Avista’s Recycling Program
Why recycle? It’s simply the right thing to do.
Recycling promotes healthy and sustainable environments, and prevents useful resources
from being wasted. Recycling turns waste into valuable resources and conserves natural
resources such as timber, water and minerals for generations to come.
Avista’s recycling program, in place since the mid 1980’s, essentially falls into
two categories: Investment recovery, and office product recycling. Investment recovery
allows the recycling of scrap metals, bolts, connectors and wood reels, and office
recycling products accounts for paper, aluminum cans, plastic, glass bottles and
cardboard.
Avista’s recycling program employs fifteen part-time and four full-time employees
from the Association of Retarded Citizens (ARC) and one Avista employee. Monies
gained from investment recovery goes to cover the cost of the recycling operation,
such as the investment recovery building, ARC payroll, and other Avista employee
salaries related to recycling. Each year recycling efforts at Avista save about
$65,000 or more in avoided costs of garbage disposal annually.
For some great recycling facts, click on the following links.
Recycling Tidbits
Eye-opening facts about recycling that you probably didn't know:
METALS
- Recycling one aluminum can save enough energy to run a TV for three hours—or the
equivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline.
- 350,000 aluminum cans are produced every minute!
- Once an aluminum can is recycled, it can be part of a new can within six weeks.
- Because so many aluminum cans are recycled, they account for less than 1% of the
total U.S. waste stream, according to EPA estimates.
- An aluminum can that is thrown away will still be a can 500 years from now!
- There is no limit to the amount of times aluminum can be recycled.
- Aluminum can manufacturers have been making cans lighter—in 1972 each pound of aluminum
produced 22 cans; today it yields 29 cans.
- We use over 80,000,000,000 aluminum pop cans every year.
- At one time, aluminum was more valuable than gold!
- A 60-watt light bulb can be run for over a day on the amount of energy saved by
recycling 1 pound of steel. In one year in the United States, the recycling of steel
saves enough energy to heat and light 18,000,000 homes!
PAPER
- Recycling a single run of the Sunday New York Times could save 75,000 trees.
- If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year.
- If every American recycled just one-tenth of their newspapers, we would save about
25,000,000 trees a year.
- During World War II when raw materials were scarce, 33% of all paper was recycled.
After the war, this number decreased sharply.
- If you had a 15-year-old tree and made it into paper grocery bags, you'd get about
700 of them. A supermarket could use all of them in under an hour. Reusable totes
are convenient, cost effective and healthier for the environment.
- The average American uses seven trees a year in paper, wood, and other products
made from trees. This amounts to about 2,000,000,000 trees per year.
- The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000
homes for 20 years.
- Approximately 1 billion trees worth of paper are thrown away every year in the U.S.
- Americans use 85,000,000 tons of paper a year; about 680 pounds per person.
- The average household throws away 13,000 separate pieces of paper each year. Most
is packaging and junk mail.
- In 1993, U.S. paper recovery saved more than 90,000,000 cubic yards of landfill
space.
- In 1993, nearly 36,000,000 tons of paper was recovered in the U.S.—twice as much
in 1980.
- 27% of the newspapers produced in America are recycled.
- Each ton (2000 pounds) of recycled paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil,
three cubic yards of landfill space, 4000 kilowatts of energy, and 7000 gallons
of water. This represents a 64% energy savings, a 58% water savings, and 60 pounds
less of air pollution!
- The 17 trees saved (above) can absorb a total of 250 pounds of carbon dioxide from
the air each year. Burning that same ton of paper would create 1500 pounds of carbon
dioxide.
PLASTIC / STYROFOAM
- Americans use 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour. Most of them are thrown away.
- Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000
sea creatures every year.
- Americans throw away 25,000,000 plastic beverage bottles every hour.
- Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as burning it in an incinerator.
- Americans throw away 25,000,000,000 styrofoam coffee cups every year.
GLASS
- Every month, we throw out enough glass bottles and jars to fill up a giant skyscraper.
All of these jars are recyclable.
- The energy saved from recycling one glass bottle can run a 100-watt light bulb for
four hours. It also causes 20% less air pollution and 50% less water pollution than
when a new bottle is made from raw materials.
- A modern glass bottle would take 4000 years or more to decompose—and even longer
if it's in the landfill.
Additional Resources
For more information about recycling locally and in general: