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Rubbish clearance and recycling
There is a lot of rubbish talked about recycling - one horror story about recycled waste ending up in lanfill sites goes a long way. But the fact is that recycling makes sence for almost all materials, most ot he time.
Whether it is mining for metals, trees for paper or oil for plastic, extracting raw materials for new products cn be seriously destructive: often there's many times more waste produced than useful products made. Equally, the manufacturing process uses huge amounts of energy, water and chemicals.
The UK has taken a long time to gt going on recycling front - even now we are way behind many of our European neighbours.
Below we've outlined the pros and cons of the most common materials in our rubbish bin:
Glass - there is no limit to the number of times glass can be recycled. And recycling just one glass bottle will save enought energy to power all ten energy - efficient light bulbs in your kitchen for nearly an hour.
Over one-third of all glass bottles are recycled in the UK, but shockingly the recycling rate is no higher for pubs, clubs, where they are thrown away en masse.
Metals - In the late 1980s we recycled only 2 per cent of cans, now is nearly 50 per cent. Recycling both aluminium and steel which are used in cans makes a lot of sense.
A new aluminium can takes 20 times more energy to make than recycle one.
Paper and cardboard - Paper and carboards account for about one-fifth of what is in our dustbins - and half of tht is made up of newspapers and magazines. Every tone recycled saves 30.000 liters of water and produced only 5 per cent of the air pollution compared to making it from scratch.
So next time when you going to calll us for rubbish clearance London make sure that you recycle as much as you can.
