The Frightening Facts about our everyday

The frightening facts are plenty. We bin around 50m tonnes of electrical waste globally every year. That’s nearly 4 million double decker buses’ worth of old computer equipment, TVs, stereos and kitchen appliances, stretching to the moon more than 3 times over!

Another frightening fact is that we throw away 7.2 million tonnes of food every year, and more than half of it’s perfectly edible. Meanwhile, 1 in 7 people across the world don’t have enough to eat.

Between 20% and 40% of fruit and vegetables are rejected by supermarkets before they even hit the shelves. Why? Because they don’t adhere to their cosmetic standards – they’re misshapen, lumpy or just plain weird-looking. But that’s what nature intended, right?

Another frightening fact is that at Christmas, as much as 83 square kilometres of wrapping paper will end up in UK bins when it could have been recycled instead. That’s the same size as Sunderland!

Trees

• The world’s oldest trees are more than 4,600 years old.
• 27,000 trees are cut down each day so we can have Toilet Paper.
• We can save 75,000 trees if we recycled the paper used on the daily run of the New York Times alone.

Rainforests

• An estimated 50,000 species inhabiting our tropical forests become extinct annually. That’s an average of 137 species a day.
• Rainforests are cut down at a rate of 100 acres per minute.

Water

• Only 1% of our planet’s water supply can be used.
• 97% is ocean water
• 2% is frozen solid in the Arctic, for now.

Aluminum Vs Plastic

• An aluminum can be recycled forever.
• Recycling 1 aluminum can save enough energy to run our TVs for at least 3 hours.
• And 80 trillion aluminum cans are used by humans every year.
• When you throw plastic materials into the ocean, it kills as many as 1 million sea creatures annually.
• A glass bottle made in our time will take more than 4,000 years to decompose.

People

Our planet gains 77 million people a year – a frightening fact! And, landfills are composed of 35% packaging materials. Used by people all over the world.

Like this you might like The waste pyramid.