What happens when we waste things?
Waste is anything we throw away, or use up, when we didn’t really need to. A bottle used once, food left on a plate, a tap left running: all of these are waste.
Most of it goes to huge rubbish dumps. Some is burned, which makes smoke. Some ends up in rivers and the sea. Only some is recycled, which means made into new things. Every year, the world’s rubbish weighs as much as 400 million elephants!
To make anything, we use water, power and things from nature, like trees. When we throw it away, all of that is wasted too. Rubbish can hurt animals. Turtles can mistake plastic bags for jellyfish, and cows on our streets sometimes eat plastic. Rotting rubbish also makes our planet warmer.
About 1 in 5 bowls of food in shops and homes ends up thrown away.
Fewer than 1 in 10 plastic things are recycled. Many are used just once.
Old phones, toys with batteries and TVs: only about 1 in 5 are recycled properly.
Around the world, about a truckload of clothes is thrown away or burned every second.
A dripping tap can waste a whole bucket of clean water in one day.
Lights, fans and TVs left on in empty rooms waste power for nothing.