Our Western Atlantic ocean storm is winding up over the Gulf Stream east/northeast of Jacksonville & will turn winds more northeast & increase in speed Wed. through Thu. Boaters should beware of rough seas & gusty winds...those headed to the beach should beware of rip currents, higher seas & surf & much cooler temps. compared to inland areas. Temps. Wed. & Thu. afternoon will range widely -- from only near 70 at the beaches to near 80 well inland from Waycross to Lake City to Gainesville. There will be an isolated shower or sprinkle mainly along the I-95 corridor to the coast but no significant rainfall.
Speaking of rain....true to the avg. April/May -- not to mention the still healthy La Nina -- we're quickly drying out on the First Coast. Some areas did receive significant rain the first 5 or so days of April but not much since. So it's coming up on 3 weeks since we've had a soaker. Little rainfall + lots of sun + some wind + low humidity means we're quickly drying out thought not as tinder as this time last yr. when we had several massive wildfires in progress. We're approaching the peak of the wildfire season which usually lasts through May & sometimes into the first or 2nd week of June. The continuation of our La Nina would point to a later than normal start of our wet season.
Some good news in that we could see a decent shot of rain next week. Long range forecast models are consistent in showing a strong storm system developing over the Eastern U.S. but vary on when & exact location. For now...it would appear our next best chance for heavy rain will be approximately the early part of next week.
And today (Tue.) is Earth Day. Check these interesting recycling facts from Oberlin College:
Recycling Facts
Facts are organized by category: water, energy, paper, metal, aluminum cans, glass, plastic, styrofoam, steel, junk mail, garbage, tires, food, newspapers, lightbulbs, and miscellaneous. Our sources are at the bottom.
WATER
*Between 1950 and 2000, the U.S. population nearly doubled. However, in that same period, public demand for water more than tripled! Americans now use an average of 100 gallons of water each day—enough to fill 1,600 drinking glasses! (EPA, 2008)
*A recent government survey showed at least 36 states are anticipating local, regional, or statewide water shortages by 2013. (EPA, 2008)
* Most people realize that hot water uses up energy, but supplying and treating cold water requires a significant amount of energy too. American public water supply and treatment facilities consume about 56 billion kilowatt-hours per year—enough electricity to power more than 5 million homes for an entire year. (EPA, 2008)
* If just 1 percent of American homes replaced an older toilet with a new WaterSense labeled toilet, the country would save more than 38 million kilowatt-hours of electricity—enough electricity to supply more than 43,000 households for one month. (EPA, 2008)
* If one out of every 100 American homes retrofitted with water-efficient fixtures, we could save about 100 million kWh of electricity per year—avoiding 80,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions. That is equivalent to removing nearly 15,000 automobiles from the road for one year! (EPA, 2008)
* Letting your faucet run for five minutes uses about as much energy as letting a 60-watt light bulb run for 14 hours. (EPA, 2008)
* If all U.S. households installed water-efficient appliances, the country would save more than 3 trillion gallons of water and more than $18 billion dollars per year! (EPA, 2008)
* Leaky faucets that drip at the rate of one drip per second can waste more than 3,000 gallons of water each year; A leaky toilet can waste about 200 gallons of water every day. (EPA, 2008)
* A full bath tub requires about 70 gallons of water, while taking a five-minute shower uses 10 to 25 gallons. (EPA, 2008)
* The average bathroom faucet flows at a rate of two gallons per minute. Turning off the tap while brushing your teeth in the morning and at bedtime can save up to 8 gallons of water per day, which equals 240 gallons a month! (EPA, 2008)
* The typical single-family suburban household uses at least 30 percent of their water outdoors for irrigation. Some experts estimate that more than 50 percent of landscape water use goes to waste due to evaporation or runoff caused by overwatering! Drip irrigation systems use between 20 to 50 percent less water than conventional in-ground sprinkler systems. They are also much more efficient than conventional sprinklers because no water is lost to wind, runoff, and evaporation. (EPA, 2008)
* The average washing machine about 41 gallons of water per load. High-efficiency washing machines use less than 28 gallons of water per load. (EPA, 2008)
* If your toilet is from 1992 or earlier, you probably have an inefficient model that uses between 3.5 to 7 gallons per flush. New and improved high-efficiency models use less than 1.3 gallons per flush—that's at least 60 percent less than their older, less efficient counterparts. (EPA, 2008)
* About 75 percent of the water we use in our homes is used in the bathroom. (California Energy Commission, 2006)
ENERGY
*Every winter, the energy equivalent of all the oil that flows through the Alaskan pipeline in a year leaks through American windows.
*The average U.S. home uses the energy equivalent of 1,253 gallons of oil every year.
*Microwaves use around 50% less energy than conventional ovens; they're most efficient for small portions or defrosting.
*Every time you open your oven door during cooking, you lose 25 to 50 degrees- or more.
*Washers and dryers can account for as much as 25% of the energy you use at home (including the hot water for the wash).
*As much as 90% of the energy consumed by washing machines and 80% of the energy used by dishwashers goes to heating the water.
*During the winter, you can save as much as 3% of the energy your furnace uses simply by lowering your thermostat one degree F (if it's set between 65 F and 72 F).
*Dust on a light bulb or dirt on a glass fixture can reduce the light it gives off by 10 percent and make it seem that you need a brighter, higher wattage bulb.
*Even the paint color you choose can affect your energy use. A white wall reflects 80 percent of the light that hits it; a black one reflects just 10 percent. The more light the walls reflect, the greater the chance that the light can be 'recycled' by striking the wall, bouncing off, and still illuminating the room.
*A heated waterbed can use as much energy as a large refrigerator. Leaving it unmade in the fall or winter can double that by letting the heat dissipate into the air.
*You can save 10% or more of your heating or cooling costs by insulating and tightening up ducts.
*About 15% of the energy you use for heating your home goes to warming up air that leaks in through the cracks.
*Efficiency counts. The most effective new appliances typically use 50% less energy than the most wasteful ones.
*Choose a refrigerator with a freezer on top, instead of a side-by-side unit. On average, the savings amount to 20%.
*Between 15 and 30 percent of the energy your water heater uses goes to keeping a tank of water hot, just in case you need it.
*Even during a mild winter, you can lose as much energy through one single-pane window as a 75-watt light bulb uses running seven hours a day, 365 days a year.
*A double-pane window retains twice as much heat as a single-pane window.
*40% of the energy you use in your home is for heat.
PAPER
*1 ton of 100% virgin (non-recycled) newsprint uses 12 trees
*A "pallet" of copier paper (20-lb. sheet weight, or 20#) contains 40 cartons and weighs 1 ton.Therefore,
*1 carton (10 reams) of 100% virgin copier paper uses .6 trees
*1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333.3 sheets
*1 ream (500 sheets) uses 6% of a tree (and those add up quickly!)
*1 ton of coated, higher-end virgin magazine paper (used for magazines like National Geographic and many others) uses a little more than 15 trees (15.36)
*1 ton of coated, lower-end virgin magazine paper (used for newsmagazines and most catalogs) uses nearly 8 trees (7.68)
*At least 38.9% of the U.S. waste stream is paper.
*Americans throw away 44 million newspapers everyday. That’s the same as dumping 500,000 trees into landfills each week.
*If every household reused a paper grocery bag for one shopping trip, about 60,000 trees would be saved.
*We save 17 trees for each ton of recycled newspaper.
*Recycling a 36-newspaper stack saves the equivalent of about 14% of the average household electric bill.
*Making one ton of recycled paper uses only about 60% of the energy needed to make a tone of virgin paper.
*One person uses two pine trees worth of paper products every year.
*Americans discard 4 million tons of office paper every year--enough to build a 12 foot-high wall of paper from New York to California.
*American’s throw out about 85% of the office paper we use.
*Americans use 50 million tons of paper annually--which means we consume more than 850 million trees. That means the average American uses about 580 pounds of paper each year.
*Every ton of recycled office paper saves 380 gallons of oil.
*Each year, 27 million acres of tropical rainforests are destroyed. That’s an area the size of Ohio, and translates to 74,000 acres per day...3,000 acres per hour...50 acres per minute.
METAL
*Every year we save enough energy recycling steel to supply L.A. with nearly a decade’s worth of electricity.
*We save enough energy by recycling one aluminum can to run a TV set for three hours.
*Recycling aluminum saves 95% of the energy used to make the material from scratch. That means you can make 20 cans out of recycled material with the same amount of energy it takes to make one can out of new material. Energy savings in 1993 alone were enough to light a city the size of Pittsburgh for six years. .
*Americans throw away enough aluminum every month to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet.
*Recycling steel and tin cans saves 74% of the energy used to produce them.
* Americans use 100 million tin and steel cans every day.
*Americans throw out enough iron and steel to supply all the nation’s automakers on a continuous basis.
*A steel mill using recycled scrap reduces related water pollution, air pollution and mining wastes by about 70%.
** When you toss out one aluminum can you waste as much energy as if you’d filled the same can half-full of gasoline and poured it into the ground.
ALUMINUM CANS
*More than 50% of a new aluminum can is made from recycled aluminum.
*The 36 billion aluminum cans landfilled last year had a scrap value of more than $600 million. (Some day we'll be mining our landfills for the resources we've buried.)
GLASS
*Americans throw away enough glass bottles and jars every two weeks to fill the 1.350-foot towers of the former World Trade Center.
*Most bottles and jars contain at least 25% recycled glass.
*Glass never wears out -- it can be recycled forever. We save over a ton of resources for every ton of glass recycled -- 1,330 pounds of sand, 433 pounds of soda ash, 433 pounds of limestone, and 151 pounds of feldspar.
*States with bottle deposit laws have 35-40% less litter by volume.
*If all the glass bottles and jars collected through recycling in the U.S. in 94 were laid end to end, they'd reach the moon and half way back to earth.
PLASTIC
*Every year we make enough plastic film to shrink-wrap Texas.
*Americans go through 2.5 million plastic bottles every year.
*26 recycled PET bottles equals a polyester suit. 5 recycled PET bottles make enough fiberfill to stuff a ski jacket.
*In 1988 we used 2 billion pounds of HDPE just to make bottles for household products. That’s about the weight of 90,000 Honda Civics.
*If every American household recycled just one out of every ten HDPE bottles they used, we’d keep 200 million pounds of the plastic out of landfills every year.
STYROFOAM/POLYSTYRENE (# 6)
*It is un-recyclable- you can't make it into new Styrofoam. The industry wants you to assume it is- don't BUY it!
*Each year American throw away 25,000,000,000 Styrofoam cups, enough every year to circle the earth 436 times.
STEEL
*The steel industry's annual recycling saves the equivalent energy to electrically power about 18 million households for a year. Every time a ton of steel is recycled, 2500 pounds of iron ore, 1000 pounds of coal and 40 pounds of limestone is preserved.
*Every day Americans use enough steel and tin cans to make a steel pipe running from Los Angeles to New York... and back. If we only recycle one-tenth of the cans we now throw away, we'd save about 3.2 billion of them every year.
*The average American throws out about 61 lbs. of tin cans every month.
*About 70% of all metal used just once and is discarded. The remaining 30% is recycled. After 5 cycles, one-fourth of 1% of the metal remains in circulation.
JUNK MAIL
*If only 100,000 people stopped their junk, mail, we could save up to 150,000 trees annually. If a million people did this, we could save up to a million and a half trees.
*The junk mail Americans receive in one day could produce enough energy to heat 250,000 homes.
*The average American still spends 8 full months of his/her life opening junk mail.
GENERAL GARBAGE
*In 1865, an estimated 10,000 hogs roamed New York City, eating garbage. Now, one of every six U.S. trucks is a garbage truck.
* In a lifetime, the average American will throw away 600 times his/her adult weight in garbage. If you add it up, this means that a 150-lb. adult will leave a legacy of 90,000 lbs of trash for his/her children.
*The average baby generates a ton of garbage every year.
*The landfill gas produced daily at Fresh Kills Landfill is enough fuel to heat 50,000 homes.
TIRES/RUBBER
*It takes half a barrel of crude oil to produce the rubber for just one truck tire.
*Every two weeks, Americans wear almost 50 million pounds of rubber off their tires. That’s enough to make 3 1/4 million new tires from scratch.
*Producting one pound of recycled rubber versus one pound of new rubber requires only 29% of the energy.
FOOD AND PACKAGING
*$1 out of every $11 Americans spend for food goes for packaging.
*Americans dump the equivalent of more than 21 million shopping bags full of food into landfills every year.
NEWSPAPERS
*Every day America cuts down two million trees-but throws away about 42 million newspapers. That means the equivalent of about 500,000 trees is dumped into landfills every week.
*If everyone who subscribes to the New York Times recycled, we’d keep over 6,000 tons of pollution out of the air.
*It takes an entire forest--over 500,000 trees to supply Americans with their Sunday newspapers every week.
LIGHTBULBS
*Every year Americans buy over a billion incandescent lightbulbs. That’s three acres of bulbs every day.
*A 60-watt incandescent bulb lasts about 750 hours; a fluorescent bulb with 1/3 the wattage will generate the same light and burn for 7,500 to 10,000 hours in five to ten years of normal use.
*Substituting a compact fluorescent light for a traditional bulb will keep a half-ton of CO2 out of the atmosphere over the life of the bulb.
OTHER
*One gallon of used motor oil can contaminate 1 million gallons of water.
* Most cars on U.S. roads carry only one person. We have so much extra room in our 140 million cars that everyone in Western Europe could ride with us.
*If today is a typical day on planet earth, humans will add fifteen million tons of carbon to the atmosphere, destroy 115 square mils of tropical rainforest, create seventy-two square miles of desert, eliminate between forty to one hundred species, erode seventy-one million tons of topsoil, add twenty-seven hundred tons of CFCs to the stratosphere, and increase their population by 263,000.
*Almost four million computer diskettes are thrown away every day, which equals over on and a half billion disks per year or a stack of disks as tall as the Sears Tower in Chicago every 21 seconds. It will take nearly 500 years for the disks to degrade.
SOURCES:
Portland General Electric.... Weyerhauser Conservatree....
American Forest and Paper Association.... Environmenal Defense Fund Reach For Unbleached..... America Recycles Day... National Polymers Inc.... The Container Recycling Institute.... Waste Management, Inc.... Pulp & Paper International Worldwatch Institute...
International Institute for Environment and Development School and College Magazine....
Can Manufacturing Institute..... The Green Consumer Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries... The Earth Works Group Recycler's Handbook.... California Dept. of Conservation.... American Flint Glass Workers Union Glass Molders/Pottery Plastics & Allied Workers..... The Consumer Research Institute's Stop Junk Mail Page... Environmental Protection Agency
