Ten facts about recycling
Putting out a recycling box or bag with the weekly rubbish collection has become second nature for many of us. If you know anyone who’s still throwing paper, plastic, cans or glass in with their rubbish, then see what they make of these facts about rubbish and recycling in the UK:
1. Each UK household produces more than a tonne of rubbish each year.
2. In less than 2 hours the UK produces enough waste to fill the Albert Hall.
3. Over the course of a year, the average dustbin contains enough unrealised energy to provide hot baths for 500 people.
4. Just one recycled aluminium can saves enough energy to run a television set for three hours.
5. Glass can be recycled again and again without losing its clarity or purity.
6. 13 billion plastic carrier bags are used in the UK each year.
7. On average, each person in the UK uses more than 200 kg of paper per year.
8. Recycling aluminium requires only 5% of the energy it takes to make new aluminium and produces only 5% of the CO2 emissions.
9. We use around 12.5 billion steel cans every year and nearly 10 billion of these still go to landfill.
10. If all the aluminium drinks cans sold in the UK were recycled, refuse collectors would have 14 million fewer full dustbins to empty each year.
You can find more facts like these on the Recycle Now website, which also has a handy tool to find out where you can recycle in your area.
A New Year’s resolution
I’ve just joined the Big Green Challenge team and will be posting here over the next couple of months, hopefully providing some inspiration so that lots of groups of people put their thinking caps on and enter the competition!
Over Christmas and New Year I’ve been thinking about what community means, in particular the local definition of community, in the sense of where you live and the people around you. Most of the communities I belong to are based online and don’t have a local aspect – the exception being Freecycle which is a great example of how an online group can make a real difference at a local level.
I’d like to make more of a contribution to my neighbourhood, and my New Year’s resolution is to get together with other people to help make my community a greener and happier place to be. I also have a fledgling idea about setting up a group where people can get together to talk about their ideas, since talking about ideas is the first step to making them happen!
It’d be great to hear about how other people have gone about getting more involved in their local community, so please leave a comment if you’ve got any experiences or tips to share.
Top tips and plastic bags
George Marshall of COIN wrote a provocative piece about whether re-using plastic bags and other small actions are helpful when it comes to doing something meaningful about climate change.
See Guardian and his blog.
Now he is right to point out that re-using bags has a very small effect on overall carbon use. He acknowledges that there may be other benefits – a few turtles won’t die as a result of confusing plastic bags in the sea for jellyfish.
So can we consign the idea of re-using bags and similar “simple tips” to the recycling bin? And chastise the Government and anyone else who promote them for diverting us from the serious business of responding effectively to climate change.
Or is there more to it? Several bloggers have pointed out that by encouraging people to start with simple actions you may them to move on to more demanding ones once they’ve realised what’s at stake and have a better understanding of what’s actually required.
What strikes me about plastic bags is that when we re-use bags today, it’s the big supermarket chains that make most the savings. We do the work, and the supermarkets reap the benefit. So there’s an imbalance there. Especially if you know that £100m or so is spent each year on these bags.
So my version of re-using bags is to have local communities strike a bargain with supermarkets. If the community re-uses bags, then the community gets some of the money that’s saved. For example, if students in a school pester their parents to re-use bags and the school gets funding for energy efficiency measures or renewable energy technologies etc. If you can save 20% of bag use, then this could be £20m a year!
But there’s more. One great advantage is that people immediately see the point; you take resources – the bags - that would literally go in a hole in the ground and turn them in to something useful – renewable energy installations or whatever. This is a very powerful message about how we confront climate change – we have to use resources much more efficiently. Only that way we have a high standard of living but with lower carbon use.
And more …. If we had a branded “Green Bag” then this would be advertising for the campaign on every high street in the country. The campaign snowballs.
