Recycling

Each household produces about one tonne of rubbish annually, amounting to about 27 million tonnes for the UK each year. That equals the weight of about 2.7 million Diplodocus' or about the same number of people who live in the Greater Manchester area!

The amount of rubbish we throw away is increasing for a number of reasons:

• new packaging materials and technology are being developed
• lifestyle changes: for example a greater reliance on fast and convenience food
• increasing affluence, leading to greater consumption of goods
• increasing population

Today's rubbish compared to pre-1960s rubbish, contains more products that don't break down when they're put in the ground. Packaging waste makes up about a quarter of all the rubbish you put in your bin. Most of this could be recycled.

We need to increase the amount of rubbish that is recycled, because we cannot carry on burying and burning rubbish forever. This is recognised by the government who are thinking of ways we can reduce the amount of rubbish we produce and increase the amount we reuse and recycle.

However, these changes will not happen overnight. To increase recycling we need to:

• collect more rubbish in recycling bins and on doorsteps ready to be recycled
• build more recycling plants
• educate people about recycling
• make sure there are enough rubbish trucks to collect the recyclable rubbish
• find ways of using the recycled material by making it into useful items. Did you know some fleece jackets are made from recycled plastic bottles?

Who makes rubbish?

Everybody makes rubbish. Each week the average family in a developed country gets through 4 glass bottles or jars, 13 cans, 3 plastic bottles and 5 kilograms of paper. That means that every day, a total of about 8,000 tonnes of rubbish is thrown away by families in England and Wales - that amount of rubbish is the same weight as 1,600 African elephants! The amount of rubbish is growing every year. In the year 2000, we threw away 1.4 million more tonnes of rubbish than the year before (1999). The good news is that more of this is being recycled than ever before. However, this still leaves a lot of rubbish that we have to burn (incinerate) or bury (landfill).