Food for thought

[Deblyn]

I found this in a magazine. The article is titled "Perspectives".

 

Polystyrene(Styrofoam) can take about 500 years to break down in landfill.

 

Americans throw away enough office paper each year to create a wall twelve feet high reaching from Los Angeles to New York City.

 

Every ton of recycled paper saves almost 400 gallons of oil.

 

a single chlorine atom can destroy over 100,000 ozone molecules.

 

children from the Chernobyl area who spend four weeks a year away from home, eating uncontaminated food and breathing uncontaminated air can potentially increase their life expectancy by two years.

 

Turning down your central heating thermostat by one degree can save as much as ten per cent of your fuel consumption.

 

Wetlands are the second largest store of carbon in the world - but half of all the world's wetlands were destroyed in the 20th century.

 

One hundred acres of land can produce enough beef to feed twenty people, or enough wheat to feed 240 people.

 

One crop of hemp grown on one acre of land produces the same amount of pulpable fibre as one acre of twenty-year-old trees.

 

In peninsular Malaysia, more tree species are found in 125 acres of tropical forest than in all of North America.

 

About thirty per cent of the carbon that accumulates in the air each year comes directly from the continued burning of rain forests.

 

 

 

Facts taken from One Makes A Difference by Julia Butterfly Hill, published by HarperSanFrancisco, priced $14.95

[ozzzyyy]

This is a naive question on my part but are Americans polluting the environment on a much greater scale than other countries? I thought we were getting better as a recycling society but those statistics are staggering!

How is recycling enforced in the UK, Lowie?