Facts about recycling
Each year Australian households produce about 400kg of waste, of which just 30% is recycled. This is an enormous waste of energy and resources.
Did you know?
- You can create 5 new sheets of office paper from 1 recycled milk carton.
- Recycling 1 tin can save enough energy to power a TV for 3 hours.
- The energy from 1 recycled plastic bottle would power a 30 watt light bulb for 6 hours – or a laptop for half an hour.
- One glass bottle recycled saves enough energy to operate a 100 watt light globe for four hours.
- Glass can be recycled indefinitely.
In 2013/2014 nearly 58 million containers – 45,000 tonnes of waste – was recycled and kept from landfill. Even better, this returned $5.8 million in refunds to the community to be reinvested rather than wasted.
Recycling tips
There are lots of other things you can do to improve your recycling efforts:
- Never put your recycling in plastic bags, otherwise it ends up in landfill.
- Don’t put biscuit packets, Pringles tubes or broken glass into home recycling bins.
- Look for products made from recycled materials, such as stationery, toilet paper, recycled wood, etc.
- Wrap your scraps in newspaper rather than plastic bags so everything will eventually decompose. Better still, compost them for the garden!
- Collect soft plastic bags (shopping bags, lolly packets, bubble wrap, plastic wrap, rice/pasta bags, etc.) and drop them into a REDcycle collection bin at selected Coles and Woolworths stores or post them to:
RED Group, Attn: Plastic packaging recycling
80C Maffra Street, Coolaroo, VIC 3048
