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Facts & Stats

Landfill Sites

We produced more than 120,000 tonnes of household waste in Rotherham last year – that’s more than one tonne per household. But what happens to this rubbish? The majority of it ends up getting dumped in landfill sites.
But... this approach is not sustainable – that means it can’t go on forever.

We have six landfill sites in Rotherham, but they are all full and will have to be managed for decades to ensure they do not become dangerous to wildlife and the environment. We now take all our rubbish to alternate sites.

In the UK about 100 million tonnes of waste is land-filled every year. In the past it was the easiest way to get rid of rubbish – there were plenty of old quarries and mines that provided cheap space to dump waste. However, space for approved landfill sites is going to run out in the next five or ten years and it is getting increasingly hard to get planning permission for new sites. This is because no one wants to live near a landfill site – they smell, create toxic gases that have to be monitored for decades, and cause concerns about health.

However, European Directives will force the UK to take a different approach to waste management. Some European countries like Switzerland and Austria recycle over 50 per cent of their waste and the new directives aim to bring the UK into line with these.

- 15.4 per cent of the recycled materials was from blue boxes and 7 per cent from composting.

Aluminium

Aluminium is a metallic element which forms 8 per cent of the earth’s crust. It is extracted from Bauxite, which is mined using the open cast strip method mainly in Australia, West Africa and the West Indies.

Mining scars the landscape and can destroy surface habitats, which include tropical rainforests.

Aluminium is extracted from the Bauxite by electrolysis. This process uses huge amounts of energy – the energy it takes to make one new can is enough to make 20 recycled ones.

Aluminium is the most valuable material to recycle – fetching up to £700 per tonne. But more than 3 billion drinks cans worth £22.5 million are lost to landfill every year.
  
An aluminium can, given for recycling today, can be back on the shelf in just six weeks. If all aluminium drinks cans sold in the UK were recycled there would be 14 million fewer dustbins.

Steel

Steel is produced from iron ore, coking coal and limestone. These substances are imported into the UK from commercial mines in the USA, Canada, Brazil, Australia and Scandinavia.

World production of iron ore is more than 1 billion metric tonnes annually…


The burning of coke in steelworks leads to air emissions, putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which causes acid rain and the greenhouse effect.

It takes 75 per cent less energy to make steel from recovered metal than it does from mined ores – the energy it takes to make one new can is enough to make 4 recycled ones.

Recycling one tonne of steel means saving 1.5 tonnes of iron ore and 0.5 tonnes of coke.

A total of 610,000 tonnes of steel cans worth more than £15 million are land filled every year.