In our day and age when the environment is fighting with the amount of waste, pollution and population, I believe we should be more aware of the facts behind the current state of the environment and the fun facts as to how we can improve.

 

We have made significant improvements in helping our environment but many companies have also used the “green” campaign as a marketing tactic to have consumers buy their products with the false expectation that the company is benefitting the environment in one form or another.

 So I just wanted to inform anyone and everyone about certain facts in relation to our environment that will hopefully steer and move you into going green.

 

One cool fact that will hopefully motivate you to recycle is that if every newspaper was recycled, we could save approximately 250, 000, 000 trees each and every year. However, America only recycles roughly 27 percent of newspapers.

 Even though many of us have moved on to electronic readers for our daily news; for those who have not and enjoy a hard copy of their daily news, please recycle it, every little bit helps.

 Another sad truth is that every year 14 billion pounds of trash is dumped into the oceans meanwhile, 87% of all household waste can indeed be recycled.

 

So we can’t lie to ourselves and think we can only recycle bottles and cans when we can recycle practically everything. We are a very wasteful people indeed where if everyone in the world lived like the average American we would need five planets to provide enough resources.

 One fact that really scares me in the sense that we are literally moving in a direction where we will drown in our own waste is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is a swirling vortex of waste in the Pacific Ocean.

 This massive pile of waste is twice the size of the continental US and holds 100 million tons of garbage. It is pure evidence of the staggering amount of waste we produce.

 We can make a difference even though we may sometimes feel like its an issue bigger than us, but every tiny step in the right direction per person is a massive step for the environment.