Beyond controlling spiraling waste disposal costs and creating jobs from waste, our recycling strategies are also yielding a host of significant environmental benefits.

Most obviously, recycling saves natural resources. It takes trees to make paper and pallets, oil to make plastic, and so forth. By returning discarded materials for future use, fewer natural resources need to be consumed. Which means fewer trees will need to be cut down, fewer oil wells will need to be drilled, less bauxite will need to be mined . . ..

It also takes energy to turn raw natural resources into new products. Since recycled materials are already refined, using these materials to create new products saves considerable amounts of energy. For instance, producing an aluminum can from raw bauxite ore requires roughly 10 times more energy than producing the same can from recycled aluminum. By saving energy through recycling it is possible to reduce greenhouse gases and help address climate change. ARS has recovered enough aluminum from the FLL waste stream to build over 20 commercial jetliners.

The table below presents estimates for some of the environmental benefits ARS has achieved since starting operations in 1989. Among these are saving nearly half a trillion BTUs of energy, offsetting the release of more than 50 million pounds of greenhouse gases, and recycling enough paper to save nearly a quarter million trees from being logged. Recycling brings many rewards.

Quantity of Recyclable Resources Recovered To Date	40 Million Pounds
Estimated Equivalent Energy Saved	400 Billion BTU's
Estimated Equivalent Crude Oil Saved	3 Million Gallons
Estimated Equivalent Trees Saved	200,000 Trees
Estimated Effective Reduction in CO2 Emissions	70 Million Pounds
Estimated Effective Reduction in Other Air Pollutants	+1 Million Pounds
Estimated Effective Reduction in Solid and Water Pollutants	+3 Million Pounds
Estimated Effective Reduction in Mined Minerals	+15 Million Pounds
Estimated Effective Quantity of Water Conserved	+70 Million Gallons