The following article was submitted by representatives from the Keep Smith County Beautiful Committee:
Can you guess how much space is used every year in our Landfills on items that could be recycled? Way more than you can even begin to imagine.
Above is a small representation on the space that these 15 2-liter bottles take up. Once you throw your trash into the dumpsters, whether it be at a convenience site or at the local landfill, the trash in the bags act like a cushion for the plastic bottles. After a dumpster is filled, taken to the landfill, and dumped, it holds, on average, approximately 2.5-3 tons per dumpster.
Once a plastic bottle gets pushed under even just a foot of other trash, the compacter machine can’t smash it completely flat, thus taking up much more space.
However, if you take the caps off and smush the bottle yourself before discarding it, you save so much more space in your own trash bag/trash can as well as that much more space in the landfill.
Help us Keep Smith County Beautiful!
DID YOU KNOW:
- Americans throw away 35 BILLION plastic bottles every year!!
- Only 25% of the plastic produced in the U.S. is recycled…..If we recycled the other 75% we could save 1 Billion gallons of oil and 44 million cubic yards of landfill space annually!
- Enough plastic is thrown away each year to circle the Earth FOUR times!
- Plastic takes up to 1,000 years to degrade in a landfill.
Keep Smith County Beautiful meets the last Friday morning of every month at 7:30 a.m. at the Chamber of Commerce in Carthage. This month’s meting is set for Friday, October 26, 2018.
Everyone is welcome to attend!
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