| Well, my group has been doing a project on how household waste is recycled in Britain. |
| We were quite shocked to discover that only 9% of people here in the UK |
| make an effort to recycle their household waste. |
| This is a lower figure than in most other European countries, |
| and needs to increase dramatically in the next few years |
| if the government is going to meet its recycling targets. |
| The agreed targets for the UK mean that by 2008 we must reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by 12.5%, |
| compared with 1990. |
| And recycling can help to achieve that goal, in two main ways: |
| the production of recycled glass and paper uses much less energy than producing them from virgin materials, |
| and also recycling reduces greenhouse gas emissions from landfill sites and incineration plants. |
| As part of our project, |
| we carried out a survey of people in the street, |
| and the thing that came up over and over again |
| is that people don't think it's easy enough to recycle their waste. |
| One problem is that there aren't enough 'drop- off' sites, |
| that is, the places where the public are supposed to take their waste. |
| We also discovered that waste that's collected from householders |
| is taken to places called 'bring banks', for sorting and baling into loads. |
| One problem here is taking out everything that shouldn't have been placed in the recycling containers: |
| people put all sorts of things into bottle banks, like plastic bags and even broken umbrellas. |
| All this has to be removed by hand. |
| Another difficulty is that toughened glass used for cooking doesn't fully melt at the temperature required for other glass, |
| and so that also has to be picked out by hand. |
| Glass is easy to recycle because it can be reused over and over again without becoming weaker. |
| Two million tons of glass is thrown away each year, |
| that is, seven billion bottles and jars; |
| but only 500,000 tons of that is collected and recycled. |
| Oddly enough, half the glass that's collected is green, |
| and a lot of that is imported, |
| so more green glass is recycled than the UK needs. |
| As a result, new uses are being developed for recycled glass, particularly green glass, |
| for example, in fibreglass manufacture and water filtration. |
| A company called CLF Aggregates makes a product for roads, |
| and 30% of the material is crushed glass. |
| For recycling paper, Britain comes second in Europe with 40%, |
| behind Germany's amazing 70%. |
| When recycling started, there were quality problems, |
| so it was difficult to use recycled paper in office printers. |
| But these problems have now been solved, |
| and Martin's, based in South London, |
| produces a range of office stationery which is 100% recycled, |
| costs the same as normal paper and is of equally high quality. |
| But this high quality comes at a cost in terms of the waste produced during the process. |
| Over a third of the waste paper that comes in can't be used in the recycled paper, |
| leaving the question of what to do with it. |
| One firm, Papersave, currently sells this to farmers as a soil conditioner, |
| though this practice will soon be banned because of transport costs and the smell, |
| and the company is looking into the possibility of alternative uses. |
| Plastic causes problems, because there are so many different types of plastic in use today, |
| and each one has to be dealt with differently. |
| Pacrite recycles all sorts of things, from bottles to car bumpers, |
| and one of its most successful activities is recycling plastic bottles to make containers |
| which are used all over the country to collect waste. |
| The Save-a-Cup scheme was set up by the vending and plastics industries |
| to recycle as many as possible of the 3.5 billion polystyrene cups used each year. |
| At the moment, 500 million polycups are collected, processed and sold on to other businesses, such as Waterford, |
| which turns the cups into pencils, |
| and Johnson & Jones, a Welsh-based firm, |
| which has developed a wide variety of items, including business cards. |
| Well, to sum up, |
| there seems to be plenty of research going on into how to re-use materials, |
| but the biggest problem is getting people to think about recycling instead of throwing things away. |
| At least doing the research made us much more careful. |