Home : What is waste?

Facts & Figures

Did you know?

Every product we consume has a hidden history, an unwritten inventory of it's materials, resources and impacts.

Environmental Benefits Of Recycling
For every one tonne of paper recycled:

13 trees are conserved
31,780 litres of water are conserved
2.5 barrels of oil are conserved
4 cubic yards of landfill space is conserved 4,100 kWh of electricity is saved
A person uses two pine trees' worth of paper products each year (US)
Globally, the pulp and paper industry pumps 100,000 tonnes of acid rain producing sulphur dioxide into the air each year.
Making paper from recycled materials results in 74% less air pollution and 35% less water pollution.

For every one tonne of aluminium recycled:

13,300 kWh of electricity is saved
95% less air pollution is produced
4 tonnes of chemical product are conserved
5-8 tonnes of bauxite
Turning old cans into new cans saves 95% of the energy needed to make cans from ore.
One recycled aluminium can saves enough electricity to run a computer or a TV for three hours.
Most of the bauxite ore used to make aluminium cans is mined in the tropics including tropical forests. Recycling aluminium helps save tropical forests.

Other unbelievable facts about aluminium can wasting in the USA:

Since 1990, Americans waste over seven million tons of cans: enough to build more than 300,000 Boeing 737 jet airplanes.
Had it been recycled this metal would have had a market value of US$7 billion.
In 2001, 759,000 tons of cans weren't recycled - more metal than was used in all transportation applications nationally.
Aluminium can recycling decreased by just over 15% from 1992 to 2001.
About three million tons of greenhouse gases were emitted last year just to replace the 50 billion cans wasted.

(Source: The Container Recycling Institute, www.container-recycling.org )

Glass Recycling

Recycling a glass jar saves enough energy to light a bulb for four hours.
Recycling glass saves 25-32% of the energy used to make it.

Plastic Recycling

A tonne of PET plastic containers made with recycled plastic conserves about 7,200 kWh of electricity.
Five 2-litre PET bottles makes enough fibrefill for one jacket.

General

"About 94% of the materials extracted for use in manufacturing durable products become waste before the product is manufactured...80% of what we make is thrown away within six months of production." [Paul Hawken, Amory B. Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, Little Brown Company, 1999]
Landfills are ranked as the second highest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States (after fossil fuel combustion). [Recycling...for the future: Consider the benefits, prepared by the White House Task Force on Recycling {Washington, DC: Office of the Federal Environmental Executive}, 1998.]
Nine tonnes of waste are generated to create a 2.3 kg laptop computer. [Paul Hawken, Amory B. Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, Little Brown Company, 1999, p. 50.]
For every rubbish bag placed at the kerb, the equivalent of 71 rubbish bags worth of waste is created in mining, logging, agriculture, oil and gas exploration, and the industrial processes used to convert raw materials into finished products and packaging. This doesn't even include the extra energy usage and climate change impacts resulting from resource extraction and processing.
Two quarts of gasoline and a thousand quarts of water are required to produce a quart of Florida orange juice
[Paul Hawken, Amory B. Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, Little Brown Company, 1999]

Did you know that:

It takes 7 gallons of crude oil to produce one car tire
75% of a tree harvested for paper does not wind up as a paper product
Toothbrushes represent over 100 million pounds of plastic waste each year
27% of the food produced for human consumption in the US is thrown out as
waste
Total contruction waste from an average 2,000 sq. ft. home adds up to
about 8,000 lbs., taking up 50 cu. yds. of space
Incinerating 10,000 tons of waste creates 1 job, landfilling it creates 6
jobs, and recycling it creates 36 jobs

Facts from www.metro-region.org/wastefacts

Energy Savings

Percentage of energy saved by using recycled instead of raw materials to manufacture:

Glass 40%
Newspaper 40%
Steel 60%
Plastic 70%
Aluminium 95% (75% when recycled back into aluminium beverage cans)

[Natural Resources Defence Council, Aluminium Association.]

"The Life of Litter. Decomposition Rate for Trash" The New York Times

Paper - 2.5 months
Orange Peel - 6 months
Milk Carton - 5 years
Cigarette Butt - 10-12 years
Plastic bag - 10-20 years
Disposable diaper - 75 years
Tin can - 100 years
Beer can - 200-500 years
Stryofoam - Never (immortal)

Nappies

It takes one full cup of crude oil to make the plastic for each "disposable" nappy.
It takes 4.5 trees to make the pulp used in "disposable" nappies for one baby over 2 1/2 years (ie: 7 million trees a year are felled for UK babies, 1.3 million trees for NZ babies)
"disposable" nappies use 3.5 times more energy, 8 times more non-renewable raw materials, 90 times more renewable materials than washable nappies. It takes as much energy to produce one throwaway nappy as it does to wash a cloth nappy 200 times.
"disposables" produce 2.3 times more waste water (at the production stage) and 60 times more solid waste than washable nappies – one baby in disposables will produce 2 tonnes of solid waste!
in a household with one baby, "disposables" will make up 50% of total household waste. Just one single item, "disposables", make up 6% of total waste in Wellington

(Please Note: These figures have been collected from various sources and have not been independently verified by Zero Waste New Zealand Trust. We offer them for your additional research)