Fun Facts

Wacky Waste Facts!

Have you ever thought about how much rubbish you and your family throw away every week? Or why we need to stop throwing so much of it away? This page is full of amazing waste facts.

General Garbage

1. The UK produces more than 100 million tonnes of waste every year. In less than two hours, the waste we produce would fill the Albert Hall in London. Every eight months it would fill Lake Windermere, the largest and deepest lake in England!

2. Greater Manchester produces 1.4 million tonnes of rubbish a year. That weighs the same amount as over 242 thousand buses. If the buses were to be parked end-to-end they would stretch from the Waste Works car park to Southern Spain.

3. The average household in the UK produces more than a tonne of waste every year. Put together, this comes to a total of 31 million tonnes per year, equivalent to the weight of three and a half million double-decker buses, a queue of which would go around the world two and a half times.

4. Every year we produce about 3% more waste than the year before. This might not sound much but, if we carry on at this rate, it means that we will double the amount of waste we produce every 25 years.

5. 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.

Preposterous Paper

6. Paper and card make up about a fifth of the typical household dustbin. About half of this consists of newspapers and magazines.

7. Two-thirds of paper is recycled, making it one of the main materials recycled in the UK.

8. All the paper for newspapers made in the UK is now 100% recycled.

Bulging Bottles

9. It is not known how long glass takes to break down, but it is so long that glass made in the Middle East over 3,000 years ago can still be found today.

10. Glass milk bottles are used an average of 13 times before recycling.

11. In 2003, the recycling of glass saved enough energy to launch ten space shuttle missions!

Fantastic Plastic

12. We produce and use twenty times more plastic today than we did 50 years ago.

13. Every year an estimated 17.5 billion plastic bags are given away by supermarkets. This represents over 130,000 tonnes of plastic - enough to cover an area the size of London twice with a layer of bags.

14. 25 two litre pop bottles can be recycled into an adult-size fleece jacket.

Trashy Tins

15. We get through 5 billion drinks cans every year. Each one could be recycled back into a new can, saving large amounts of energy, raw materials and waste.

16. Weight for weight, empty alumunium cans are worth 6 to 20 times more than any other used packaging material. There are more than 30 million pounds worth of empty aluminium drinks cans in the UK just waiting to be collected, cashed in and recycled.

Revolting Rubbish

17. UK households throw away between £250 and £400 of potentially edible food every year.

18. It has been calculated that, before they are toilet trained, the average child goes through 3,796 nappies, most of which end up buried in landfill sites.

What happens to it?

19. In 2007/08, 8.7 million tonnes in tonnes of household waste were recycled or composted. This amounts to 34.5 percent of total household waste. However, it has been estimated that up to 80% of the contents of our dustbins could be recycled or composted.

20. 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.