Did You Know?

• Each UK household produces over 1 tonne of rubbish annually, amounting to about 31 million tonnes for the UK each year

• Every year, the average dustbin contains enough unrealised energy for 500 baths, 3500 showers or 5,000 hours of television.

• On average every person in the UK throws away their own body weight in rubbish every 7 weeks

• Every 8 months the UK produces enough waste to fill Lake Windermere (the largest lake in England)

• In less than 2 hours the UK produces enough waste to fill the Albert Hall

• If all the aluminium drinks cans sold in the UK were recycled, there would be 14 million fewer full dustbins per year

• If all of the aluminium cans recycled in the UK in 1998 were laid end to end, they would stretch from Land's End to John O'Groats more than 160 times

• Amazingly, recycling aluminium requires only 5% of the energy it takes to make new aluminium – and produces only 5% of the CO2 emissions.

• Just one recycled aluminium can saves enough energy to run a television set for three hours!

• In the UK we use around 12.5 billion steel cans every year, or 600 per household, but nearly 10 billion of these still go to landfill.

• Producing steel from recycled material saves 75% of the energy needed for steel made from virgin material

• Every steel can is 100% recyclable. It can be recycled over and over again into products like bicycles and of course new cans

• Glass can be recycled again and again without losing its clarity or purity

• Milk bottles are reused an average of 13 times before recycling

• The UK has more than 50,000 bottle banks

• One bottle bank can hold up to 3,000 bottles before it needs to be emptied

• Making glass bottles and jars from recycled ones saves energy. The energy saving from recycling one bottle will power a 100 watt light bulb for almost an hour

• Making glass bottles and jars from recycled ones saves energy. The energy saving from recycling one bottle will power a computer for 20 minutes

• Making glass bottles and jars from recycled ones saves energy. The energy saving from recycling one bottle will power a colour TV for 15 minutes

• Making glass bottles and jars from recycled ones saves energy. The energy saving from recycling one bottle will power a washing machine for 10 minutes

• When using recycled glass to make new containers, 315Kg of CO2 is saved for every tonne of recycled glass used.

• On average, each person in the UK uses over 200 kg of paper per year. 66 % of this is collected for recycling

• We use 12.5 million tonnes of paper and cardboard every year in the UK

• About one fifth of the contents of household dustbins consist of paper and card, of which nearly half is newspapers and magazines. This is equivalent to over 4kg of waste paper and card per household in the UK each week

• Recycled paper made up 80.6% of the raw materials for UK newspapers by the end of 2006

• Present clothes banks are only operating at about 25% capacity

• Recycling just one plastic bottle saves enough energy to power a 60W light bulb for six hours

• It takes just 25 two litre pop bottles to make one adult size fleece jacket

• 13 billion plastic carrier bags are used in the UK each year

• Every tonne of biodegradable waste produces 300-500 cubic metres of landfill gas

• 70% less energy is required to recycle paper compared with making it from raw materials

• The unreleased energy contained in the average dustbin each year could power a television for 5,000 hours

• As much as 50% of waste in the average dustbin could be composted

• Up to 80% of a vehicle can be recycled

• £36,000,000 worth of aluminium is thrown away each year

• Aluminium cans can be recycled and ready to use in just 6 weeks

• Glass that is thrown away and ends up in landfills will never decompose

• The average person in the UK gets through 38kg of newspapers per year

• It takes 24 trees to make 1 ton of newspaper

• 275,000 tonnes of plastic are used each year in the UK, that’s about 15 million bottles per day

• Most families throw away about 40kg of plastic per year, which could otherwise be recycled

• Plastic can take up to 500 years to decompose

• Over Christmas as much as 83 square kilometres of wrapping paper will end up in UK rubbish bins

• All branches of Tesco and Sainsbury's offer a plastic bag recycling service

• We get through nearly 3 billion disposable nappies each year in the UK alone and around 90% of these end up on landfill sites. Disposable nappies take 500 years to decompose

• Each day, we produce enough rubbish to fill Trafalgar Square to the height of Nelson's Column

• Each year, one person gets through 90 drink cans, 70 food cans, 107 bottles and jars and 45kg of plastic

• The UK uses about 12 billion cans each year - that's enough to stretch to the moon and back!

• On average each person in England and Wales produces nearly 500kg of household waste a year

• 7 million trees are cut down every year just to make disposable nappies

• The average British family throws away 6 trees worth of paper in their household bin a year

• Every tonne of paper recycled saves 17 trees

• Five out of six glass bottles are thrown away

• The recycling rate for aluminium cans is already above 90% in some countries such as Brazil and Japan

• Cans made from aluminium are worth 6 to 20 times more than any other used packaging material

• Every year in the UK, we throw away over 28 million tonnes of rubbish from our homes. This weighs the same as three and a half million double-decker buses. A queue of buses that would go around the world one and a half times.

• To grow enough trees to provide the amount of paper that Britain uses each year, you would need a forest the size of Wales.

• The number of disposable nappies thrown into British bins for each baby weighs the same as a family car

• The energy required to make one aluminium can from raw materials could be used to make 20 recycled cans

• UK consumers throw away 6.7 million tonnes of food every year - that's £10 billion pounds worth.

• In the UK we throw away 1.6 million whole untouched bananas every day

• In the UK we throw away 1.3 million unopened yoghurts every day

• In the UK we throw away 600,000 whole uncooked eggs every day

• In the UK we throw away 1.2 million untouched sausages every day

• In the UK we throw away 20 million slices of bread every day

• We throw away 6.7 million tonnes of food each year in the UK, most of which could have been eaten.

• In the UK at least £10 billion worth of food that could have been eaten is thrown out every year.