End of life disposal

• How we dispose of products can have a significant impact on the environment. It's better if the materials can be recycled than if they are buried in underground rubbish dumps as landfill
• Recycling means reprocessing a material so that it can be used again. It reduces the need for new materials and therefore causes less environmental impact
• Plastics can be sorted according to their reuse. Every plastic bottle or container has a recycling symbol and number that helps in the sorting process and can lead to it being reshaped into new products

  
• Aluminium drinks cans are recycled by going through a re-melt process; they're turned into ingots that are then used to make new cans
• Glass is often reused - e.g. glass milk bottles ar ereturned the dairy, sterilised and reused for further milk deliveries
• Jars can become containers for other items, but at the end of their useful life they are crushed, melted and moulded into new bottles and jars or other glass items. Glass does not degrade so it can be recycled again and again
• If a product eventually has to go into a landfill then ideally it should be made of biodegradable materials
• Biodegradable means that the materials naturally break down quicjkly when in landfill to naturally occuring substances
• Non-biodegradable materials can take hundreds of years to break down
• Supermarkets started charging for plastic bags to encourage their reuse as, like most packaging materials, they quickly end up in landfill polluting land and sea. This is now a legal requirement