Recycling

Every bag of household and gardening rubbish thrown away in your wheeled bin is more than half full of potentially valuable resources.

Recycling your rubbish has many benefits.  Most of the things that we throw away are made from natural resources that are running out or that can not be replaced quickly enough to compensate for the amount that we use.  Making products out of recycled materials saves energy.  For example, making aluminium cans from recycled aluminium uses 20 times less energy than from making the cans from new aluminium.

Nine out of ten of us have kerbside collection schemes with our local council.  Different councils collect different materials although most collect cans, glass and paper.  Check with your local council to see what you can recycle in your area, you could be able to recycle:

Garden Waste
Paper
Newspapers
Magazines
Cardboard
Metal/tin cans
Glass
Wood
Textiles
Nappies
Plastics

As our TV adverts show, the transformation that takes place when you recycle is quite amazing.  For example in just seven days, your paper could come back as another newspaper; in just six weeks your metal can could be recycled and used as part of a fridge, a car, a plane… or simply another metal can!; your glass bottles could be recycled into house insulation, and plastic bottles could be made into a cosy fleece jacket!

The UK produces more than 434 million tonnes of waste every year.  This rate of rubbish generation would fill the Albert Hall in London in less than 2 hours. (Source:Waste Online)

Some Facts:

5 out of 6 glass bottles are thrown in the bin.

Aluminium cans take 80 - 100 years to rot down.

It is estimated that we use more than 12 billion plastic shopping bags every year.  They can take between 10 - 20 years to rot down.

Tin cans can take up to 50 years to rot down.

For every tonne of paper recycled approximately 15 average sized trees can be saved.

If all the aluminium cans sold in the UK were recycled there would be 12 million fewer wheeled bins needed.

The average family in the UK uses 6 tree's worth of paper each year.

In the UK, 8 million disposable nappies are thrown away each day.

Every year we need a forest that is the same size as Wales to provide all of the paper we use in the UK.