Dafferns recyclers, Brian Jukes and David Halkett, joined Coventry & Warwickshire First at Sherbourne Recycling’s impressive Coventry plant, sorting some 47.5 tonnes of dry waste an hour to learn more about what our bins tell us about society.
British households create 26 million tonnes of waste per year – for the cruisers amongst you, imagine the ‘Allure of the Sea’ filled 260 times over when up to 80% of the things we throw away could be recycled.
Good news, UK recycling rates are on the up!
Allure of the Sea of Plastic
Recycling one plastic bottle can keep the lights on for up to 3 hours – worth considering as otherwise it takes up to 500 years for plastic to fully decompose. The WWF estimates 8 million tonnes of plastic waste is ocean bound, creating a garbage patch three times the size of France. Some good news – the 5p carrier bag tax has resulted in 98% fewer single use plastic bags in circulation in the UK.
Some 90 billion plastic items are disposed of each year in the UK. It’s not that we aren’t recycling, the problem is too much throwaway plastic still being produced. This could be trumped with the Presidential order to re-instate the humble plastic straw, Macdonald’s use 95 million a day!
Stop the Rot
Globally, over one billion tonnes of food is wasted every year, equating to one billion meals thrown away every day, of which 50% could be composted. The UK alone produces 7 million tonnes of which a significant element could be recycled through foodbanks. As households, we discard 20% of all food purchased, with 24 million slices of bread and 3 million yoghurts being condemned each day.
Food waste could make over 15 billion meals. In the UK, our top 3 most wasted food items are fresh potatoes (some 4.4 million a day), trusty bread (around 1 million loaves a day) and milk (approximately 3.1 million glasses).
Batteries not included (not the 1987 Sci-Fi Comedy drama)
Recycling one coke ‘can’ (which if recycled can be back on the shelves in 60 days) can save enough energy to power a television through 3 episodes of Love Island, whilst sadly only 27% of remote control ‘AAA’ batteries are recycled. It is estimated that we throw away 600 million batteries in the UK. It’s worth noting that it takes 50 times more energy to make a lithium ion battery than the energy the battery can store.
Those old discarded electrical items banished to landfill potentially contain up to 7% of the world’s gold, whilst platinum and silver can also be found in abundance.
Who Gives A Crap
15% of the value of your weekly shop can be attributed to packaging. It takes 70% less energy to recycle paper than to make it from raw materials and in the UK we recycle around 80% of our paper waste, which is recycled on average 3.8 times. Recycling 1 tonne of paper can save 17 trees and this has been made even more eco-friendly by 100% recycled poetry inspired toilet paper company ‘Who Gives A Crap’, with 50% of their profits donated to help those without working toilets.
We are not quite paperless – it’s estimated that 70% of total waste in offices is paper waste. Recycling one tonne of paper saves up to 31,822 litres of water. Each Sunday nearly 90% of newspapers are thrown away, recycling a year’s worth of Sunday papers saves a tree.
The Seventh Resource
Recycling saves 700 million tonnes in CO2 emissions each year – it’s on our doorsteps, it is a route to conserving our precious primary resources, of which we have consumed more in the last 50 years than ever before.
What will I do differently? Definitely make sure that 100% of my batteries go to the supermarket with me, only buy food we are going to eat (make better use of the freezer) and be a responsible ‘right bin’ recycler!
Simon Cossey is Dafferns’ Business Development Consultant and part of our Strategic Advisory team.
