Recently, I’ve become interested in the amount of waste generated by and in the United States, so I did some research and what I came up with was quite startling.

As I was cleaning out my refrigerator, wasted food was the first thing to come to mind, and a study from the University of Arizona in Tucson gave me just the information that I needed. The study revealed that 40 to 50 percent of all food ready for harvest never gets eaten. The sad part of that is that most of this food was found to be edible. That means that it could be going to feed the many people who need it. Moreover, the loss rate could save U.S. consumers, as well as manufacturers, tens of billions of dollars EACH YEAR!

The average American household wastes 14 percent of their food purchases. Interestingly enough, 15 percent of that is food that is NOT expired and has never even been opened. Across America, household wastes total $ 43 billion worth of food (that’s 43,000 tons of food), which equals a serious economic problem. If Americans could reduce food wastes by at least half, adverse ecological impacts could be reduced by 25 percent.

One of my environmental concerns has always been the beautiful trees, which seem to be becoming more scarce every day.

Paper, paper, paper. Where do I begin? The depletion of the world’s forests has so many harmful effects to the environment. For starters, trees help make the oxygen we breathe. That’s right, trees take in carbon dioxide (CO₂) and release the oxygen that we need. Secondly, without trees, many animals cannot live. What many people don’t realize is that animals die when their natural habitat is destroyed. When species die off, the order of the food chain is eventually harmed. Of course we don’t see this, since we’re at the top of the food chain. However, the years we’ve spent destroying this earth is about to catch up with us.

Did you know that Americans receive almost four million tons of junk mail every year? That’s paper, and most of it ends up in landfills. The average U.S. citizen expends 650 tons of paper each year. We use enough office paper in a year to build a 12-foot wall that would stretch from Los Angeles to New York City.

The rate of office paper use is almost staggering.  We make 400 billion photocopies per year; that’s about 750,000 copies every minute of every day. American businesses currently use an estimated 21 million tons of paper every year, averaging 175 pounds of paper for each citizen of this wasteful country.

Every year, virtually 900,000 precious trees are cut down so that American paper and pulp mills can have raw material, so that we, in turn, can waste all that paper. For instance, one magazine uses approximately 11.5 trees. Think of all the magazines that don’t get purchased. Once the shelf life has expired, where do they go? In the trash.

But it isn’t just the trees on U.S. soil that are being chopped away. In the last 20 years, almost one million species have disappeared from the world’s tropical forests. From 1960 to 1985, more than 40 percent of the Central American rainforests were destroyed to create grazing land for cattle.

But that’s not America’s problem, right? Wrong. The U.S. imports more than 100,000 tons of beef from Central America each year. The U.S. cattle industry alone produces 158 million tons of waste per year, leaving livestock production as the number one cause of water pollution in the United States. About  85 percent of topsoil loss in this country is the consequence of livestock production, which has left 22 million acres of land unusable thanks to desertification.

So, how much actual trash does the American public actually waste?  Well, The United States alone tosses out 56 tons of garbage a year per person—that’s about five pounds of trash generated by each American every day.

Every year, this country fills enough garbage trucks to stretch, halfway to the moon—that’s 63,000 garbage trucks. Sadly enough, the amount of money spent on trash disposal in American schools is equal to the amount spent on textbooks. That says a lot.

Plastic? Who cares how it’s made—let’s waste it. Every hour, 2.5 million plastic bottles are thrown away. It makes sense when considering our rate of soda consumption alone, as there is one vending machine for every 97 people in this country. We toss out enough of paper and plastic cups, forks and spoons to circle the equator 300 times.

Glass bottles? Every two weeks, we could have filled BOTH World Trade Center towers, when they existed, with the amount of glass bottles we trash.

Aluminum—who needs it? We squander enough to rebuild this country’s commercial air fleet every three months. That’s because 65 billion soda cans are used each year. Wasting one aluminum can exhaust as much energy as if that can were half full of gasoline.

We all love kids, but how much waste is generated in trying to keep them cared for? Well, if the average kid uses between 800 and 10,000 disposable diapers ($2,000 worth) before becoming potty trained, and 18 billion of these items are disposed of per year, the United States alone uses nearly 100,000 tons of plastic and 800,000 tons of tree pulp to produce these single-use items. Not only are more than one billion trees cut down to make these convenient poop catchers each year, but these diapers will remain in the landfills 300 years from now. We dispose of 570 diapers per second (49 million diapers per day)—that’s a lot of poop and a lot of paper.

Now, let’s talk about water. Lubbock already is experiencing a shortage of this raw material. The typical U.S. home wastes between 12,000 and 38,000 gallons of water each year. Approximately 339,000 gallons of water are used in the United States every. But water, just like trees, doesn’t seem to be such a big deal to us anymore. As of 1992, 14 billion pounds of trash have been dumped into the oceans annually around the world.

Two million gallons of motor oil are dumped in American waterways each year, and more than eight million tons of oil are spilled into the world’s oceans every year. Sewage treatment facilities discharge six trillion gallons of sewage wastewater into U.S. coastal waters every year.

So what does this do to the animals that are forced to live and die in these waters filthy with pollution? Who cares? Not us. Two million sharks die in driftnets in the North Pacific every year, while tuna fishermen are permitted to kill more than over 20,000 dolphins every year.

Well, some people may be asking, “if this is such a problem, how do we fix it?”

I say, “Learn to recycle!”

As it turns out, more than half of all the trash we throw away could be recycled into new products.  If we placed the emphasis on recycling rather than landfill operations, we would have more jobs. That’s right, recycling as opposed to landfill ventures creates six times more jobs.

Of the aforementioned half of garbage that is thrown out yet recyclable, only 10 percent actually is turned into something new.

So, let’s talk about the positive affects of recycling. Recycling just one soda can saves 96 percent of the energy used to make a can from ore, and if produces 95 percent less air pollution and 97 percent less water pollution.

Recycling one ton of cardboard saves over nine cubic yards of landfill space, while one ton of paper from recycled pulp saves 17 trees, three cubic yards of landfill space, 7,000 gallons of water, 4,200 kilowatt hours (which is enough to heat your home for half a year) and 390 gallons of oil. It also prevents 60 pounds of air pollutants.

Producing recycled white paper creates 74 percent less air pollutants, 35 percent less water pollutants and 75 percent less process energy than producing paper from virgin fibers.

Aside from that, recycling paper keeps us from cutting down more trees, and pressures our forests. Restraining from depleting our tree supply will keep a safe natural habitat for animals, and keeping species alive will benefit us all in the end.

I’m not quite sure why Americans think that our ecosystem is something to just squander. It isn’t. It’s full of precious resources that we need for survival. Until we realize what we’re doing through our gluttony and waste, we’ll keep destroying this earth until there’s nothing left of it, and I don’t want that to happen.

We need to become conscious of our waste and pollution of water and airways, of the damage we’re doing to the forests (and the animals that live there), and make an effort to stop, or at least slow down, the rate at which we are annihilating our natural resources.

So think twice before you toss out that paper and plastic. Find a recycling center. Yes, recycling seems much more time-consuming than just tossing it in the garbage.  But the benefits will far outweigh the consequences of not recycling.