6 billion bottles of pop on the wall How long do you think it will take to sing this song?

Litter Recycling around the world Global Dimensions The UK’s new rubbish dump What can we do to help? The bad side of recycling What our school has done Finally

Litter Have you ever thought about how much rubbish you throw away? If you have, how much do you think it is?

Each year in Britain alone, we use over six billion glass bottles and jar. We throw away 31 million tonnes of rubbish from our homes. This weighs the same as three and a half million double Decker buses. In just over a week we can produce enough waste to fill Wembley stadium, half of which can be recycled.

Global Dimensions Sustainability Recycling around the world Is recycling poisonous?

Sustainability Last year Birchfield School and the Bangladeshi Youth Forum did a joint project in Bangladesh. Part of the project was to set up a clean water system in a remote part of Bangladesh as we had been looking at how many Bangladeshis are drinking from arsenic contaminated tube-wells.

Tubewell Project

Planting Sustainable Trees

Recycling around the world Britain is running out of space! There are fewer and fewer spaces for us to dump our rubbish and because recycling is ‘expensive’ locally we have now found a new solution to our problem. We dump it on someone else!

The UK’s new rubbish dump More than a third of the waste paper and plastic collected by British local authorities, supermarkets and businesses for recycling is being sent 8,000 miles away to China or India and we don’t even know what the environmental or social costs will be. “It costs less to send rubbish to China than to Scotland.” (The Guardian 20/09/04)

What can we do to help? To help with this very serious problem we could, instead of throwing away our magazines and newspapers we could swap them with our friends and family. If that doesn’t work you can use it for arts and crafts. When we put our food in packaging we could re-use the bottles and plastic bags. We could also try and recycle some of it but sometimes that isn’t always a very good idea…

The bad side of recycling Although everyone always says that recycling is good and we should all do it, there is a dark side to recycling. Have you ever thought about what happens when you recycle something? Well at Birchfield school, we have. When you recycle, the things that can’t be recycled are taken apart are shipped off to China. Nowadays there is so much pollution in China that people need to wear gas masks just so they can go outside!

What our school has done to help To help the cause, we at Birchfield have done some very special things. Our global theme this year is child labour and we have been looking at, amongst other things, the ship recycling industry in Bangladesh.

Ship Recycling Ship-breaking takes place in poor countries, where once pretty beaches in India, Bangladesh, China, Pakistan and Turkey are turned into ship graveyards. These countries recycle super-tankers at very low costs. They are able to do this by paying their labourers very low wages who work in very unsafe conditions.

Children Recycling Super-tankers Children also work in this industry and because of the lack of safety equipment, are put at risk daily. If you imagine the sort of materials on board a super-tanker and then imagine a young child working, barefooted, barely clothed then it is obvious that this sort of recycling is poisonous. During scrapping these poisons are released into the environment and the workers' bodies. Greenpeace urges the shipping community to take immediate action and develop international legislation on ships-for-scrap.

How we are trying to help In school we are promoting safe recycling. We are doing this by using recycling bins and: We have a school litter charter. Making displays so people could realise what they’ve done. We’ve put recycling bins around the school so people could use them anytime. We’ve made posters around the parking area for the parents to look at and consider ways that they can help.

So how long will it take Does any one know the answer to our earlier question? Well It would take you over three and a half thousand years to sing "Six Billion Green Bottles"!

Thank-you for watching our presentation. We hope that this will inspire you to consider the effects of your actions and think about how you can help out planet.

This has been a presentation by Birchfield Community School Making a Lifetime Impression