Quick Answer — How Much Does Recycling Actually Avoid?
Recycling avoids greenhouse gas emissions mainly by skipping the energy-intensive process of extracting and processing virgin materials — mining and smelting bauxite for new aluminum, logging and pulping for new paper, drilling and refining for new plastic. The EPA's Waste Reduction Model (WARM) quantifies this per material: recycling a short ton of aluminum cans instead of landfilling them avoids about 9.13 metric tons of CO2-equivalent (MTCO2E) — by far the highest per-pound impact of any common recyclable, because virgin aluminum smelting is extraordinarily energy-intensive. A short ton of mixed recyclables (paper, plastic, glass, and other metals) avoids about 2.83 MTCO2E per EPA's blended figure.
Quick reference (annual impact): A household recycling 5 lb of aluminum cans and 20 lb of mixed recyclables per week avoids about 2.66 metric tons of CO2e per year — equivalent to taking roughly 0.58 of a typical passenger vehicle off the road for a year, or not driving about 6,640 miles.
The aluminum number is the headline here: pound for pound, recycling aluminum avoids more than 3 times the emissions of mixed recyclables, which is why this calculator tracks it as a separate input rather than folding it into one blended weight.