From an email sent by Greenpeace:
What questions?
Here are some ideas:
1) How many bottles per year in the UK?
2) What percentage of the global bottles are sold in the UK?
3) How much landfill would the bottles (in the UK) take up
per day?
4) In Germany they charge a deposit of ¢25 (you pay an extra
25 cents when you buy a plastic bottle of drink, but if you return the empty
bottle (via a Reverse Vending Machine) they give you the 25 cents back). At the current exchange rate, what would the
total deposit be on the UK bottles? What
percentage do you estimate would not be returned?
5) In 2015, 93.5% of plastic bottles were recycled in Germany. If we managed to get a similar percentage in
this country, how many bottles per day would be recycled?
Answers:
1) Using upper and lower bounds on the 16 million per day
(and then multiplying by 365) I get somewhere between 5.7 billion and 6.0
billion bottles per year.
2) This means about 6% of the global bottles (and presumably
the global drink sales) are in the UK.
3) If we assume the bottles are crushed to half their size
and that the majority will be 500ml bottles then we could say that each bottle
will take up about ¼ litre. Multiply
this by 16 million to get 4 million litres, which is 4,000 cubic metres. Lots!
4) The students will need to look up the current exchange
rate.
5) If the 16 million figure is assumed to be exact then
93.5% of that is 14.96 million.
Sources:
