Earth Day ~ April 22nd Together, We can make a Difference!

According to the calendar, Earth Day is fast approaching, though this year, it most certainly doesn't feel like anything is on schedule, at least not when we look out the window!

Snowstorms on April 14th?
Ish!

Earth Day feels to me like something that we should be doing something OUTSIDE, say, in the EARTH, the dirt...
but that is simply not true.

Earth Day is about environmental goals - and everyone can contribute and do their part - even when the weather has us holed up indoors, for months on end.

Each year, Hormel Foods strives to do their part conserving energy & reducing pollution. In 2011, they reduced their solid waste to landfills by 29% and completed 33 packaging reduction projects to reduce materials used by 4.2 million pounds! (To learn about these and other successes, CLICK HERE!)

Sure, you're thinking...of course they can make a difference. They are a big company right?

So what does this have to do with you? You are one person...who cares if you toss that empty pop can into your office garbage can with your discarded junk mail and your leftover banana from lunch right?

WRONG.

Some pretty amazing recycling facts...

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.

A used aluminum can is recycled and back on the grocery shelf as a new can, in as little as 60 days. That's closed loop recycling at its finest!

Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours -- or the equivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline.

An aluminum can that is thrown away will still be a can 500 years from now!

We use over 80,000,000,000 aluminum soda cans every year.

	To produce each week's Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down.
	Recycling a single run of the Sunday New York Times would save 75,000 trees.
	If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year!
	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!!

	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!
	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.

So you see, you CAN make a difference. You don't have to be a corporation to make a large impact. Every BODY matters. It all adds up.
One aluminum can at a time. One Sunday newspaper at a time. One reusable container instead of a zip loc baggie, at a time...

At our house, there is no shortage of reuseable lunch containers ~ What do you do, to reduce, reuse, recycle? Do you have something that has become habit for you, that is making a difference for the rest of us?

We can, and we will, make a difference!

Happy Earth Day!

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*** As a Hormel Foods Extended Family Blogger, I am invited to share my thoughts and opinions on Hormel Foods products and their corporation. I am not compensated for these blog posts, however, Hormel Foods does provide me with the necessary resources to correctly share facts with my blog readers. ***