Think of all the things you throw away: juice bottles, soda cans, candy wrappers. It adds up. How much trash do you produce?
Americans throw away an average of 1 ton of trash per person every year. That’s 2,000 pounds (907 kilograms) of garbage! Most of this trash gets buried in big holes in the ground called landfills.
A lot of this garbage can be recycled, or turned back into something useful. Just about any material can be recycled. The main things we recycle today are made from metal, paper, glass, or plastic.
People recycle for many reasons. One of the main reasons is to conserve resources. Making new aluminum cans out of old ones means less aluminum is needed for new cans.
This leads to a second reason people recycle: It saves energy. Recycling old aluminum cans takes a lot less energy than making new aluminum. To make new aluminum, you need to mine metal ore from the ground, remove the impurities, and refine it into a finished metal.
Recycling also conserves valuable land. By recycling, we produce less garbage. That means fewer landfills are needed for dumping our trash.