It's anything but a load of old rubbish

Ally Waser.

Picture this: Houses no longer having backyards; schools no longer having a playground; no more parks in local cities; and when you look out your window, landfills are everywhere - just because we chose not to recycle.

This is what our world will come to if we do not take action now on such a small and easy task we can all do daily.

I'm sure you all know about recycling and many of you take part.

But for those of you who don't, I think this is important information that you should know.

Imagine burying more than 82,000 football fields worth of compacted garbage each year.

That's right - about 250 million tonnes of waste is generated worldwide annually, and roughly only 30% of that is being recycled.

The numbers are hard to grasp.

In the United States alone, the rubbish produced annually could form a line of filled-up rubbish trucks and reach the moon.

Meanwhile, an aluminum can thrown away will still be a can 500 years from now. Yet there is no limit to the number of times an aluminum can can be recycled.

The average American uses seven trees a year in paper, wood, and other products made from trees. This amounts to about two billion trees per year.

More than 500,000 trees need to be cut down just to read the Sunday newspaper in the morning.

Americans also use 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour. Most of them are thrown away too.

In Wanaka, we have the fantastic Wanaka Wastebusters Centre, a leader in New Zealand recycling, right around the corner from where we all live.

They have even recently added an e-recycling depot that takes all your old computers and televisions to stop all of these going into our landfills.

Papers, bottles, glass, plastic, cardboard - they all get picked up right from our doorsteps every week. So the only part you personally need to take part in doing, is organise these piles to be collected.