What happens to our rubbish?
Half of all the rubbish collected from our homes is recycled or composted. The rest goes to landfill sites.
Both rubbish that goes to landfill, as well as most recycling, is collected from outside your home. Some recycling is taken to special places like bottle banks.
Recycling is picked up and taken to a depot where it is sorted into different types of materials, such as glass, paper, plastic and metal. It is important that the materials within the recycling are separated, as the companies which recycle the materials only want one particular material and not a mixture.
The other rubbish gets put in the back of a lorry, where it is crushed, so that they can put as much rubbish as they can inside it. The rubbish truck takes the squashed rubbish to a landfill where it is dumped into a big whole in the ground.
We have 3 operational landfills in Devon but they are filling up fast because there is so much rubbish that we throw away.
Do you know how landfills affect the environment?
