For context I live in the UK but I guess it’s pretty much the same worldwide.
I live in a country with something like 65 million people and around 20 million households.
We get recycling and non recycling collected separately every other week.
I imagine over a two week period most people easily fill their waste bin. I normally can squeeze in around 5 or 6 bin bags.
So that must mean around 140 million bin bags are dumped each fortnight or more. That is 3.5 billion bags a year!!
Where the hell does it all go?
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It’s definitely not the same around the world, and even within the UK each different council does it differently
Some places you have to separate out different things, others all the recycling goes together, some places you can only recycle certain stuff and more goes to landfill because they don’t have the facilities to recycle everything
Most of the general waste will go to incinerators or landfill, depending on where you live. The recycling will get sorted in various different ways, depending on how they get you to separate things.
They used to sell a lot of plastic and ship it overseas, but i don’t think the market is there for it any more, so i think there is a challenge of what to do with all the plastic we send for recycling, because there’s not that much demand for it
Where i used to live in Sheffield you could pay extra for garden waste as well, but not all councils do that kind of thing
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