Did you know

• Each year we throw away £36m worth of aluminium into landfill sites.
• Glass bottles and jars will never decompose.
• It takes 24 trees to make 1 tonne of paper.
• 7 million trees are chopped down each year to produce nappies for the UK market. It is estimated that it could take longer than 200 years for disposable nappies to rot down in landfill sites.
• Nappies generate 4% of household waste, and this costs the council tax payer almost £300,000 per year.
• As a county we produce 260,000 tonnes of rubbish every year. This is about 100 black bags per household and weighs almost as much as a family car!
• If you took all the rubbish that county residents produce in a year and put it into a single pile, it would be taller than Gloucester Cathedral!!
• Gloucester residents put 41,412 tonnes of rubbish in their wheeled bins in the year 2000. This is enough to fill Kingsholm Rugby Ground to a depth of 50 metres.
• Gloucestershire generates 100,000 tonnes of compostable rubbish every year. That is more than 10,000 full refuse vehicles.
• There are over 250,000 households in Gloucestershire. If every household receives one unwanted piece of Direct Mail a day, that is approximately 6 million pieces of wasted paper per month.
• Shoppers use 8 billion carrier bags every year - enough to cover London's Oxford Street almost 200,000 times.
• Methane gas is collected from Hempsted and Wingmoor landfill sites, and burned in a turbine where it generates electricity that is fed into the National Grid.
• Almost half of the average Gloucestershire household refuse bin is made up of waste that could be composted.