Only recently have the American public become aware enough of their wasteful habits to act on them. The average amount of garbage that a person living in America today produces is about 4.4 pounds. As startling as that is between eighty and ninety percent of that garbage is considered recyclable. If you compound the daily garbage output over a years time it adds up to around 1600 pounds of garbage per person per year. This kind of habitually wasteful behavior is just unacceptable. As a society we must make a conscious effort to reduce, reuse, and recycle.
There are many advertising campaigns in the present day attempting to break us from our old habits of disposing of that which we can not use ourselves. If we only took the time to recycle that 80 percent of garbage that we throw away each day we would only produce about .88 pounds of garbage per day. This would make our yearly output about 321 pounds, a mere fraction of what it is today. Along with the recycling portion of our routine, the point of reusing old materials would reduce that statistic even further. Take your old clothes to a shelter. Save our planet.