Christmas has well and truly arrived, a time that we over-indulge and get together. It won’t be long until the presents are all under the tree and the smell of turkey and pigs in blankets is filling your home. It can be easy to forget how much extra waste we’re creating over the festive period.
So, with that, we’re going to give you some facts that might surprise you about just how much waste is created over Christmas, and how we could help it.
Christmas Tipples
500 million extra canned drinks are sold over Christmas, along with 13,350 tonnes of glass being binned! If we all recycled those empty wine bottles after the Christmas party, the amount of CO2 saved could equivalate taking 1,300 cars off the road!
Unwanted Gifts
£42 million worth of unwanted gifts are sent to landfill every year. This is a completely avoidable problem that we should be actively avoiding. If you receive a gift that you don’t want, why not re-gift it, or place it in a charity shop?
Gift Packaging
About 100 million black bags of gift packaging are thrown out rather than recycled every Christmas. With masses of packaging from all your children’s new toys, it can be easy to just chuck it all in a black bag and get rid of it. But think of it this way, one tonne of landfill waste costs the taxpayers £36. That means that there could be a bill of around £168 million for waste that could have been recycled!
It may seem like hard work to sort through all your waste and put it in the correct bags for collection, but it’s important to re-direct rubbish landfill. At Valley Waste Recycling, we divert over 70% of the waste we collect from landfill. So, if the thought of sorting through those mountains of bags leftover from the parties, children and adults then give us a call and we’ll be able to help out.
While we’ve got you we thought we’d take the opportunity to let you know that we’ll be closed for Christmas from 20th December – 2nd January 2020. Merry Christmas!