Earth Day

by Cassie Ankener

Hey Guys!

In celebration of the fact that Earth Day just happened, I would like to share with you a few facts about our Earth’s environment:

-Americans use about 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour;
-The average time for plastic bottles to decompose in landfill is about 700 years;
-27,000 trees are cut down each day so that we can have toilet paper;
-We can save 75,000 trees just if we recycled the daily run of the New York Times Newspapers;
-When you throw plastic bags and other materials in the ocean, it can kill as many as one million sea creatures each year;
-Rainforests are cut down at a rate of 100 acres per minute;
-Landfills are composed of 37% packaging material.

Our Earth is changing and not in a good way. There are scientific studies that show that if we don’t change the way we are living in the next 12 years, the damage that we have done is permanent and cannot be fixed. Right now, you can contribute to saving the Earth just by doing small things on the trail such as going out on the trail once in a while with a trash bag and picking up trash that you see along the way. If every person just picked up ONE piece of litter, there would be 300 million fewer pieces. If everybody picked up ten pieces of liter, there would be 3 BILLION fewer pieces of litter that is affecting our environment. I think we all know that if we keep doing what we are doing, our home (Earth) is not going to last. There are so many problems that are occurring with our environment right now but even by doing the tiniest things such as picking up a piece of litter, you are helping tremendously. Let’s help save this beautiful place we call home.