Why bother?

So why should you care about the waste that you (and everyone else) produce every hour of every day of every year? And why is it so important to reduce, reuse and recycle?

Here are some good reasons.

What a waste!

Throwing things away is a waste of the resources and energy which have been used to make the product.

If we reduce, reuse and recycle instead of throwing away, fewer new materials need to be quarried or mined and fewer plantations need to be grown to make new things. Many parts of the world have already been damaged by mining and quarrying, which destroy the natural environment and wildlife habitats and may cause environmental and health problems for local people. In addition, the vast majority of resources that we use in manufacturing products and providing services cannot be replaced and so will eventually run out.

Recycling also uses less energy than making things from scratch. A lot of this is the result of the oil and other fossil fuels that have to be used to transport raw materials around the world. For example, making aluminium cans from old ones uses only one twentieth of the energy needed to make them from raw materials. Every can made from recycled aluminium saves enough energy to power a TV for 3 hours.

Not only does reducing, reusing and recycling save resources and energy, it can also reduce pollution. Recycling old bottles, instead of making them from new, can cut pollution by up to 20% and reduce the demand for water by half. Making bags from recycled polythene rather than raw materials produces only a third of the sulphur dioxide and half of the nitrous oxide as well as only using one-eighth as much water.

When something is thrown away we are failing to see it as a resource. What is waste to one person may not be seen as waste by another. Increasingly people are realising that it makes economic sense as well as environmental sense to use "waste" rather than just throwing it away.

Where can we put it?

If we don't reduce, reuse and recycle our materials, they will have to be disposed of in one way or another.

Most of the U.K.'s waste currently ends up in landfill sites, large holes in the ground which, over time, are filled up with rubbish. Once a landfill site is full, it is covered over, meaning that all of the materials in the site are buried and no longer of use. Also, although most landfill sites are well managed, people don't tend to like living near them. In any case, the space available to create new landfill sites is now almost all used up, so we're going to have to think about something else to do with our waste.

One of the main alternatives to landfill is incineration, which means getting rid of the waste by burning it. Although the burning of waste in incinerators is often used to make energy, for example to heat nearby homes and offices, it also results in valuable resources going up in smoke. In the same way that people don't like living near landfill sites they also don't like living near to incinerators, particularly as they can view them as a potential health risk.

We've got to do it...or else!

The European Union has told our government that it must reduce the amount of waste produced in the U.K. and increase the percentage that is recycled. In turn, the government has set strict recycling targets for local authorities. This explains why we're all being asked to make a greater effort to reduce, reuse and recycle.