Whats what recycling - Ecobots Facts
- Every year in Britain, we throw away 28 million tonnes of rubbish from home. This weighs the same as 3½ million double decker buses. A queue of buses that long would go around the world 1½ times.
- We use over 6 billion glass bottles and jars each year. It would take you over 3½ thousand years to sing '6 Billion Green Bottles'!
- Every year we need a forest the size of Wales to provide all the paper we use in Britain.
- Every day 80 million food and drinks cans end up in landfill - that is 1½ cans per person. In a year, each person could fill a bath with the contents of 3 cans!
- 1 million tonnes of nappies are thrown away every year, that is 8 million nappies every day. Each child uses a total of 5850 nappies in their lifetime!
- On average, every family in the UK consumes the contents of around 330 glass bottles and jars a year.
- Recycling 1 glass jar will save enough energy to watch 3 episodes of your favourite soap.
- Recycling an aluminium can will light 3 standard 100 watt light bulbs for over 6 hours. If you used energy saving light bulbs it would light 3 light bulbs for over 30 hours!
- Last year around 13 billion steel cans were produced in the UK. Of these, 3 billion were recycled. This means that nearly 10 billion ended up in landfill sites.
- If the average family recycled all of their paper, this would save 3 trees worth of paper every 6 months.
- It is not known how long glass takes to break down. What we do know is that it is so long that glass made by the Egyptians who lived over 3000 years ago can still be found today.
- Recycling 2 plastic bottles saves enough energy to boil water for 5 cups of tea.
- Each year food shops give away 17½ billion carrier bags (enough to cover half of West Yorkshire with a layer of bags).
- In 2001, UK households produced the equivalent weight of 1000 elephants per week in packaging waste.
