Oakland county and Michigan

*Oakland County alone has 3 landfills, with an additional 14 in bordering counties

* Annual Budgets for the Great Lake States are as follows:

Pennsylvania: 66 million dollars
Wisconsin: 29 million dollars
Minnesota: 14.2 million dollars
Ohio: 12 million dollars
Illinois: 6.5 million dollars
Indiana: 3.2 million dollars
Michigan: 200 thousand dollars

 

Country wide or general

* Paper and cardboard combined make up 73 percent of the material in landfills

* Paper products make up 40 percent of our trash

* Once paper is put in a landfill it takes over 50 years to decompose

* Every Sunday, Americans waste 90 percent of recyclable newspapers. This wastes 500,000 trees

* Every day, Americans buy 62 million newspapers and throw out 44 million

* The average American uses 650 pounds of paper a year

* One piece of office grade paper can be recycled 7 times

* It takes a 15-year-old tree to produce 700 grocery bags

* Recycling half of the world’s paper would free 20 million acres of forest

* If Americans recycled every phone book, an estimated 650,000 tons of paper could be saved each year

* Each ton of recycled paper can save: 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, 3 cubic yards of landfill space, 4,000 kilowatts of energy and 7,000 gallons of water