My name is Lauren, I'm aged nine and I'm home educated. On Thursday 11th of September my mum and the Medway Mulchers group were invited to visit a special recycling centre in Sittingbourne, Kent called 'SWEEEP' and I went along too.

SWEEEP is a specialist WEEE processing and recycling plant. WEEE stands for Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment, and Justin Greenaway, the Commercial Director came to meet us and show us around. But first we each had to put on a hard hat and a brightly coloured high visibility vest and a visitors tag because it's a very busy, noisy and dangerous place.

We all stood outside the plant while Justin explained that at least one million tonnes of electrical equipment is thrown away each year in the UK. That's about the same weight in rubbish as 20 Titanics!

Using their special equipment, SWEEEP can recover around 97.5% of the useful materials that would normally just go into landfill, and there are lots of things that people throw away. Things like mobile phones, batteries, video games, ipods, laptops, computers, tv's, toys.... so many things, and some of them aren't even broken, just thrown way because their owners want new ones. When these things go into landfill, they can release toxic pollution into the environment and that's bad, so it's better for the planet if we can recover, recycle and re-use them instead.

Justin took us along to the entrance and showed us the huge piles and piles of waste inside and outside the warehouse that had come in on lorries from all over the country to be recycled.

First, it all goes onto a conveyor belt and up into the dismantler which smashes it all into pieces. It takes 15 seconds for the dismantler to completely smash something as big as a washing machine into little bits. These bits go along another conveyor belt, where powerful magnets separate out the small pieces of metal and plastic. The bigger bits are hand sorted to see which ones need to go back again to be made smaller and also so that they can take out the valuable stuff like copper cables, brass and stainless steel

It's a very noisy, dirty and dusty place, and I thought it was sad that there were so many things that had been thrown away, even if they were being recycled. SWEEEP is open 24 hours, 7 days a week and the machines never stop, which shows you just how much stuff there is! Isn't that sad? Imagine if it was all still going into landfill?

I think that people should think very carefully before they buy something new, especially if the old thing is still working and there's really nothing wrong with it. Maybe they could just keep it until it does stop working and then send it off to be recycled. Or maybe they could try passing it on to someone else who can use it instead.

It is important that we look after our environment, especially for the future because one day children like me will be grown up and I don't want to have to tell my children that the planet is so polluted because people didn't take care of it properly.

photos (c) Carol 2008