LEFT TO ROT?

Here at UK Vending we take our commitment to recycling extremely seriously. We have joined forces with a number of the leading environmental and recycling charities and organisations to ensure we leave as small a carbon footprint behind us as is humanly possible.

Therefore it is important to think about how our everyday actions have a vast impact on our surroundings and ultimately our general health and well being. The Daily Mail recently ran an article that showed just how long it takes for certain products to decompose under normal circumstances. These items are not at all unusual in fact you may be using some of them right at this moment.

Once you’ve eaten the juicy flesh of an apple did you know that it’ll take at least a fortnight for the core to decompose? Is that a banana you’re munching? Its skin is made of a substance called cellulose, the very same stuff as cellophane and can take as long as eight weeks to rot away. But that is nothing compared with orange peel – it takes two years to disappear.

If you just had a refreshing drink from an aluminium can – expect your great grandchildren to still see the results as it’ll take 200 years for the can to be gone. To be fair aluminium can be recycled and here at UK Vending we encourage you to do so.

But the winner in terms of how long it’ll take to lose some discarded trash by natural means goes to plastic bottles. Those made from Polyethylene Terephalate (PET) takes a staggering 500 years to decompose!

The answer however is extremely simple. Recycle and reuse and above all else don’t litter and expect someone else to tidy up the mess.