Facts & Figures

Waste

• In England and Wales more than 100 million tonnes is produced each year by households. This is growing at around three per cent each year.

• So what’s in your rubbish? The rubbish bag in an average household.

• If every tonne was compressed into a cube one metre by one metre by one metre and then piled layer on layer on the Norwich City’s Carrow Road pitch then the pile would be higher than Mount Everest, topped by the Empire State Building and with the Eiffel Tower on top.

• England recycles or composts just 14.5 per cent of its household waste – one of the lowest rates in Europe – and the target is to increase this to 25 per cent by 2005/2006.

• 99 per cent of an old fridge can be recycled.
  The CFCs can be removed and the fridge can be broken down into
  1. Mixed plastics
  2. Steel
  3. Aluminium and copper
  4. Ground CFC-free foam
  And all of this can be reused.

• The average school dustbin usually consists of:
  - 14 per cent plastic
  - 26 per cent paper
  - 7.5 per cent metal
  - 0.5 per cent fabric
  - 15 per cent cardboard
  - One per cent glass
  - 19 per cent food and green waste
  - 17 per cent other things (made from two materials eg crisp packets, drinks cartons or items that did not fit into any other category such as sponge).

• Municipal waste in Norfolk has been increasing at nearly four per cent a year — from 349,000 tonnes in 1995/6 to 422,100 tonnes in 2000/1, an increase of over 70,000 tonnes.

• The way things are going there could be 700,000 tonnes of waste a year produced in the county by 2020. HMS Ark Royal, the Royal Navy aircraft carrier, displaces 20,000 tonnes so we could produce enough rubbish by then to equal the bulk of 35 aircraft carriers.

• Each week, the average family in a developed country gets through four glass bottles or jars, 13 cans, three plastic bottles and five kilos of paper.

• Each UK household produces about one tonne of rubbish annually, amounting to about 27 million tonnes for the UK a year.

• Norfolk residents dispose of around 400,000 tonnes of refuse every year. But much of it isn’t rubbish at all - and more than 60 per cent of the contents of the average dustbin could be recycled.

Wood and paper

• Your recycled good quality timber can be made into chipboard or MDF.

• Your recycled poor quality or contaminated timber is used for roadways or coverings at landfill sites.

• Every tonne of recycled paper uses 64 per cent less energy, 50 per cent less water and causes 74 per cent less air pollution than the same quantity of from virgin wood pulp. It also saves 17 trees.

• Last year people in the UK recycled 45 million Christmas cards - or 883 tonnes - which is the equivalent of saving 15,011 trees.

Plastics

• Your recycled plastics can be made into road signs or garden furniture.

• Soft drink bottles can be melted down to make the fibres to create clothing. In fact, it takes just 25 bottles to make a medium man-sized fleece!

• On average, every UK household uses 440 plastic bottles each year, of which just 24 are recycled.

Can

• Every year, more than 10 billion steel cans are produced and up to a quarter of new cans are now made up of recycled steel.

• Each UK resident uses an equivalent of 200 cans a year – if you put these end to end, this is as high as the Tower of London!

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

• A recycled aluminium can saves enough energy to run a television for three hours.

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

• If all the aluminium drinks cans recycled in the UK last year were laid end to end, they would stretch from John O Groats to Lands End 140 times.

• Nearly 5,000,000,000 aluminium cans could be recycled each year in the UK.

• More than 2,000,000,000 are already collected.

• The average annual consumption of aluminium cans is 1.3kg per person or 3.2kg per household.