Did you know?

Each week we add a new 'killer' fact to a growing list of astonishing facts and figures that relate to our debate themes. Here you can see what we've collected so far. If you've something you'd like to add, contact swdebates@southwestrda.org.uk or go to have your say. 
 

Did you know....

 
 
According to Defra nearly 2m tonnes of textiles are dumped in landfill each year. 
www.defra.gov.uk

Together, construction, demolition and earthworks produce 90m tonnes per year of waste, around 10% of which is estimated to include unused building materials. Fewer than 1 per cent of all new buildings use any reclaimed materials.

If just 50% of everyone staying in air conditioned hotel rooms turned off the air conditioning for their week away this summer - it would save more than 5 million tonnes of CO2 from being emitted into the atmosphere. 
www.carbonneutralnewcastle.com

Unaddressed junk mail has grown fourfold over the past two decades. Some 78,000 tonnes of direct mail ended up in UK landfill in 2005, and now 70 per cent must be recycled by 2013.

British homes contribute 27% of the country's carbon dioxide emissions, non-domestic buildings account for 18% and and a further 10% comes from construction and shipping of materials. Making a zero carbon building adds between 5% and 30% to the price. 
Uk Green Building Council

Between 2000 and 2006, individual donations to charity grew by just over 8 percent, while the economy was registering a 20 per cent growth. Only 54 per cent of the population and 65 per cent of top earners report giving on a regular basis.

3000 year old glass made in the Middle East can still be found today and on average every family consumes around 330 glass bottles a year. 
waste on line and British Glass

Half the vegetables and 95 per cent of the fruit eaten in the UK comes from beyond our shores. Increasingly, it arrives by plane - and air travel gives off more CO2 than any other form of transport.... 
BBC News - food matters

4.4 million whole apples are thrown away untouched every day in the UK; in total we bin nearly £3 billion worth of perfectly good fruit and vegetables each year...... 
www.lovefoodhatewaste.com

More than 330m pairs of new shoes are bought each year and a similar amount goes to landfill.....

Every year, we spend around £1.35 billion on cut flowers in the UK, with imports accounting for 80 per cent of the flowers bought each year. These are mostly air freighted because of their short shelf life and have a significant climate change footprint. 
Friends of the Earth

In the past year, the price of wheat has risen 130 percent, soya by 87 percent and rice by 74 per cent. According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, there are only eight to 12 weeks of cereal stocks in the world, while grain supplies are at their lowest since the 1980s.

In 2006/07 there were about 41,700 National Insurance Number Allocation registrations in the South West, 6.8% of the total in England. This number was about 24% higher than in 2005/06, the highest percentage change among the English regions..... 
South West Regional Assembly

The market for organic food reached more than £2bn in 2007, with most consumers from households with children under the age of 15. An average of £37m is spent each week on organic produce, mostly in the south east of England.

More than 300,000 Britons own second homes, with a predicted rise of 24 per cent over the next seven years. In West Cornwall (the area in the country with the highest proportion of second home ownership), more than 50 per cent of young working housholds are priced out of their local housing market.

Enough sunlight falls on the earth's surface every hour to meet world energy demand for an entire year... 
www.alliantenergykids.com

2.27 billion litres of bottled water were drunk in the UK in 2006, with a total retail value of £1.68 billion. 9000 tonnes of CO2 are produced each year taking Volvic the 1000km from South West France to Britain. Evian travels 930km from Lake Geneva producing 14,000 tonnes of CO2. 27 million tonnes of plastic are used to bottle water worldwide each year. At the same time,1.3 billion people don't have access to clean water and 1.8 million children die each year from waterborne illnesses.

In 2001 UK households produced the equivalent weight of 245 jumbo jets per week in packaging waste. Every year each person produces 4 times as much packaging waste as their luggage allowance on a jumbo jet. 
www.wasteonline.org.uk

If a householder replaced all their lightbulbs, the total impact on yearly electicity consumption will be around 400 units (kWh). A new plasma TV bought at the same time would outweigh all of those savings. 
Guardian - environment

Food is the biggest source of household carbon emissions - its transportation, distribution and collection produces twice the emissions than that from our heating, lighting and daily car use. 
Go Zero

The South West has the oldest population structure of all the regions in England; 38% were aged 50 or over in 2004. Official projections suggest that the number of residents aged over 50 will rise by over 300,000 over the next ten years, raising their share of the total population to 41%. 
Southwest Observatory - ageing

One litre of fuel will carry a person 4 miles in a large car, 5.5 miles in a small car, 31 miles in a bus with 40 passengers and 34 miles in a train with 300 passengers. A double-decker bus carries the same number of people as 20 full cars yet takes up one seventh of the road-space. 
Go Zero

It is estimated that 83 square kilometres of wrapping paper end up in our rubbish bins each Christmas. That's enough to wrap up Guernsey. 
Natural Matters 

An estimated 1.7 billion Christmas cards are sent each year in the UK and most are not made from recycled paper.  
Go Zero

IT is responsible for up to 40 per cent of the average UK business's carbon footprint. US data centres (powering most servers) account for 1.2 per cent of total power consumption. 
Green ISP

40 million tyres are scrapped every year in the UK alone. Re-treading uses half the amount of energy that is needed to replace the whole tyre and has been recognised as the most environmentally friendly method of dealing with used tyres.  
Go Zero

The South West's population growth over the past decade has been entirely the result of migration, as the region has experienced more deaths than births in each year. 
Southwest Observatory - State of the South West

Germany generates 12% of its electricity from various renewables, compared with 4.6% in Britain. It has created a quarter of a million jobs in renewables - a number that is growing fast. Britain has only 25,000, the number of jobs created in the industry in Germany in the past year alone. 
www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/jul/23/germany.greenbusiness

Babies' nappies make up about 2% of average household rubbish. This is equivalent to the weight of nearly 70,000 double decker buses every year. If lined up end to end, the buses would stretch from London to Edinburgh. 
www.wasteonline.org.uk

Waste oil from nearly 3 million car oil changes in Britain is not collected properly. If it was, this could meet the annual energy needs of 1.5 million people. 
Scotish Oil Care Campaign

One quarter of the word's population (in the developed world) use 85% of the world's resources. 
www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6922065.stm

Over 30,000 people move to the South West every year - which will lead to a population increase of over 700,000 by 2026. 
Southwest Observatory

Every year, an estimated 17½ billion plastic bags are given away by supermarkets, equivalent to over 290 bags for every person in the UK. Every plastic bag buried in landfill takes around 500 years to decay. 
waste on line

1 litre of oil can pollute 1 million litres of fresh drinking water 
Scotish Oil Care Campaign

About one fifth of the contents of household dustbins consist of paper and card, of which half is newspapers and magazines. This is equivalent to over 4kg of waste paper per household in the UK each week. 
waste on line

Every flush of your toilet uses 12 litres of water. If you put a brick in your toilet cistern you will save 3,000 litres of water a year 
Go Zero 

The population of the South West grew faster than any other region between 1981 and 2003. 
www.swo.org.uk

Global income is more than 40.2 trillion dollars a year, but 19 per cent (1.21 billion) of the world's population earn less than one dollar a day  
Economic & Social Research Council