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Glass
- Up to 80 per cent of new glass can be made from reclaimed scrap
glass - so remember to take bottles and jars to a bottle
bank.
- Glass packaging makes up about 10 per cent by weight of our
household waste.
- It takes a million years for a glass bottle to
degrade.
- The average glass bottle contains over 25 per cent recycled
glass.
- Every tonne of recycled glass saves over one tonne of raw
materials like sand and limestone. Which means less damage to
countryside, less pollution, valuable energy savings and less
global warming.
Click here to do more.
Paper
According to the organisation Waste Watch:
- The total paper consumption in the UK in 1996 was 11 million
tonnes.
- It takes between 10 and 17 trees to make one tonne of paper -
enough for only 7,000 copies of a national newspaper.
- Each year in the UK we use over 150 million trees-worth of
paper - the equivalent of a forest bigger than Wales.
Click here to find out how to Campaign.
Try this:
- Encourage your parents to recycle paper waste from home. Box
it, bale it, take it to paper recycling bins.
- Ask for recycled paper for your homework and your letters.
Choose carefully. Some recycled papers use more harmful chemicals
like bleach than 'new' paper. Expect that your recycled paper may
not look quite so good!
- Re-use paper where possible. Do local shops and offices have
recycling bins? Is paper used on both sides before recycling? Find
out; and find out about local schemes for recycling paper. Put
local businesses in touch with these schemes.
- Local charities and voluntary groups - Scouts, Guides,
Woodcraft Folk - can benefit from collecting newspapers for
recycling. You need somewhere - a lockup garage or barn - to store
it. A recycling company will collect from you regularly. If you
have a place for it, they may leave a lockable skip with you,
collecting it when full.
Click here to do more.
Plastics
- It takes 450 years for a plastic bottle to degrade.
- Nearly four million tonnes of plastic was consumed in
1995.
- Using polystyrene cups means they will never go away as they
are non-biodegradable.
- Recycling just one plastic bottle can save the same amount of
energy needed to power a 60 watt light bulb for six
hours.
- Penny back schemes offer you an incentive to re-use your
carrier bags - rather than using new ones. One leading supermarket
chain which operates a penny back scheme is reckoned to be saving
one million bags, that’s 20,000 gallons of oil (the
equivalent of 2.5 road tankers) and 20 tonnes of plastic every
week.
This information is from RECOUP (Recycling of
Used Plastic Containers).
There are ways to recycle plastics. There are three types of
plastic bottles: PET, HDPE, and PVC. All three types can be
re-used.
- PET - can be turned into fibre for clothing like fleeces. The
fleece you are wearing might once have been pop bottles.
- HDPE - can be turned into new plastic bottles. The bottle on
your table might have been a bottle before - a different shape with
different contents.
- PVC - can be used to make drainpipes and plant pots.
Plastic bags can be made into garden benches, fences, sheds and
road bollards.
Many supermarkets re-use plastic packaging to make carrier
bags.
Click here to do more
Aluminium
- In 1995, 6.7 billion aluminium cans were used in the UK.
Twenty-eight per cent of these were recycled. This leaves 4.8
billion cans per year, equivalent to 80 cans per person going to
landfill sites.
- In 1995, Sweden recycled 91 per cent of its aluminium
cans.
- About 34,000 tonnes of aluminium foil packaging is wasted each
year.
- Seven countries consume nearly 60 per cent of all the aluminium
in the world.
- If all the aluminium cans sold in the UK were recycled, there
would be 15.4 million fewer full dustbins.
- Recycling an aluminium can saves 95 per cent of the energy
needed to make a new one and 99 per cent less emissions than when
it is produced from raw materials.
- Aluminium can be recycled time and time again without loss of
quality.
Packaging
How many different types of drink
package can you think of?
The bottle....the can....?
Here are FIVE.
- The box!
You can buy drinks in cartons. Sometimes packs of cartons are
shrink-wrapped together. The straw is attached to the
carton.
People buy drinks in cartons because they are light and easy to
hold, they can’t break, they can’t spill and they fit
neatly into lunch boxes. Environmentally, cartons use much less
material than many other types of packaging. Once drink cartons
have been used, they can be recycled into items such as pencil
cases and even toilet paper. They are recycled far less in the UK
than some other types of packaging.
- The glass bottle!
Glass bottles are the oldest form of drinks packaging. You can find
old glass bottles on Victorian rubbish tips. Some of them had round
glass stoppers - which made good marbles.
A popular soft drink was made by a company called Codd and
Co. It was called 'Codd's Wallop'. Some people use the
phrase 'What a load of old Codswallop' to describe something
as nonsense!
People like glass bottles because they’re nice to drink out
of, the drink is visible, and the top can be put back on the bottle
to save some for later. Glass is heavy, though, so some people like
to buy drinks in lighter packaging so they can carry them home from
the supermarket more easily. And glass can break, so some parents
prefer to give their kids other types of packaging. Glass bottles
use a lot of material - a lot of resources, but they can be
recycled easily.
- The plastic bottle!
Soft drink bottles are often made from a plastic called PET. People
buy drinks in PET bottles because they are light and easy to carry,
and safer than glass. In the UK quite a few councils and
supermarkets collect PET bottles for recycling. The bottles are
ground up, spun into yarn and made into fleece, clothing or
carpets.
Have you got a warm fleece for the winter? Its fibres may once have
been plastic bottles!
- The can!
Metal cans go back a hundred years. They were developed at
Napoleon's instructions, to keep food for his soldiers on the
march. Napoleon's cook experimented with stoppered bottles; then
tried steel cans, lined with tin which did not corrode.
The can was a great success. But it was a long time before anyone
invented the can opener. In the meantime, people opened cans with
chisels.
Cans are light and convenient for single servings. They can be made
of aluminium or steel and both of these materials are easy to
recycle. Aluminium cans go into can banks. Steel cans can be
recycled out of normal household rubbish too. Some councils use
huge magnets to separate the steel cans from the household mixed
rubbish for recycling.
- The pouch!
This is a new idea. The straw can be made integral with the
pack.
Pouches are a new type of drink packaging that use less material
than any other type of pack. People like pouches because they are
easy to use and unbreakable. They are soft so they can be worn in
back packs for cyclists for example. They are not often recycled
but could be recycled like drink cartons in future.
Click here to do more.
Unwanted
Computers
Cybercycle have found out what happens to old computers and other
electronic devices.
They estimate that:
Six million electronic items with a total value of at least
£50 million are landfilled each year in the UK.
That means that these electronic devices are being put in holes in
the ground.
There may be nothing wrong with them; they may just be out of
date.
They may have a fault; but the rest of the device may be working
perfectly well.
They have parts - including circuit boards, components - even
solder - that can be usefully recycled.
An estimated 40 tonnes of computers are disposed of each week in
the Square Mile alone.
That means that the City of London - the financial centre of the
country - is ditching nearly 40 tonnes of computers every week of
the year as they become outdated!
Click here to do more. |
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