantly cleaning cans, washing bottles, cutting off labels, breaking down cardboard, putting newspaper in bins & always washing out detergent bottles. To me, now, its just habit! And luckily, we have a little recycle center that's just about 10 minutes away from us so once a month, the car gets loaded & I feel like I've done my part to help the little Earth!

Just try it for a week & look at all the stuff you, just one person or one family, has that can be recycled!

I also save all my things at work that can be recycled & take home when its a recycle trip weekend & I'm SHOCKED at the things I have just in my work area. Cardboard from coke boxes - water bottles - cardboard from cracker holders - aluminum cans out the wahzoo! Just me - all this comes from me!

I have to say, one of my biggest accomplishments that I'm proud of - I got my Jazzercise group to recycle their water bottles! I would look around & everyone had a water bottle with them & they'd just get thrown away. I told them I would personally recycle them myself if they would just set up a recycle center for them - they loved the idea & now there is a huge bin for all the bottled to be recycled & the awesome women that run it do all the work of making sure they are all being recycled!! GO JAZZERCISE!

And I'm not that fanatic where I make everyone else recycle - that's your choice, but let me just put some facts for you to look at & see what you can do to help! Does it help if one person makes a change, like me? Yeah - maybe not alot, but it helps! Does it make a difference if we all make changes? OH YEAH! Think about what little things you can do that will make a big difference!

ALUMINUM

* During the time it takes you to read this sentence, 50,000 12-ounce aluminum cans are made.

* There is no limit to the amount of times an aluminum can can be recycled!

*Recycling ONE can saves enough energy to run a TV for 3 hours - or an equivalent of a half gallon of gasoline!!!

PAPER

*To produce each week's Sunday's newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down (Oh, that makes me so sad!!!)

*If all our newspaper was recycled - we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year!!!!

*The amount of wood & paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years

PLASTIC

*Americans use 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour!!! 25,000,000 are thrown away each hour!

*Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as burning it in an incinerator.

*Plastic bags & other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kills as many as one million sea creatures each year!

GLASS

*Every month, we throw out enough glass bottles & jars to fill up a giant skyscraper - all of these jars are recyclable!

*A modern glass bottle would take 4,000 years or more to decompose - and even longer if its in the landfill!

MISC

*Rainforests are being cut down at the rate of 100 acres per minute!

*More than 20 MILLION Hershey's Kisses are wrapped each day - using 133 square miles of tinfoil. All that foil is recyclable - but not many people realize it!

*McDonalds saves 68,000,000 pounds of packaging per year just by pumping soft drink syrup directly from the delivery truck into tanks into the restaurant, instead of shipping the syrup in cardboard boxes! GO MICKEY D's!!!!!

*A typical family consumes 182 gallons of pop, 29 gallons of juice, 104 gallons of milk & 26 gallons of bottled water a year. That's alot of containers! Please try to recycle some of them!