Textile Recycling Facts
1. Textiles make up 12% of landfill sites
2. In one year discarded clothing would fill Wembley stadium
3. Britain produces around 1 000,000 tonnes of textile waste a year. Roughly a quarter of this is recycled, mostly through jumble sales, clothes banks and charity shops and don't forget to tie your shoes together!
4. By educating children on the importance of recycling with textiles in particular in mind the concept of textile recycling will become part of everyday life for generations to come
Top 10 Recycling Facts
* In one hour we produce enough waste in the UK to fill the Albert Hall.
* In one day there would be enough waste to fill Trafalgar Square to the top of Nelson’s Column.
* In one year there would be enough waste to fill dustbins stretching from the Earth to the Moon.
* Every year 13 billion steel cans are produced and up to a quarter of every new steel can is made from recycled steel. This is the equivalent of over 3 billion cans made from recycled steel.
* About 34,000 tonnes of aluminium foil packaging (worth around £12 million) is wasted each year. Only 3,000 tonnes is recycled (worth £1.2 million).
* If all the aluminium cans sold in the UK were recycled there would be 12 million fewer full dustbins each year.
* Each tonne of paper recycled saves 15 average-sized trees, as well as their surrounding habitat and wildlife.
* A milk bottle is reused an average of 20 times before it is recycled.
* Every tonne of glass recycled saves over 1 tonne of raw materials like sand and limestone. This means less quarrying, less damage to our countryside, less pollution, valuable energy saving and less global warming.
* In 1995, 6.7 billion aluminium cans were used in the UK. If recycled they would be worth around £65 million. Only 28% of these cans were recycled, which means that 4.8 billion cans were landfilled with a value of approximately £47 million.
What is a landfill site?
A landfill site is a place where solid waste is deposited. Usually a hole in the ground.
What happens at a landfill site?
Household waste is collected from your wheeled bin and tipped into the back of a refuse collection vehicle. When this vehicle is full of rubbish it drives to the nearest landfill site. It drives onto the weighbridge where the whole of the vehicle is weighed. From this weight the known weight of the empty vehicle is subtracted and a ticket showing the weight of the rubbish is produced.
The vehicle then drives along to the tipping face where the driver ejects the load of refuse onto the ground. A compactor (large tractor with spikes on its wheels) pushes the waste into position and rolls over it to compact it into the ground. Once a layer of about 2 metres has been deposited, a layer of soil and clay is then tipped on top of the compacted rubbish to seal it to the site. This helps to stop litter being blown away from the site.
What happens to the waste then?
Over time the organic waste such as food and paper will begin to break down (biodegrade). This rotting process produces a substance called leachate and also gives off landfill gas (methane and carbon dioxide). The gas and leachate must be monitored and controlled to prevent environmental damage and to stop the gas exploding.
The waste that cannot decompose (non-biodegradable) such as metals and plastics will remain in the landfill site forever.
The Cost of Disposal
We are very quickly running out of landfill space so the Government is making this form of disposal more and more expensive in order to try and encourage us to find alternative methods of disposal and to encourage recycling.
Gateshead Council currently pay about £30 for every tonne of material sent to landfill. Multiply this by the 115,000 tonnes of waste produced by Gateshead residents' last year gives a waste disposal bill of over £2 million pounds.
Also in sending waste to landfill we are wasting valuable resources. Organic material could be made into compost. Glass can be reused or recycled into new glass products. Old clothes and furniture could be given to charities for reuse. There are endless possibilities.
