The amount of rubbish humans produce has been escalating over the last 50 years. There has been a gradual change in shopping habits and people's attitudes to throwing things away.
Things aren't built to last - the need for less expensive products means that they don't last. Items also go out of fashion very quickly with styles and technologies updating at a rapid rate.
The personal service provided by shop-keepers has been replaced by self-service in supermarkets where the goods are often highly packaged; often loose items are packed together and priced to speed up payment at the check-outs.
Some goods are elaborately wrapped to make them look more attractive, put into plastic bags and then loaded into plastic carrier bags at the checkout. A Women's Environmental Network group bought a trolley-load of 102 basic items - -the shopping for a family for two weeks. They found that there was a total of 543 pieces of packaging.
The UK government estimate that we generate about 177 million tonnes of waste every year in England alone.
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