It's official! Britain is burying itself in household waste. Every year in Wales and England, 500 million tonnes of household waste are produced. What does it consist of? More than half of the contents of the average dustbin is made up of paper and vegetable matter from the kitchen. In one week the British produce enough rubbish to fill the Millennium stadium in Cardiff to the top of its roof!

Every house in Britain produces around 26 kg of waste a week and the figure is rising. This is because our newspapers are thicker, our food is wrapped in more and more packaging, and we buy convenience food such as canned drinks and burgers. To carry our food home from the supermarket we use 6 billion plastic carrier bags a year and then throw them into the bin.

Every year we need a forest the size of Wales to produce all the paper that we use in Britain. We use over 6 billion glass bottles every year. Every day we throw 80 million food and drink cans away - nearly all of which end up in landfill sites.

The mountain of waste we produce reaches a peak every Christmas. Last Christmas generated an extra 2.25 million tonnes of waste consisting of food, wrapping paper, Christmas crackers, packaging and let's not forget the 5.5 million Christmas trees we bought and then threw away two weeks later.

You may be wondering where all this rubbish goes to after you put it in your dustbin. In Wales 95% is buried in old quarries. In England the figure is 84%. A very small proportion gets recycled and the rest is burnt in incinerators. The government wants us to be recycling 40% of household waste by the year 2010. Unless we all change our consumer habits there is almost no chance of this target being met.