Define Your World...
South Mountain Community College is committed to reducing our impact on the environment. It is our goal to raise environmental awareness and demonstrate how we can all become stewards of the earth with only a few small changes in the way we live.
With several awareness projects in the works, and a paper-recycling program that is already in progress, we’re well on our way to being an earth-first college!
Currently, our paper-recycling initiative is based solely on volunteer efforts from students and faculty. For information on how to become a part of this important effort, contact Amy MacPherson, PTK Advisor at 602.305.5714.
Take a moment to review some quick tips on how you can improve the environment and learn how you can define your world.
Did You Know...
- To produce each week's Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down.
- Recycling a single run of the Sunday New York Times would save 75,000 trees.
- If every American recycled just one-tenth of their newspapers, we would save about 25,000,000 trees a year.
- If you had a 15-year-old tree and made it into paper grocery bags, you'd get about 700 of them. A supermarket could use all of them in under an hour!
- This means in one year, one supermarket goes through 60,500,000 paper bags! Imagine how many supermarkets there are in the U.S.!!!
- The average American uses seven trees a year in paper, wood, and other products made from trees. This amounts to about 2,000,000,000 trees per year!
- The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.
- Approximately 1 billion trees worth of paper are thrown away every year in the U.S.
- Americans use 85,000,000 tons of paper a year; about 680 pounds per person.
- The average household throws away 13,000 separate pieces of paper each year. Most is packaging and junk mail.
- In 1993, U.S. paper recovery saved more than 90,000,000 cubic yards of landfill space.
- Each ton (2000 pounds) of recycled paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill space, 4000 kilowatts of energy, and 7000 gallons of water. This represents a 64% energy savings, a 58% water savings, and 60 pounds less of air pollution!
- The 17 trees saved (above) can absorb a total of 250 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air each year. Burning that same ton of paper would create 1500 pounds of carbon dioxide.
- The construction costs of a paper mill designed to use waste paper is 50 to 80% less than the cost of a mill using new pulp.
(Source: Recycling Revolution)