Recycling Facts For Kids

When kids are young, their brains are like sponges that soak up knowledge at a truly amazing rate. Children are quick to learn numbers, sight-words, appropriate play, and so many other valuable teachings that will benefit them throughout their life. However, what if parents and educators also took the time to focus on the importance of teaching recycling to preschoolers? What if teachers emphasized why students should recycle and provide facts about the inconvenient truth about what happens if we don’t recycle in the classroom or during playtime? Children are eager to learn, and teaching them fun recycling facts for kids is one way to show them the importance of reducing our carbon footprint. So let’s check out some of those recycling facts for kids!

Amazing Facts About Recycling

10 Fun Facts About Recycling

1. For every ton of paper recycled, roughly 17 trees are saved, 380 gallons of oil is not used, and 7,000 gallons of water is saved!
2. In a single day, businesses in the United States use so much paper that it could literally circle the entire planet 20 times! This is about 67 million tons of paper annually in the United States alone (Paper makes up roughly 40% of trash in landfills).
3. If people in the United States recycled just 10% of newspapers the net result would be 25 million trees not deforested.
4. Mount Rumpke is the highest point in the great state of Ohio. Unfortunately, this mountain is completely made of trash and the base sits in a landfill.
5. It is estimated that every American generates about 4lbs of trash per day either directly or indirectly.
6. Styrofoam recycling is becoming a very important issue because in the United States alone approximately 25 trillion Styrofoam cups are tossed in the trash each year!
7. The importance of keeping ground water clean from hazardous waste is critical when you consider only 1% of the entire supply of water on the planet us usable (97% is ocean water, 2% of drinkable water is frozen).
8. By recycling 100 aluminum cans, enough energy is saved to light up an entire bedroom for 14 days! And if you don’t recycle those cans they can stay in that form for nearly 500 years!
9. Americans use 2.5 million plastic bottles every 30 minutes! Sadly, most of those plastic bottles end up in a landfill rather than properly recycled.
10. If you added up the total wood and paper that is thrown each year instead of recycled you would have enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for two decades!

Recycling Tips For Schools

Want to learn more ways to reduce waste at school, or implement successful recycling programs in schools? Then check out our helpful guide to battery recycling, or electronic waste recycling!