Interesting Facts

According to the Recycling Association, Lucozade sport drink bottles, and Pringles crisp tubes are the worst products for recycling. (It's not just about how much plastic is used; the variety of materials that go into the packaging is key.  Pringles with its distinctive tube is one of the worst: it has a metal base, plastic cap, foil tear off lide and foil-lined cardboard sleeve.  The association described it as a nightmare. I'm not sure which bin they should go into, but luckily I don't drink Lucozade, and I don't eat Pringles.)

Local Authorities in the UK will be able to hand out vouchers and loyalty cards to households that recycle their rubbish. (England’s biggest council, Birmingham city council, is trialling the scheme by offering Nectar points to incentivise paper waste collections. Residents will receive 25 points every time paper recycling containers are put out for collection. The points can then be redeemed at a range of stores, including Argos, Homebase and Sainsbury’s. I wonder if they can recycle their plastic loyalty card.)

Metal implants from cremated human bodies are recycled. (Everything from steel pins to titanium hips and cobalt-chrome knees are reclaimed from the ashes. The co-founder of OrthoMetals, Ruud Verberne said that in Europe, an operation to provide a new hip may cost you around £5,000 ($8,000. 6,000 euros, but the return value as scrap is maybe, around £10 ($16, 12 euros) per kilo, and there are five hips per kilo.   The recycled parts don't get reused, instead it is melted down and gets used to make things like cars, planes, and even wind turbines.)

About half of all crematoria in Britain are members of a recycling scheme, promoted by the trade "body", the Institute for Cemetery and Crematorium Management. (Basically any metal that remains after the cremation, is sorted into wheelie bins and collected twice a year. Proceeds from the recycling are donated to charity. The logical conclusion of this is that eventually we'll simply be chucked directly into the wheelie bin and rolled down to the recycling centre, thus cutting out the middle man.)

According to the recycling consortium, one billion Christmas cards end up in bins across the UK over Christmas. (That's 17 for every man, woman and child in the UK.)

According to Recoup, about 35% of the 13.1 billion plastic bottles used by UK households annually are recycled. (This is up from 3% in 2001. So, things are improving.)

In the UK it's against the law to overfill your wheelie bin. (Recently father-of-four, Gareth Corkhill, 26, of Whitehaven, Cumbria, was given a criminal record for overfilling his wheelie bin by four inches. The bin men, sorry - refuse collection officers - even took a photo of the offending wheelie bin. Don't get me wrong, I believe we should reduce our waste and recycle whenever possible, but giving someone a criminal record for such a trivial offence is ludicrous.)

The first bottle bank in the UK is 30 years old. (Since the first bottle bank opened in the UK in 1977, twenty-three billion jars and bottles have been recycled. Nowadays 752,000 tonnes of glass are recycled every year.)

According to the Institute for Public Policy the Netherlands recycles 65% of its waste, whilst Portugal only recycles 3%. (Of course Britain can't hold its head up either. It recycles 27% and, in Europe, only Greece and Portugal recycle less.)