Recycling is one of the most important ways to reduce your carbon footprint and gives you a feeling of going green. Especially, recycling the electrical items or gadgets helps you leave a lasting impact and do a favor to the planet earth.
Here are some interesting facts about electrical goods recycling in the UK:
- Electrical goods are the fastest growing waste stream in the UK, growing by 5% each year
- 75% of waste electronics end up in landfill sites
- In the lifetime of 1 UK citizen 3.3 tonnes of waste electronics is created!
- In the UK the amount of electrical waste we create in one year would fill the new Wembley Stadium 6 times!
- 150 Thousand Double-Decker buses worth of electrical and electronic waste is thrown away in the UK each year.
- £ 36,000,000 worth of aluminum is thrown away each year.
- 15 Million Mobile phones are upgraded in the UK each year, laid from end-to-end they would reach from John O'Groats to Lands End!
- Current UK recycling is estimated to save more than 18 million tonnes of CO2 a year.
- Incinerating 10,000 tonnes of waste creates one job. Land-filling the same amount creates six jobs but recycling it creates 36!
- Plastic bags and other plastic garbage throw into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year.
- Over 55 million printer cartridges go into UK landfills each year according to the UK Cartridge Remanufacture Association. That means if everyone in the UK recycle printer cartridges and get paid an average of 50p, consumers could claim a share of around £ 27.5 million through recycling their inkjet and toner cartridges.
Empty franking machine cartridges hold a major share of the inkjet cartridges that go to the landfills each year. Therefore, recycling franking machine cartridges means you can not only earn some money but also help save the environment. There are some companies in the UK that pay the customers money when they recycle franking machine cartridges. They also arrange free pick-up to collect your empty franking machine cartridges. Even if your cartridges are not worth any money, they happily recycle them for free.
The current difficult financial times require us to not only save the environment by reducing our carbon footprint but also earn some money by selling our old electrical goods.
