- According to the UK's Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, Environment Agency (Defra), the people of England generate about 177m tonnes of waste every year.
- Every year we produce some three per cent more waste than the year before.
If this rate continues, the amount of waste we produce will double every 25 years. - On average, each person in the UK throws away their own body weight in rubbish every seven weeks.
- UK households throw away between £250 and £400 of potentially edible food every year.
- In less than two hours, the waste the UK currently produces would fill London's Royal Albert Hall and, every eight months it would fill Lake Windermere, England's largest and deepest lake.
- A stack of newspapers three feet high weighs some 100 pounds and is equivalent to one, 30 feet tall tree.
- Recycling one tonne of paper saves 17 mature trees, 7,000 gallons of water, 3 cubic yards of landfill space, 2 barrels of oil, and 4000 kilowatt hours of electricity.
- The average UK family throws away the equivalent of six trees worth of paper each year.
- Some 66 per cent of paper in the UK is recycled - making it one of the country's main recycled materials.
- To make one ton of virgin paper uses 17 trees (which take up some 3.
66 acres of forest).
Forests around the world are being cut and trees are currently being felled at a rate of some 100 acres per minute. - Recycling one aluminium can saves the energy equivalent to one cup of petrol.
Recycling 100 cans could save enough energy to light your bedroom for two weeks. - Just under ten per cent of the money we spend on groceries goes to pay for packaging.
- Almost a third of all municipally-collected waste comprises packaging.
- Between 20m and 50m metric tonnes of electrical and electronic waste are disposed of every year around the world.
Only 12.
5 per cent of this waste is currently recycled. - For every 1m mobile phones that are recycled, 35,274 lbs of copper, 772 lbs of silver, 75 lbs of gold, and 33 lbs of palladium can be recovered.
- It takes 539 lbs of fossil fuel, 48 lbs of chemicals, and 1.
5 tons of water to make one computer and monitor. - Over 75 per cent of waste is recyclable, but we only recycle about 30 per cent of it.
- Used plastic dumped into the sea kills sea life at an estimated rate of 1m sea creatures per year.
- Each Christmas up to 83 square kilometres of wrapping paper ends up in UK rubbish bins.
This is sufficient to cover an area larger than Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands. - Antarctica is the cleanest place on Earth and is protected by strong antipollution laws.
Waste King doesn't need to operate there - but it does operate in the UK.
previous post
next post