The Adopt A Highway® / Sponsor A Highway® programs across the United States were initially pioneered to help keep our nation’s significant roadways clean and safe for the local communities and visitors. Because of the continued support of businesses and participating groups, each year, the Adopt A Highway® / Sponsor A Highway® programs bring continued awareness to keep our environment clean and beautiful.
Earth Day is celebrated around the world.
Senator Gaylord Nelson was the leading founder in bringing awareness to environmental degradation, and on April 22, Earth Day was first celebrated in 1990.
This year’s Earth Day theme is “Trees for the Earth”.
Our planet is losing over 15 billion trees yearly due to deforestation, land development, and bad forest management (roughly 48 football fields every minute).
Why Trees? (www.earthday.org)
- Trees help combat climate change. They absorb excess and harmful CO2 from our atmosphere. In fact, an acre of mature trees in a year absorbs the same amount of CO2 produced by driving the average car 26,000 miles.
- Trees help us breathe clean air. Trees absorb odors and pollutant gases (nitrogen oxides, ammonia, sulfur dioxide, and ozone) and filter particulates out of the air by trapping them on their leaves and bark.
- Trees help communities achieve long-term economic and environmental sustainability and provide food, energy, and income.
5 Earth Day Facts:
- 2009, the United Nations renamed Earth Day as International Mother Earth Day.
- More than 100 thousand people in China rode their bikes on Earth Day 2012. They did this to save fuel and to reduce the CO2 emissions from vehicles.
- In Afghanistan in 2011, the Earth Day Network planted 28 million trees on Earth Day.
- In honor of Earth Day in Panama, they planted 100 species of endangered orchids to prevent their extinction.
- Earth Day is recognized across the globe by 192 countries each year.
The importance of Earth Day is to help raise awareness of our impact on the environment and what can be done about it. Some of the stats that are used to get the point of going green across include:
- Recycling one aluminum can save enough energy to watch 3 hours of TV. It takes less energy (90% less) to recycle aluminum cans than to manufacture new ones.
- The average person tosses out about 4 pounds of garbage every day.
- The average person uses about 12 thousand gallons of water each year.
- Only 27% of newspapers in the U.S. are recycled. If they were all recycled, it would save one-quarter of a billion trees EVERY YEAR.
- Every year, there are 14,000,000,000 pounds of garbage thrown into the oceans.
- Plastic garbage kills at least 1 million creatures in the ocean each year.
For more information about Earth Day, please visit www.earthday.org