Did you ever wonder just how much material is recycled each year and where it all goes?

By David McClelland

I dutifully place all our recyclables in our Blue and White Recycle Bin in each week and haul it out to the curb on Tuesday mornings for pick-up. I always wondered where it went and what it amounted to, nationally.

The Birmingham-Bloomfield Eagle recently published statistics which it obtained from Consumer Energy's website for the period from 1992 – 2007. You need to divide the following numbers by 16 to get approximate annual figures.

Antifreeze – More than 300,000 gallons

Used oil – About 4 million gallons

Fuel – 150,000 gallons

Paint – 12,000 gallons

Batteries – 430,000 pounds

Mercury equipment – 21,000 pounds

Metals – 29,000 tons

Corrugated materials – 50,000 yards

Paper – Almost 117,000 yards

Wood and wood products – 189,000 tons

Toner cartridges - 16,000 tons

Lamps – 408,000 pounds

Electronics – 108,000 pounds

Lighting ballasts – Roughly 50,000 pounds

None of the above goes into landfills. Consumers Energy states that, in the last 20 years, there has been enough recycled material to fill 168 Olympic size swimming pools and conserved 551,000 cubic yards of land fill space.  In 2010, there was more than one million pounds of universal waste and it all got recycled in one form or another. That is good news for Planet Earth and for you if you are at all "green."

Now, we both know more about our recycled material.