Earth Day facts:

Over one billion people from 180 countries around the world celebrate Earth Day every year.

If everyone in the United States recycled their newspapers, the lives of 41,000 trees would be spared. One single tree can detoxify the air of up to 60 pounds of pollutants.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA,) without recycling, a family of four throws away about 2,000 pounds of garbage each year.

If you chopped down a 15-year-old tree and used it to make paper grocery bags, you'd wind up with about 700. That's roughly the number of bags your local supermarket goes through in an hour.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in the United States, about 75 percent of the garbage dumped in the regular trash could be recycled.

It takes nearly 500,000 trees to produce the weekly Sunday newspaper.
If you walked a mile along any highway in the United States, you'd encounter an average of 1,457 pieces of litter.