Some Bad Facts About Our Planet If you throw away 2 aluminum cans, you waste more energy than 1 billion of the world's poorest people everyday. Making a new can from scratch uses the energy equal to half a can of gasoline About one-third of what an average American throws out is packaging. More than 1 billion trees are used to make disposable diapers every year. Every minute 50 acres of rain forest is destroyed. Some rain has a pH of 3 or 4 (which is pretty acidic, considering 7 is neutral and not acidic whereas battery acid has a pH of 1). Some fish, such as lake trout and smallmouth bass, have trouble reproducing at a pH of 6, which is only slightly acidic. Some clams and snails can't survive that at all. Most crayfish are dead at a pH of 5. On average, a person in the US uses energy two times more than a person in Japan and West Germany does, and 50 times more than a person in India. About 90% of the energy used in lighting a standard incandescent light bulb is lost as heat. Air conditioning uses 10 times more energy than a fan, therefore, it creates 10 times the pollutants. It takes half the output of the Alaskan pipeline to heat the air that escape from all homes in the US during a year. Cars and pick-up trucks are responsible for about 20% of carbon dioxide into the air. There are about 500 million automobiles on the planet, burning an average of 2 gallons of fuel a day. Each gallon releases 20 pounds of carbon dioxide into the air. About 80% of our trash goes to landfills, 10% is incinerated, and 10% is recycled. The average American makes about 3.5 pounds of trash a day. In a year, the average American uses as much wood in the form of paper as the average resident of the developing world burns as much fuel.