Below are some pretty amazing facts you may find useful for your video production!

SIMPLE NUMBERS

• According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), during the past 35 years, the amount of waste each person creates has almost doubled from 2.7 to 4.4 pounds per day. The most effective way to stop this trend is by preventing waste in the first place.
• Americans use 100 million tin and steel cans every day.
• The average American generates 1,609 pounds of trash each year; 75% is recyclable.
• We recycle about 27% of our waste—going to 35% would equate to taking 7 million cars off the road.
• The average child in America is exposed to 5 pesticides daily in his/her food and drinking water.
• Plastic bags cause over 100,000 sea turtle and other marine animal deaths annually when animals mistake them for food.
• After less than 50 years of plastics, there is a Texas–sized vortex of plastics in the Pacific Ocean due to trash accumulation from swirling, under-ocean currents.
• Styrofoam takes 20,000 years to degrade in the environment. It has been estimated that the average office worker uses 500 Styrofoam cups in a year.

FOOD & FARMING

• The average American eats 14 pounds of chemicals each year—2 pounds of these are pesticides and herbicides.
• Each 1% shift to organics saves 10 million pounds of pesticides and herbicides a year.
• The typical bag of potato chips bought at the supermarket has been subjected to more than 50 chemicals from seed to shelf and can contain up to 75 times the “safe” levels of cancer-causing acrylamide established by the state of California.
• If organic farming methods were practiced on all the planet’s food-growing land, it would be like taking more than 1.5 billion cars off the road.
• Cotton uses 25% of the world’s pesticides with just 3% of the cropland.

HOUSEHOLD

• Pesticide poisoning is the second most common cause of household poisoning in the U.S., resulting in 2.5 million poisonings annually by products as common as ant and roach killer, fly sprays, and insect repellents.
• The typical suburban homeowner uses 6 times the pesticides and synthetic fertilizers per acre as a conventional (non-organic) farmer, according to The Organic Center.
• One nice, hot shower exposes you to 50 times the chemicals in a glass of tap water.
• If every household in the United States replaced just 1 box of facial tissue, 1 roll of toilet paper, and 1 roll of paper towels  with 100 percent recycled counterparts, we could save 1,130,900 trees.
• 40–60% of energy use in buildings is for heating and cooling… making it a major contributor of greenhouse gas emissions.
• Changing the temperature 2 degrees can save you 6 percent of your power or gas bill.
• Programmable thermostats automatically adjust your home’s temperature settings, allowing you to save energy while you are away or sleeping.
• Your computer consumes electricity equal to three 100-watt light bulbs when it is on.
• Nontoxic LED lights use 10% of the power of conventional bulbs, last 50 times longer, and contain no toxic mercury as fluorescent bulbs do.
• We use enough disposable batteries to build a stack as tall as the Empire State Building daily.
• When possible, use rechargeable batteries to help reduce garbage and keep toxic metals found in some batteries out of the waste stream.
• Disposable diapers create 5 million tons of untreated excrement in landfills while reusable diapers consume 3 times as many BTUs of energy and generate 10 times as much water pollution.

RECYCLING

• We use 244 billion single-use water bottles and disposable cups each year in the U.S. alone.
• Our yearly stack of plastic water bottles would go to the moon 9 times.
• Americans throw out enough paper and plastic cups and flatware to circle the equator 300 times.
• Just in the United States, we use a million plastic bags every 5 minutes, 20% of the world’s total.
• Each reusable shopping bag has the potential to eliminate the use of 1,000 plastic bags over its lifetime.
• Bottle deposits have brought recycling of glass bottles to near 100% in Ontario, Canada.
• Recycling aluminum saves 95% of the energy used to make the material from scratch. That means you can make 20 cans out of recycled material with the same amount of energy it takes to make 1 can out of new material.
• When you toss out 1 aluminum can, you waste as much energy as if you had filled the same can half full of gasoline and poured it into the ground.
• A steel mill using recycled scrap reduces related water pollution, air pollution, and mining wastes by about 70%.
• A recycled beer can can become a new beer can in a very short amount of time, and making new aluminum cans from recycled cans uses 95% less energy than making cans from virgin ore, according to Earth911.
• Every ton of mixed paper recycled can save the energy equivalent of 185 gallons of gas.
• Americans throw away enough aluminum every month to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet.
• We save enough energy by recycling 1 aluminum can to run a TV set for 3 hours.
• Every year, we save enough energy recycling steel to supply LA with nearly a decade’s worth of electricity.

AUTOMOBILES

• Americans throw out enough iron and steel to supply all of the nation’s automakers on a continuous basis.
• Each year, we use 600 million gallons of motor oil, which is equivalent to 66,700 tanker trucks.
• The 4 quarts of oil in an average oil change can poison 1,000,000 gallons of water.
• Improper oil changes result in the equivalent of 16 Exxon Valdez oil spills into U.S. sewers and landfills each year.

HEALTH & BEAUTY

• Lipstick is the most toxic personal care product, and the average woman swallows 4 to 9 pounds of it each year, according to Glamour magazine.
• Most makeup is made from petroleum.