It's Recycle Week 18-24 June 2012. To get us all thinking about recycling, here are some interesting facts about plastic:
The first plastic bottle was sold in 1947
Any plastic bottle can be recycled now (though this may depend on the facilities available in your local area!) Just wash & squash them.
The flag planted on the moon by Neil Armstrong in 1969 was made of Nylon.
Plastic is the most used material in the world, and has been for 35 years.
Recycling 1 tonne of plastic bottles saves 1.5 tonnes of carbon emissions.
It only takes 25 two-litre plastic bottles to make an adult-sized fleece.
Recycling just one plastic bottle saves enough energy to power a 60W light bulb for six hours
We now recycle 20 times more plastic than we did back in 2000.
Over 90% of our local authorities now offer collection facilities for plastic bottles, either from your kerbside or recycling centres.
If all of us in the UK recycled just one extra plastic bottle every year, we could power over 71,000 plasma screen TVs indefinitely using the energy saved (though personally I would have thought there were better things to do with that energy!
Thanks to WRAP for the information in this blog post.
I'm a big believer in recycling, and I think Japan is way ahead of most American cities in that regard. We have seven or eight mandatory categories to divide our household trash into, including two different categories for plastics. Each day of the week is assigned to a different pick-up category. But my daughter lives in Nagoya, a big city on the main island, that has SEVENTEEN categories for household trash. It gets pretty confusing for me, but I keep thinking how much harder it must be for elderly people to figure out how to divide their trash and which days are assigned for their pick-up.
ReplyDeleteThere are some companies here that make big money doing recycling, especially of building materials and demolished buildings.
ReplyDeleteHi Debbie -0 17 categories sounds very confusing! here the sorting is mostly done after collection. Even then I'm astonished by how many people put cardboard into rubbish bins when there are packaging recycling bins next to the rubbish bins.
ReplyDeleteRabbits' Guy - yes it is big business!
I love recycling, reusing, composting whatever and wherever I can !! I could be considered a sufferer of OCD or as I prefer environmentally aware. Consume with care, use markets instead of supermarkets oh dear maybe there is a way to recycle my bandwagon?
ReplyDelete