EVERYTHING COUNTS

According to National Geographic Channel’s new documentary Human Footprint, each American consumes 3,264 HALF GALLONS of milk over the course of a lifetime, which adds up to 989,985,594,240 half gallons for the population as a whole. It takes more than one trillion kilowatt-hours of energy (emitting 740,674,244 tons of greenhouse gases) to produce, ship and landfill all those paper milk cartons—the same amount of energy needed to power New York City for 16 years! Unfortunately, only a scant 2 percent of those cartons are ever recycled. If Americans recycled every one of their half-gallon milk cartons, and those were turned back into new ones, we would keep 3,689,244 TONS of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.