Hayes School - Environmental Issues

At Hayes we are learning to become more responsible on enrivonmental issues and the impact that we have on the environment.

 

Click on the button to the left to calculate your carbon footprint.

 

There are also some useful website links from the menu above to websites concerning the environment and how you can help to save it.

DID YOU KNOW?

Have you ever thought about how much rubbish you and your family throw away every week? Or why we need to stop throwing so much of it away? This page is full of amazing waste facts. Did you know that?
General garbage
1. The UK produces more then 100 million tonnes of waste every year. In less than two hours, the waste we produce would fill the Albert Hall in London. Every eight months it would fill Lake Windermere, the largest and deepest lake in England!
2. On average, each person in the UK throws away their own body weight in rubbish every seven weeks.
3. The average household in the UK produces more then a tonne of waste every year. Put together, this comes to a total of 31 million tonnes per year, equivalent to the weight of three and a half million double-decker buses, a queue of which would go around the world two and a half times.
4. Every year we produce about 3% more waste than the year before. This might not sound much but, if we carry on at this rate, it means that we will double the amount of waste we produce every 25 years.
5. Most of the world's waste is produced by people from the 'developed' world (which includes Britain), even though these people only make up about 5% of the world's population.
Preposterous paper
6. Paper and card make up about a fifth of the typical household dustbin. About half of this consists of newspapers and magazines.
7. Two-thirds of paper is recycled, making it one of the main materials recycled in the UK.
8. Each Christmas as much as 83 square kilometres of wrapping paper ends up in UK rubbish bins, enough to cover an area larger than Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands.
Bulging bottles
9. It is not known how long glass takes to break down, but it is so long that glass made in the Middle East over 3,000 years ago can still be found today.
10. Milk bottles are used an average of 13 times before recycling.
11. In 2003, the recycling of glass saved enough energy to launch ten space shuttle missions!

Fantastic plastic
12. We produce and use twenty times more plastic today than we did 50 years ago.
13. Every year an estimated 17.5 billion plastic bags are given away by supermarkets. This represents over 130,000 tonnes of plastic - enough to cover an area the size of London twice with a layer of bags.
14. 25 two litre pop bottles can be recycled into an adult-size fleece jacket.
Trashy tins
15. We get through 5 billion drinks cans every year. Each one could be recycled back into a new can, saving large amounts of energy, raw materials and waste.
16. Weight for weight, empty alumunium cans are worth 6 to 20 times more than 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.
Revolting rubbish
17. UK households throw away between £250 and £400 of potentially edible food every year.
18. It has been calculated that, before they are toilet trained, the average child goes through 3,796 nappies, most of which end up buried in landfill sites.
What happens to it?
19. In 2005/06 at least 6.8 milllion tonnes of household waste were recycled or composted. This amounts to 27 percent of total household waste. However, it has been estimated that up to 80% of the contents of our dustbins could be recycled or composted.
20. Other countries recycle a lot more than we do in the UK. For example, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany recycle around 60% of their waste.

 

• Every year we need a forest the size of Wales to provide all the paper we use in Britain.
• We use over six billion glass bottles and jars each year. It would take you over three and a half thousand years to sing 'Six Billion Green Bottles'.
• An average person throws away 74kg of organic waste each year, which is the same as 1,077 banana skins.
• Every year in Britain, we throw away 28 million tonnes of rubbish from home. This weighs the same as three and a half million double decker buses. A queue of buses that long would go around the world one and a half times.
• 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.
• Each year food shops give away enough carrier bags to cover the whole of London with a layer of bags.
• Every day 80 million food and drinks cans end up in landfill - that's one and a half cans per person. In a year, each person could fill a bath with the contents of these cans.
• 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 1 January until midday on 5 May.
• In the 1950s the world made less than 5 million tonnes of plastic products. This has increased to about 80 million tonnes today. We produce and use 20 times more plastic today than we did 50 years ago.