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Glanton Bob - Echoes from the edge of town »Just how much stuff do we throw away. Time for some uncomfortable facts.
Britain sends more household rubbish to landfill than any other country in the EU.
The Local Government Association (LGA) research showed that we are sending 22.6 million tonnes to landfill per year.
Compared to the rest of the EU Britain is way out in the front. Italy, sends 17.6 million tonnes to landfill, Spain sends 14.2 million tonnes and France sends 12 million tonnes of household waste to landfill.
The best was Luxembourg they send only 59 THOUSAND tonnes to landfill.
Of course Luxembourg is small and has a tiny population (480,222 people). So let's compare waste per head of population. For Luxembourg that’s 123kg of rubbish per person per year. Germany has the largest population in the EU at over 82 million. They only landfill 7.3 million tonnes, that works out at a tiny 89kg per person per year. With the UK population of approximately 60 million that means every one of us throws 374kg into the bin each year.
Average British man weighs 79kg that means he throws away 4.7 times his bodyweight in a year.
The key is to reduce our waste, reuse our stuff and recycle what we can't reuse. They can do it in the rest of Europe and I believe that what they can do, we can do better. You can make a huge impact. Just remember how full your bin used to get before you started to recycle - in my house (with four people in it) we have one or two bin bags every week that half fill our bin.
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