Paper

The theme of this week’s facts is paper. These facts are all U.S. based because pretty much everything in the world always is. To help you picture the scale, the population of the U.S. is about 75 times that of New Zealand.

58% of U.S. newspapers are recycled.

That’s fairly good, but 500,000 trees could be saved if every family in the United States recycled their newspaper.

Americans use 50 million tons of paper annually – consuming more than 850 million trees.

So I guess that would mean 17 trees are used to make one ton of paper

Every ton of recycled office paper saves 1,440 litres of oil (plus save heaps of trees)

These facts raised a really interesting point for me, basically because I like cars and I like driving. Let’s just stop being such arrogant idiots and save some stuff. I see now why greenies get so frustrated, because if everyone on the planet did this stuff it would make a huge difference. Billions of trees and millions of litres of oil would be saved instead of being pissed away. It makes me think of burning money – just totally wasteful and pointless. Aaaaaah! I think I’m being converted :/

ATM receipts

If you’re not already saying no to ATM receipts, thats one thing you can start doing today. Not only are receipts annoying (and sometimes depressing), they create a massive amount of litter and are less useful than a plastic bag. To put it in perspective:

In the USA alone, 8 billion ATM receipts are printed every year. If you joined these end to end, the result would be a roll of a paper long enough to circle the Earth’s equator 15 times!!! (according to Market Watch)

With some rough maths, I reckon New Zealand must be up around the 100 million mark.

WHOA! Thats crazy. So say no at the ATM. Hopefully, eventually we can put an end to ALL annoying receipts, you know the ones, like when you buy one thing at the supermarket and its still 30cm long. . .Yay! No more annoying scraps of paper and a little hug for the planet.