As Christians, we believe that the earth is entrusted to our faithful stewardship. We are not its owners, but its caretakers on behalf of God. How can I be a good steward?

• The average household throws away 13,000 separate pieces of paper each year. Most is packaging & junk mail. Be sure to recycle whatever you can.
• U.S. paper recovery saves more than 90,000,000 cubic yards of landfill space.
• A 60-watt light bulb can 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!
• About one-third of an average dump is made up of packaging material! Out of every $10 spent buying an average item, $1 (10%) goes for packaging that is thrown away. Packaging represents about 65% of household trash. Consider purchasing brands that utilize less packing material, it will probable save you money, and put less trash in the land fill.
• If you had a 15-year-old tree and made it into paper grocery bags, you'd get about 700 of them. A busy supermarket could use all of them in under an hour! This means in one year, one supermarket can go through over 6 million paper bags! Imagine how many supermarkets there are just in the United States!!!
  
• The U.S. is the #1 trash-producing country in the world at 1,609 pounds per person per year. This means that 5% of the world’s people generate 40% of the world’s waste. The highest point in Hamilton County, Ohio (near Cincinnati) is “Mount Rumpke.” It is actually a mountain of trash at the Rumpke sanitary landfill towering 1045 feet above sea level.
• The energy saved by recycling one glass bottle can run a 100-watt light bulb for four hours or a compact fluorescent bulb for 20 hours. It also causes 20% less air pollution and 50% less water pollution than when a new bottle is made from raw materials.
• Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year! Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as burning it in an incinerator.
• An estimated 80,000,000 Hershey’s Kisses (or chocolate eggs) are wrapped each day, using enough aluminum foil to cover over 50 acres of space – that’s almost 40 football fields. All that foil is recyclable, but not many people realize it.
• A used aluminum can is recycled and back on the grocery shelf as a new can, in as little as 60 days. Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours -- or the equivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline.
• Americans use 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour! Most of them are thrown away! In most cases, the quality of “bottled” water is no better than what comes from the tap. Consider avoiding convenience bottled water wherever possible. You may want to pick up one of the reuseable water bottles that are now readily available, and recycle whatever plastic bottles you do use.
• Consider conserving and recycling paper wherever possible. Do you really NEED to print that email, or might you just read it on the screen? 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!

Time to give up plastic bags or incandescent bulbs?

You might want to check back here for more recycling ideas as we add them,
or visit the sites below for information on how you can help:

http://earth911.com/recycling/

http://www.cuyahogaswd.org/

http://www.epa.gov/recyclecity/

http://www.recycling-revolution.com/