What is Waste?

Waste is anything we do not want anymore and we want to dispose of. It can be made up of many things:Packaging (e.g. plastic bags, cans, bottles, cardboard) , paper, leftover food, broken or unwanted toys, broken or unwanted electrical equipment, old clothes or other textiles, garden waste, clinical (hospital) waste, soil and rubble, DIY waste.

A typical household bin is made up of the following types of materials*

What could we do with our waste?

There are lots of things we could do with the things we want to throw away, rather than putting them in the bin. We could give them to someone else who may use them, fix them if they are broken, reuse them or send them to be recycled or composted.

Recycling

We could recycle more than 55% or over half of all our waste. Recycling means that we use materials such as aluminium or paper over and over again, reducing the need to dig more minerals out of the earth or cut more trees down. Once an can or newspaper is buried in landfill or burned at an Energy from Waste plant , it is a resource which has been lost forever.

*_{Source: Analysis of household waste composition - Dr. J. Parfitt, WRAP, December 2002}

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