12 Cans Per Second
No need to adjust your computer screen. The counter at the bottom of the site which calculates the number of empty beverage containers ending up in Alberta Landfills is correct. It may seem like there's a computer glitch -- the number is so high and rises so quickly, it can't be correct. But that's how many empties have been tossed in our province since March 2. In the end, over 378,908,185 end up in Alberta landfills a year. That's about twelve a second, 24 hours a day.
On the plus side, every minute 3,729 beverage containers are recycled in Alberta. In 2007, the weight diverted from landfills through container recycling was 64,719 metric tons, or almost 142 million pounds. That's a lot, enough to fill 6 Calgary towers. In Alberta alone if the aluminum cans that were recycled were laid end to end, they would easily circle the Earth. Not bad.
So you might think, "I'm just throwing out one empty beverage container, what difference does that make". Look to the counter below -- it adds up. Because landfills are tucked away it's a problem we tend not to see. The millions of empty beverage containers that are thrown in the garbage take up valuable landfill space, break down and end up in the groundwater and take a whopping 1,000 years or more to biodegrade. All that can be avoided if you simply stop being a Tosser. Keep your empty beverage container out of the garbage, and always recycle. Let's see if we can slow down that counter.