What a Waste What have you eaten or used today Did you have to throw anything away We all throw things away every day A wrapper around something we’ve eaten an apple core a piece of paper that we’ve drawn on This is our waste or garbage A Load of Garbage Imagine this if you live in the UK the United States or Australia you probably throw away seven times your weight in garbage every year This garbage is likely to include three plastic bottles four glass bottles 13 metal cans and 11 pounds 5 kg of paper a week The U S tops the charts for the country that makes the most waste Australia comes second and the UK throws away the most garbage of any country in Europe x 3 2 million x 2 5 million x2 million x 1 7 million K U y l a t I i n a p S e c n a r F x1 million y n a m r e G 6 A fully grown African elephant weighs around 7 tons These figures show how many elephants worth of garbage some countries in Europe throw away in a year
Did you know On average each person in the U S produces around 4 5 pounds 2 kg of solid waste every day That adds up to nearly a ton of waste per person in a year In Europe about 3,500 trash cans full of garbage are thrown away every minute Why So Much Garbage We haven’t always made so much waste Nowadays food and other goods are much more heavily packaged than they used to be meaning we have more packaging to throw away We also tend to buy more products such as clothes toys and electrical goods than people used to and we keep them for less time before throwing them away Most importantly there are many more of us in the world than there used to be The Earth’s population has multiplied by four times in the last 100 years and more people equals more waste 7
