8/12/2019 7a Residual Waste Fact Sheet

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S   h  e  e  t    Residual Waste Fact Sheet

What is residual waste?

The term Residual Waste refers to the waste that cannot be or is not separated for

recycling or composting. It is all the stuff that currently, we cannot collect for recycling.

Think of all the materials that you do separate for recycling and then think of all the

stuff that is left. It will include:

•  various plastics – yoghurt pots, margarine and ice cream tubs, plastic food bags

(bread, frozen pea, chip bags etc), cling film, meat containers, biscuit and sweets

wrappers, broken toys.

•  other items made from two or more types of material that cannot be separated

such as crisp packets, crisp tubes, lids, old slippers, vinyl coated wall paper,

disposable nappies.

•  other broken items such as ceramics, metal items, textiles (odd socks),

pyrex glass.

•  contaminated paper and card.

•  pet waste!

In 2009/10, 66% of the waste in Greater Manchester was placed in the Residual

waste containers but more of this can and should be being recycled. In Greater

Manchester, the aim is that residual waste will be transferred to Mechanical

Biological Treatment facilities where we can make best use of this resource by

recovering energy.

Thinking of the 3R’s, you should reduce waste or at least re-use and recycle as much

as possible and if that is not possible, at least recover the energy from it. This can be

done in several ways:

•  Through Anaerobic digestion

•  Thermal Recovery through burning

•  Or methane capture at a landfill site

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Additional residual facts

•  Babies’ nappies make up about 2 % of the average household rubbish. This is

equivalent to the weight of nearly 70,000 double decker buses every year. If lined

up front to end, the buses would stretch from London to Edinburgh.

•  Every year UK households throw away the equivalent of 3½ million double-

  decker buses (almost 30 million tonnes), a queue of which would stretch from

London to Sydney (Australia) and back.

•  On average, each person in the UK, throws away seven times their body weight

(about 500kg) in rubbish every year.

  www.wasteonline.org.uk/topic.aspx

•  A 0.3 litre yoghurt pot contains enough energy to keep a light bulb burning for

one hour.

•  In a landfill site it may take as long as 20 years for a plastic bag to decompose;

50 years for a tin can; 1,000,000 years for a glass bottle; and disposable nappies

500 years.

www.rbwm.gov.uk/web/wm_waste_facts.htm

•  It is argued that each year, with the average household producing one tonne of

waste, if energy recovery of 25% of that waste was reached, then that would

meet 15% of the annual electricity requirements of UK households.

  www.letsrecycle.com/energy