1. We use over six billion glass bottles and jars each year. It would take over three and a half thousand years to sing "Six Billion Green Bottles"
2. The amount of waste paper buried each year would fill 103,448 double decker buses, which if parked nose to tail would go all the way from London to Milan
3. Aluminium cans have a value worth 6 - 20 times that of any other used packaging material. There are more than 30 million pounds worth of empty aluminium drinks cans in the UK just waiting to be collected, cashed in and recycled. Who wants to be a millionaire?
4. Every year, food shops in the British Isles give away roughly 8 billion plastic carrier bags. This represents over 65,000 tonnes of plastic - enough to cover the whole of London with a layer of bags.
5. Every day 80 million food and drinks cans end up in landfill (being buried) - that's one and a half cans per person. In a year, each person could fill a bath with the contents of these cans!
6. Each year in Britain, we throw away 28 million tonnes of rubbish from home. This weighs the same as 3.5 million double decker buses. A queue of buses that long would go around the world one 1.5 times
7. One million tonnes of nappies are thrown away every year, that's 8 million nappies a day. Each child uses a total of 5850 nappies in their lifetime; that weighs the same as an average family car
8. We fill about 300 million square metres of land with rubbish every year. That's the same as covering the pitch at Old Trafford, Manchester United Football Club's ground, 28,450 times. To walk around the pitch that many times would take you from midnight on 1st January until midday on May 5th
9. An average person throws away 74 kg of organic waste each year, which is the same as 1077 banana skins
10. Every year we need a forest the size of Wales to provide all the paper we use in Britain
www.wastewatch.org.uk