What if everyone in your neighborhood recycled all their aluminum cans?

Sometimes I wonder if everyone understands completely what recycling can do for sustainability. Check out this photo I found on NewsCom:

Bales of crushed aluminum cans ready for recycling at the Novelis plant in Oswego, NY. Each bale contains approximately 34,000 used beverage cans.
(PRNewsFoto/Novelis Inc.) Location: Atlanta, GA, USA

That led me to try and find out what if EVERYONE recycled their aluminum cans?

Thankfully, Novelis Recycling provides a ‘recycling calculator‘ to find stats about just that.

Assuming 100 people lived in your neighborhood, this is what the calculator says:

(These statistics are based on US data, assuming 100% recycling rate.)

Total Cans Recycled: 29,900
Total Weight Recycled: 874 LBS
Amount of Greenhouse Gases (C02e) Saved vs Using New Aluminum: 4 Metric Tons
Energy Saved: 56 MBTUs
Barrels of Oil with Equivalent Energy: 10 Barrels
Equivalent GHG Emissions from Cars Not Driven in One Year: 1 Car(s)
Length of Cans if Stacked End to End: 2 Miles
Value of Aluminum: $656
Water Saved: 2 Cubic Meters

Use the calculator to see what if everyone in NYC recycled all their aluminum cans? (Population: 18,800,000)

When can we start?

The Question of Green

Don’t get me wrong; I do love the environment and I believe in our participation to keep it friendly, but I can’t help but wonder if some entities may be trying to make a quick greenback exploiting the ‘green’ message.

For one, I recently read an article when the author takes, for example, the question of cloth vs disposable diapers. More than 80 per cent of Americans still list disposable diapers (DDs) as the diaper of their choice. Could they all be illiterate, or uncaring for the environment or just plain taking it easy?

Now, DDs do demand more resources to manufacture than cloth diapers, even after considering the vast amounts of water and energy that goes into cotton farming. Yet a study concludes that cloth ended up being 39 per cent more energy-intensive overall, when you look at the electricity (and the water) needed to wash loads used diapers.

Maybe the 80 per cent are aware of this.

You’d Have to Go Nude to be More Eco-friendly Than This

How eco-friendly can you get? In the words of EcoGear founder Robert Hii, “you’d have to go nude to be more eco-friendly” than the world’s first 100% recycled clothing.

Incredible EcoGear is just about to change forever the way we think about our clothes. Robert Hii, a 20-year veteran of Toronto’s garment industry, began researching the possibility of creating a 100% recycled fabric in 2007, following a string of devastating natural disasters around the world. His research led to the possibility that a wide range of clothes could be created for even the fashion-conscious, and that was when Hii struck out with Incredible EcoGear.

The fabric is created from leftover cuttings from the floor of clothing factories. The cuttings are separated by color and shade, then cut into ultra-fine fibers and attached to a continuous strand of polyester thread made from recycled plastic bottles. The resulting yarn is then spun into EcoGear clothing products. The process is free of dyes, bleaches and other harsh chemicals. To top it, the inks used on EcoGear labels are organic, and garments’ hang tags are printed in soy inks on recycled paper.

“EcoGear clothing is the first 100% recycled clothing available to consumers,” said Hii. “We realized that any difference in climate change will have to start with you and me, and that is the founding principle of EcoGear.”

Incredible EcoGear’s commitment to environment doesn’t end with producing eco-friendly clothing. It also donates 1% of sales to environmental organizations, including the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, the World Wildlife Fund and the Toronto Zoo to name a few.

SOURCE Incredible EcoGear