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Getting to know your rubbish
Do you know ?
- Every week each of us throws away 8kg of rubbish? Doesn’t sound a lot, but it’s the same weight as 8 bags of sugar – try carrying all that at once! To put it another way, each of us throws away on average nearly seven times our own body weight in rubbish each year.
By the end of a year in the UK we’ll have produced an unbelievable 26,250,000 tonnes of rubbish - enough rubbish to fill dustbins to stretch from the Earth to the moon or from London to Edinburgh and back 323 times! And where’s it all going to go?
Whichever way you look at it, it really is a load of old rubbish!
The problem is, it’s getting worse. The amount we’re throwing away is increasing every year by nearly 1 million tonnes, that’s enough to fill Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium. So instead of reducing the amount of rubbish we create, by recycling or re-using our things, the UK’s rubbish mountain is set to scale even greater heights.
And out of the 26.25 million tonnes of rubbish produced by UK households each year, only 11 percent is recycled.
Sounds bad? It is bad. The UK is one of the worst recyclers in Europe, which is a fact that has not gone unnoticed by either the EU or our own Government. As a result, the UK set a tough target to increase the amount of household rubbish recycled to 25% by 2005. This means that everyone - Government, members of the public, businesses, industry, and the waste management sector - is under pressure to do better.
Out of sight, out of mind
It’s easy to think that this is an issue that doesn’t affect you. But, as we’ve just shown, all of us are guilty of creating too much rubbish every day and this needs to change.
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You can do more than you think to help and it will make a huge difference - around 60% of your rubbish can be recycled
Alistair McGowan
Patron, Rethink Rubbish campaign
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