Waste Education


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active | for yourself | sam's quiz

Reduce Re-use Recycle

Do you know where your rubbish goes after it is taken away by the council?

The barges carry containers to a landfill site. Each container holds 12 tonnes of rubbish.

Barges carrying waste to the landfill site

Trucks dumping waste at the landfill site

This is where all the rubbish from London gets dumped. If we keep dumping rubbish at our current rate we are going to run out of land!

What is worse is household waste is increasing by 3% every year.

Once all this waste has been lying around for a while all the materials mixed together start to rot
and let off a mixture of gases.

These gases can cause fires and explosions and they also contribute to global warming.

Some of the materials may seep into the ground and pollute nearby rivers.

The waste rots into the ground

Did you know each household throws away
one tonne of rubbish a year?

That’s 150 black sacks?!!

But is it all rubbish, even if it is wasted by us?
What can we do to help our planet?

Reduce
Most of the goods we buy today come in packaging. Most of the time the packaging is thrown away,
and ends up in a landfill site.
Do we really need to buy so much?

We could ask not to have so much packaging when we buy things. We could reduce the amount of packaging we get.

Maybe when we go shopping we could think about whether we need to buy so much at once.
For example, do we need to buy a whole bag of fruit? If we end up throwing away some of it because it has gone bad; we could reduce the amount that we buy.

Most people use about 134 plastic carrier bags a year. If thrown away they each take about 500 years to rot away.

We could buy stronger material bags and reuse them each time we go shopping, reducing the amount of plastic bags we use.

It is important to reduce waste

We can re-use materials

Re-use
Most of what we throw away could be re-used.

Many of the things that get taken to a recycling plant could be re-used.

Many things could be taken to a second hand shop and sold to people who will re-use them.

Recycle
Sometimes we can’t help buying materials like paper, cardboard, glass, tins and plastic bottles.

They usually arrive home with our food and drinks from the shops.

But instead of throwing them in the bin
we can recycle them.

We can have them taken to places
where they will be sorted, cleaned
and turned into something new.