Did you know?
For all those fascinating facts and everything you didn't know about recycling and the environment.
Every year we cut down a forest the size of Wales to provide the paper we use in the UK.
A plastic bottle is predicted to take about 450 years to break down in a landfill site.
Britain has over 1500 landfill sites, in 2001 these were responsible for emitting a quarter of the UK’s methane, a greenhouse gas over 20 times more potent than CO2.
Recycling a single aluminium can saves enough energy to run a television for 3 hours!
Every year the UK produces 38 million tonnes of household, office and school waste, 85% of this ends up in landfill sites, 9% is incinerated and just 6% is recycled.
Most schools currently spend between £300 and £1000 on waste disposal each year depending on size, and produce a minimum of 1 tonne of waste per term.
Packaging makes up about a quarter of all the rubbish you put in your bin, up to 85% of this could be recycled!
Most of the world's waste is produced by people from the 'developed' world (which includes Britain), even though these people only make up about 5% of the world's population.
In 2003, the recycling of glass saved enough energy to launch ten space shuttle missions!
Other countries recycle a lot more than we do in the UK. For example, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany recycle around 60% of their waste.
