1Well, my group has been doing a project on how household waste is recycled in Britain.
2We were quite shocked to discover that only 9% of people here in the UK
3make an effort to recycle their household waste.
4This is a lower figure than in most other European countries,
5and needs to increase dramatically in the next few years
6if the government is going to meet its recycling targets.
7The agreed targets for the UK mean that by 2008 we must reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by 12.5%,
8compared with 1990.
9And recycling can help to achieve that goal, in two main ways:
10the production of recycled glass and paper uses much less energy than producing them from virgin materials,
11and also recycling reduces greenhouse gas emissions from landfill sites and incineration plants.
12As part of our project,
13we carried out a survey of people in the street,
14and the thing that came up over and over again
15is that people don't think it's easy enough to recycle their waste.
16One problem is that there aren't enough 'drop- off' sites,
17that is, the places where the public are supposed to take their waste.
18We also discovered that waste that's collected from householders
19is taken to places called 'bring banks', for sorting and baling into loads.
20One problem here is taking out everything that shouldn't have been placed in the recycling containers:
21people put all sorts of things into bottle banks, like plastic bags and even broken umbrellas.
22All this has to be removed by hand.
23Another difficulty is that toughened glass used for cooking doesn't fully melt at the temperature required for other glass,
24and so that also has to be picked out by hand.
25Glass is easy to recycle because it can be reused over and over again without becoming weaker.
26Two million tons of glass is thrown away each year,
27that is, seven billion bottles and jars;
28but only 500,000 tons of that is collected and recycled.
29Oddly enough, half the glass that's collected is green,
30and a lot of that is imported,
31so more green glass is recycled than the UK needs.
32As a result, new uses are being developed for recycled glass, particularly green glass,
33for example, in fibreglass manufacture and water filtration.
34A company called CLF Aggregates makes a product for roads,
35and 30% of the material is crushed glass.
36For recycling paper, Britain comes second in Europe with 40%,
37behind Germany's amazing 70%.
38When recycling started, there were quality problems,
39so it was difficult to use recycled paper in office printers.
40But these problems have now been solved,
41and Martin's, based in South London,
42produces a range of office stationery which is 100% recycled,
43costs the same as normal paper and is of equally high quality.
44But this high quality comes at a cost in terms of the waste produced during the process.
45Over a third of the waste paper that comes in can't be used in the recycled paper,
46leaving the question of what to do with it.
47One firm, Papersave, currently sells this to farmers as a soil conditioner,
48though this practice will soon be banned because of transport costs and the smell,
49and the company is looking into the possibility of alternative uses.
50Plastic causes problems, because there are so many different types of plastic in use today,
51and each one has to be dealt with differently.
52Pacrite recycles all sorts of things, from bottles to car bumpers,
53and one of its most successful activities is recycling plastic bottles to make containers
54which are used all over the country to collect waste.
55The Save-a-Cup scheme was set up by the vending and plastics industries
56to recycle as many as possible of the 3.5 billion polystyrene cups used each year.
57At the moment, 500 million polycups are collected, processed and sold on to other businesses, such as Waterford,
58which turns the cups into pencils,
59and Johnson & Jones, a Welsh-based firm,
60which has developed a wide variety of items, including business cards.
61Well, to sum up,
62there seems to be plenty of research going on into how to re-use materials,
63but the biggest problem is getting people to think about recycling instead of throwing things away.
64At least doing the research made us much more careful.