Why Recycle?

Most of us are aware that there is a general problem of dealing with the disposal of waste - household waste, business waste and urban waste. Many of us make an effort to recycle some of our waste but we could do a lot more.

• We use over six billion glass bottles and jars each year. It would take you over three and a half thousand years to sing "Six Billion Green Bottles"!
• Every year we need a forest the size of Wales to provide all the paper we use in Britain.
• Each year in Britain, we throw away 28 million tonnes of rubbish from home. This weighs the same as three and a half million double decker buses. A queue of buses that long would go around the world one and a half times.
• An average person throws away 74 kg of organic waste each year, which is the same as 1077 banana skins.
• The amount of waste paper buried each year would fill 103,448 double decker buses, which if parked nose to tail would go all the way from London to Milan.
• Each year food shops give away enough carrier bags to cover the whole of London with a layer of bags.
• Every day 80 million food and drinks cans end up in landfill (being buried) - that's one and a half cans per person. In a year, each person could fill a bath with the contents of these cans!
• We fill about 300 million square metres of land with rubbish every year, that's the same as covering the pitch at Old Trafford, Manchester United Football Club's ground, 28,450 times. To walk around the pitch that many times would take you from midnight on 1st January until midday on May 5th!
• One million tonnes of nappies are thrown away every year, that's 8 million nappies every day. Each child uses a total of 5850 nappies in their lifetime; that weighs the same as an average family car!
• In the 1950s the world made less than 5 million tonnes of plastic products. This has increased to about 80 million tonnes today. We produce and use 20 times more plastic.

Download a PDF version of this list - Top 10 Wacky Waste Facts!

 

Aluminium facts

• aluminium is the third most abundant element in the earth's crust and is the earth's second most used metal
• the aluminium drink can is the world's most recycled packaging container - worldwide over 50% of aluminium cans are recycled
• nearly 60% of the aluminium used in the UK has been previously recycled
• recycling aluminium drink cans saves up to 95% of the energy needed to make aluminium from its raw materials
• making one aluminium drink can from raw materials uses the same amount of energy that it takes to recycle 20
• recycling 1 kg of aluminium saves 8kg of bauxite, 4kg of chemical products and 14 Kilowatts of electricity
• the energy saved by recycling 1 aluminium drink can is enough to run a television for three hours
• in 2000 the UK consumed 5 billion aluminium drinks cans, of which 42% were recycled. This is lower than the European leaders - Switzerland and Finland currently have the highest recycling rate at 91%
• the average person uses 1.3kg of aluminium cans a year - that's about 84 cans
• the average household uses 3.2kg of aluminium cans a year - that's about 208 cans
• if all the aluminium drinks cans recycled in the UK last year were laid end to end, they would stretch from John O'Groats to Land's End 140 times
• an aluminium drink can contains four different aluminium alloys: the can body, can end, ring pull and the rivet attaching the ring pull

 

Plastics

why recycle plastics?

Plastic bottles are made from oil - a fossil fuel that will one day run out. It is important to make use of materials like plastics that can be recycled and re-used, rather than continually exploiting the fossil fuels used to make them in the first place.

In Britain we throw away about 455,000 tonnes of plastic bottles every year - that's around 9.1 billion bottles! Many of these end up in landfill where, because plastic bottles are very light but very bulky, they take up lots of space.

Plastic bottle recycling helps to stop all these bottles being dumped into landfill sites and means the plastic they are made from can be used to make new products. All sorts of amazing products can be made from recycled plastic bottles, including fleece jackets! It takes just 25 x 2 litre pop bottles to make one adult size fleece jacket.

Recycling just one plastic bottle saves enough energy to power a 60W lightbulb for six hours!

More about recycling plastics

 

Paper

why recycle paper?

Paper and packaging make up huge proportions of most municipal and commercial waste streams and therefore the paper industry is the UK's largest recycler.

However, almost 5 million tonnes of waste paper are still sent to landfill or incineration each year. This means that the industry has to import fibre to meet its needs, which does not make environmental or economic sense.

 

 

Go to More reasons to recycle

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