The average American generates 1,600 pounds of trash per year. This means that in my adult life to date, my household as a typical American household would have discarded 135 tons of trash or about 10 full garbage trucks. This volume would fill a two bedroom apartment floor to ceiling with compacted trash. I estimate that we have recycled more than half of our household trash for more than forty years.

Residential trash contains materials that could easily be recycled by those in the household. This amounts to roughly 60% of the trash volume. The amount that American residential households ACTUALLY recycle is 13%. By contrast, Europeans recycle 50-64% of their residential trash. We have a long way to go.

Here’s a more vivid image – If you took the 72 million tons of Municipal Solid Waste that goes to the landfill every year across our land, the garbage trucks to transport that waste would be lined up bumper to bumper from here to the moon. We could shrink that by 60% if we only cared enough about future generations to do so.

On top of the recyclable trash, about half of our domestic food waste can be composted. This saves energy, reduces investment in sewage infrastructure and provides useful gardening soil. Studies vary in their measurements but 20-28% of American households actually compost some or all of the 36 million pounds of food waste they send to the dump each year.

It takes 20 times the amount of energy to create new aluminum from its ore (bauxite) than it does to melt an aluminum can and recycle it. For glass the number is about 3. For plastic it is about 1.6. Here are some more tangible ways to look at it: The energy saved in recycling ONE aluminum can could run a 14 watt CFL light bulb for 20 hours or power your desktop computer for 3 hours. Five 2 liter recycled PET bottles (mainly soft drink bottles), produces enough fiberfill to make a ski jacket. The energy saved recycling one glass bottle would run a 14 watt CFL bulb for 28 hours. Broken glass in the environment takes 1 million years to break down.

Manufacturing one ton of office paper products with recycled paper saves between 3,000-4,000 kilowatt hours of energy or about the entire output of the Muskogee power plant for one hour. Grace uses a ton of paper products every two years (most of which gets recycled).

If we really care about the “unborn” or those who come after us, we might ponder these numbers in prayer and resolve to do what we can about it. The future is literally in your hands.