How green is your wheelie?

Householders are urged to recycle to stop waste going to landfill sites

People in the UK produce over 35 million tonnes of household rubbish every year.

Every hour we create enough waste to fill the Albert Hall.

No wonder, then, that the government and local councils are constantly encouraging us to recycle using their kerbside wheelie bin and box collection schemes.

But have you ever stopped to think what happens to your plastic bottles, baked bean cans and newspapers after they have been taken away?

In March, Dutch authorities at the port of Rotterdam found 60 shipping containers crammed with the paper, plastics and cans that households back in England had taken time to separate.

For the past year, our reporter Morland Sanders has been on the trail of exported trash.

What he has uncovered is a scandal involving the shipment and dumping of supposedly recyclable waste on third world countries - damaging health and destroying their environment.

Recylers' waste dumped abroad

---

Real Story: How green is your wheelie bin? - BBC ONE on Monday 5 December at 1930 GMT.

The programme will be streamed live on this website at the same time as the UK television transmission. Viewers cannot obtain tapes of Real Story because of copyright reasons.