Did you know that by recycling paper we could have cleaner air? How you ask? Trees absorb the carbon dioxide (CO2) from our environment; it then uses its bark and leaves to remove the harmful carbon before releasing oxygen back into the air. Just an acre of mature trees, in one year, could provide enough oxygen for 18 people. Imagine the amount of clean oxygen we could produce, just by protecting our tree life.

In addition to clean air, when we recycle, we help reduce greenhouse gas emissions which help climate change issues; we also help lower the use of energy in manufacturing plants to produce new products from raw materials. Recycling helps preserve our resources, for example, one ton of plastic saves 16.3 barrels of oil and recycling aluminum saves an estimated 95% or 14,000 kilowatt hours of energy required to make the same amount of aluminum from its raw source.

You might be asking yourself how you can help; it’s simple, use a shredding service. Deciding to use a shredding service can be the first step in helping make our environment more sustainable. We all have paper  that needs to be destroyed, whether it is confidential information or pieces of scrap. Shredding services make it easy to destroy these materials, and in most cases, they will offer additional shredding services such as film, hard drives, CDs/DVDs, and server drives. If you are a business, servicing your facility can be done on a weekly basis, monthly basis or as needed. For residents, look locally for walk-in services or local shred days through the neighborhood chamber.