What is waste?
Waste is simply material that someone no longer wants or needs. One person’s waste may be useful to another person. In England and Wales approximately 400 million tonnes of waste is produced every year. To ensure household waste is suitable for use in making new products it needs sorting. Sorting should begin at home and continue at your local household waste sorting site. Sorting enables us to produces a clean, usable `streams` of raw materials, e.g. paper, cardboard, plastic, glass, tin cans, compost and wood.
How you can help
Why reduce?
Avoid creating waste – Try not to create waste in the first place. Garden and food waste make up a third of the contents of most dustbins. Home composting is the most single most effective action you can personally take to benefit the environment.
Why reuse?
Buy products packaged in re-usable, refillable or recyclable containers. Highly concentrated products, such as washing powder/liquid, use less packaging and often give greater value for money. Buy recycled products. Leeds City Council is constantly striving towards finding alternatives to landfill. Currently over 66% of our waste ends up in landfill and this is not the most environmentally friendly way.
By offering your goods for reuse you are doing your bit for the environment by helping to conserve the world's natural materials such as metals, wood and oil. This is because these materials are in limited supply and by re-using the goods we already have, ensures these natural materials last longer. By adapting to this lifestyle, you can ensure that your family's needs will be met and maintained now as well as in future generations.
Whether you have a dustbin with a liner bag, or a black wheeled bin, remember that this waste will end up in landfill – please think about reducing, reusing and recycling your waste before you put it in your bin. Virtual tour of the landfill in Leeds
Why recycle?
Rubbish dumped in landfill sites is a waste of natural resources and energy and can be a source of pollution. The number of suitable new landfill sites is diminishing and the existing sites are filling up. To tackle these problems, councils are now obliged to reduce the amount they send to landfill.
Recycling has been around for a long time. The Chinese were recycling as long as 2,000 years ago and so were the Romans. Recycling is now easier than ever, make the best use of your local Household Waste Sort Site and recycling banks (usually situated near your supermarket). By recycling some of this waste, raw materials are produced for factories to make new products. Many household items have `second life` uses, e.g. glass jars, newspapers and tin cans. Buy items with a minimum of packaging. Virtual tour of materials recycling facility (MRF)