upcycled gifts

It’s EasyBeing Green

(and fun too!)

upcycled gifts

upcycling – the process of converting waste materials or useless products into new materials or products of better quality or a higher environmental value.

upcycled gifts

Each day Americansproduce enough trash toequal the weight of theEmpire State Buildingin New York City.

upcycled gifts

7,300,000 poundsof trash EVERY DAY

51,100,000 poundsof trash EVERY WEEK

2,657,200,000 poundsof trash EVERY YEAR

upcycled gifts

If everyone lived like us–

we would need4 more Earths to provide

enough resources.

upcycled gifts

Who? Me?I didn’t do anything!

upcycled gifts

When you die, it will take one space in the cemetery

to bury your body.

upcycled gifts

It would take 1,100 more spaces to bury the trash you will produce as an average

American.

upcycled gifts

REDUCE

REUSE

RECYCLE

RESTORE

upcycled gifts

• Americans use 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour.

• Americans purchase an impressive 29 billion bottles every year.

• Making the plastic for those bottles uses 17 million barrels of crude oil annually.

• That is enough fuel to keep 1 million vehicles on the road for 12 months.

• If you were to fill one quarter of a plastic water bottle with oil, you would be looking at roughly the amount used to produce that bottle.

upcycled gifts

upcycled gifts

• A modern glass bottle would take 4000 years or more to decompose -- and even longer if it's in the landfill.

• More than 28 billion glass bottles and jars end up in landfills every year -- that is the equivalent of filling up two Empire State Buildings every three weeks.

• Glass can be recycled and re-manufactured an infinite amount of times and never wear out.

upcycled gifts

upcycled gifts

• The U.S. goes through 100 billion plastic shopping bags annually.

• Plastic bags are made of polyethylene which is a petroleum product. 

• It takes 1000 years for polyethylene bags to break down. 

• Every time a plastic is recycled, it loses strength and is downgraded.

• Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year.

upcycled gifts

upcycled gifts

• Americans throw away enough office paper each year to build a 12 foot high wall from Virginia Beach to the Pacific Ocean

• It takes one 15 year old tree to make 700 paper grocery bags.

• Recycling a stack of papers just 3 feet high saves one tree.

• The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.

• If every American recycled just one-tenth of their newspapers, we could save about 25 million trees each year.

upcycled gifts

upcycled gifts

• The gift card is the #1 most-requested gift (clothing is #2)

• There’s approximately $30 billion in unused gift cards

• The average household sits on $300 in unused gift cards

• A whopping 75 million pounds of polyvinyl chloride (PVC a toxic substance) material from plastic cards enters America's waste stream every year.

upcycled gifts

upcycled gifts

• Every three months, Americans throw enough aluminum in the landfills to build our nation’s entire commercial air fleet.

• The average person has the opportunity to recycle more than 25,000 cans in a lifetime.

• The 36 billion aluminum cans landfilled last year had a scrap value of more than $600 million. Over the past twenty years we've discarded over $12 billion worth in today's market.

upcycled gifts

upcycled gifts

REDUCE

REUSE

RECYCLE

RESTORE