VISITORS and residents paying a trip to Brighton’s seafront left behind a colossal amount of waste, the city council has revealed.

Over the course of the summer, street cleaners have picked up a mountain of rubbish weighing in at more than 300 tonnes (300,000 kilograms).

But what does this amount of waste actually compare to in terms of scale?

Here is a list of five different things that Brighton’s piles of waste are equivalent to.

25 double-decker buses

The double-decker bus is a common sight across Brighton and Hove, taking visitors and residents to and from town and the seafront.

An average bus weighs roughly 12,000kg, so it would take a fleet of 25 to match the weight of the rubbish found this summer on the seafront.

50 African bush elephants

Less common around the streets of Brighton is the African bush elephant - the heaviest land mammal in the world.

A male of one of these endangered animals weighs roughly 6,000kg, so it would take 50 male elephants to balance the scales against the waste collected on Brighton’s seafront this summer.

Each day it consumes 230 kilograms of vegetation, meaning the weight of Brighton’s rubbish in grass, foliage and fruit could feed an African bush elephant for more than three and a half years.

The Statue of Liberty

A landmark of New York City and the United States as a whole, the Statue of Liberty was given as a gift from France and was completed in 1886.

The total statue weighs in at just over 204,000kg, meaning a full-scale replica could be built out of Brighton’s rubbish and there would still be waste to spare.

An Airbus A380

Many people have been able to go abroad for their summer holidays this year, catching flights on planes like the Airbus A380, used by airlines like British Airways and Emirates.

When empty, an A380 can weigh in at 277 tonnes, so Brighton’s waste is heavier than this colossal plane as it waits to be fuelled and take on passengers and their luggage.

20,000,000 empty drinks cans

Drinks cans are sadly common sight for beach cleaners.

Once the beverage inside has been drunk, an empty 330ml can of drink weighs just 15 grams.

To balance the scales against the monumental amount of waste found on the seafront, roughly 20 million drinks cans would be needed.

To put that in more context, if you stood all the cans against each other, you could create a line of cans stretching from Brighton to Edinburgh and back again… and still have more than 1.7 million cans to spare.

Have you got a story for us? Email news@theargus.co.uk or contact us here.

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to keep up with all the latest news.

Sign up to our newsletter to get updates sent straight to your inbox.

You can also call us on 01273 021 400.