Waste Facts & Stats

Developed countries use 11 tonnes of raw material to produce 1 tonne of product - DETR (1998)

Nationally, Americans throw away enough aluminium every three months to rebuild their entire commercial air fleet - US Dept of Energy (2002)

The USA consumes 20% of its human population’s weight in resources in any one day (2003)

Recycling an aluminium can uses less than 5% of the energy used to make the original product - US EPA (2007)

Recycling steel and tin cans saves between 60 - 74% of the energy used to produce them from raw materials - US EPA (2007)

The recycling of steel packaging in Europe saves enough energy to power three large cities the size of Sheffield each year - Corus (2007)

Steel recycling in the United States saves the energy equivalent to electrical power for about one-fifth of American households for one year - Steel Recycling Institute, according to US EPA (2007)

Producing recycled paper requires about 60% of the energy used to make paper from virgin wood pulp - US EPA (2007)

Producing new plastic from recycled material uses only two-thirds of the energy required to manufacture it from raw materials - US EPA (2007)

434 million tonnes of waste are produced in Britain each year, enough to fill the Albert Hall in London every two hours - Environment Agency (2005)

…since the middle of the 20th century, humankind has consumed more natural resources than in all previous human history - Margaret Beckett, Secretary of State, Defra (March 2005)

93% of production materials are never used in the final product and 80% of products are discarded after a single use - Martin Gibson, Director, Envirowise, addressing ENVEC (2003)

90% of the resources we use in the UK ends up in landfill sites, as effluent, or air emissions - Environment Agency (1998)

61% of people in the UK describe themselves as committed recyclers - WRAP (2008)

A £1,000 wedding ring - equivalent to one ounce of gold - creates up to 30 tons of toxic waste. To produce that single ounce, miners have to quarry hundreds of tons of rock, which are then doused in a liquid cyanide solution to separate the gold - The real price of gold, Daniel Howden (2005)

Over 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile of ocean – UNEP (June 2006)

100,000 dolphins, whales, seals and turtles are killed every year by plastic bags being dumped into the oceans - Sea Change by Richard Girling (2007)

A "plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States - The Independent (February 2008)

7 billion tonnes of solid waste enters the world’s oceans annually - Ecohouse, Australia (2007)

If each of the UK's 10 million office workers used one less staple each day, 120 tonnes of steel would be saved each year. Use a paper clip instead - Environment Agency (2007)

Mobile phones: In the UK we buy 18 million new handsets a year...we discard 1,000 mobile phones every half hour...just a small percentage of those get sent for re-use or recycling - Channel 4 programme 'Dumped' (September 2007)

Batteries: We buy one billion in the UK each year. Most go into [end up in] landfill. But new EU legislation will require us to recycle around 50 per cent - Environment Agency (2007)

If every household in the UK recycled one electrical or electronic item, 73,000 tonnes could be diverted from landfill, or over 65,000 tonnes of CO2. The same as 9500 round the world flights - Defra (2009)

Plastic bags: 17.5 billion are picked up from shops each year [in the UK] - Environment Agency (2007)

Just 8.7 checkout bags contain enough embodied petroleum energy to drive a car 1 kilometre - Ecohouse, Australia (2007)

Food waste: In the UK we throw away a third (= 6.7m tonnes) of the food we buy at a cost of £8 billion a year and most goes to landfill. If we could halt the amount of food being wasted we would make a big impact; the same as taking 1 in 5 cars off UK roads - WRAP (November 2007)

UK householders throw out on average £400 per year of good food - Defra (2009)

Britons throw away 1.3 million unopened pots of yoghurt each day - WRAP (2008)

About 44% of junk mail is never opened or read - Technology Partnership Initiative (TPI) News (January 2007)

744 million Christmas cards are thrown away every year [in the UK] - the equivalent of 248,000 trees - Business in the Community (2007)

In 1980 before the introduction of the PC, world office paper consumption averaged 70 million tonnes a year – by 1997 it had more than doubled to almost 150 million tonnes - Global Action Plan's 'An Inefficient Truth' report (2007)

"Half a tonne per person": Europeans generated 524 kg of municipal waste per person in 2008. More than 40% of EU27 municipal waste was landfilled, 20% incinerated, 23% recycled and 17% composted - Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union (2010)

If every household in the UK recycled one electrical or electronic item, 73,000 tonnes could be diverted from landfill, or over 65,000 tonnes of CO2 – the same as 9,500 flights - Defra (2009)

40% of the UK's methane emissions are generated from biodegradable material decomposing in landfill sites - Defra (2010)

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