We are now almost a month into the New Year! This year is going to fly by and it’s only just beginning.
Today’s blog post is about the movie Story of Stuff. Take 20 minutes of your day to watch this movie about how production and consumption patterns, affect waste generation. This is an American movie, but many of the themes apply to our everyday lives.
Here are some Canadian waste facts to give you a Canadian perspective:
- An average North American will throw away 600 times his or her weight in garbage, in their lifetime. For example: a 68 kg adult will leave 40,825 kg of trash.
- Since 1950, Canadians have consumed as much as all the generations before us combined.
- To create just one kilogram of consumer goods, manufacturers create five kilograms of waste.
- In North America, we produce enough garbage each day, to fill 70,000 garbage trucks. If you were to line up all these garbage trucks, over a year, they would stretch halfway to the moon.
- Across Canada it costs over $1.5 billion a year to dispose of garbage.
- Today, 80% of municipal and industrial solid waste in Canada is disposed of in landfills. The rest is disposed through recycling, resource recovery and incineration.
- About 1/3 of our waste is paper and paperboard while another is yard and kitchen waste. The rest is glass, metals, plastics, textiles, wood and other materials.
- Over 20% of the garbage thrown out by the average BC household is packaging.
- Recycling one tonne of newspaper saves 19 trees, 3 cubic metres of landfill space, 4,000 kilowatt hours of energy, 29,000 litres of water and 30 kgs of air pollution.
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For these facts and more visit:
www.gbresourcesgroup.com
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