The plants that make the boxes generate wastes, too:
- As much particle air emissions as 31,000 city buses
- As much greenhouse gas as 50,000 cars
- Enough solid waste to fill 4,677 garbage trucks
- Enough wastewater to fill 506 Olympic swimming pools
It takes 345 million pounds of paperboard to make a one year supply of cereal boxes. That's the weight of 734 747 jumbo jets.
Right out of the gate, we use 75% less packaging.
That's 156 million pounds of paperboard saved since 2001. If the boxes were laid end to end they would reach ¾ of the way to the moon or would go around the moon 26 times.
The boxes saved would take up as much space as 6,600 houses.
It takes 2.4 trillion BTU of energy to power the plants that make the boxes—enough to power 26,000 homes.
Each year, the United States produces 2.3 billion cereal boxes. That is enough to build not one, but almost 3 great pyramids.
If the boxes travel 100 miles to get to the cereal plant, this consumes 1400 tons of fuel—the equivalent of 46 tanker trucks full of fuel.
The fuel conserved since 2001 by not transporting boxes to our plants is enough to drive 342 passenger vehicles for a year. Imagine almost 2,000 tons of CO2 that never got put in the air, which is the weight of 26,000 sheep or 594 billion ants.
By not manufacturing boxes, 1.1 trillion BTU of energy was saved, enough to light ten 100-watt bulbs for 36,000 years or 36,000 100-watt bulbs for ten years.