Paper
For an office which contains 1000 people:
- each person uses approximately 10,000 sheets of paper per
year
- that is enough paper to stretch nearly 2,000 miles (from here
to southern Italy);
- that is a pile of paper 500 metres high (as high as four times
the London Eye);
-
- for each tonne of paper recycled we can save 1,500 litres of
water;
- for each tonne of paper recycled we can save 4,200 KWh of
electricity;
- this is enough electricity to power a large house in the UK for
a year;
- on average every family in the UK disposes of around 8.5 kgs of
paper and card each week;
- once paper is landfilled it takes over 50 years to
decompose;
- one piece of office grade paper can be recycled seven
times;
- to supply the UK's paper consumption, a forest the size of
Wales is required each year.
Plastic
- In Suffolk, 300,000 plastic bags are given away each day by
supermarkets.
- Every Plastic bag we throw away stays buried in the ground for
up to 500yrs before it finally breaks down
- It takes about 25 recycled soft drink bottles to make one
fleece jacket.
- In Britain we use about 275,000 tonnes of plastic bottles in
our home / work every year. We use 15 million bottles
everyday.
- One tonne of plastics is equivalent to 20,000 two litre drink
bottles or 120,000 carrier bags.
- Plastic consumption is growing about 4 per cent every year
in Western Europe.
Aluminium
- Every year 34,000 tonnes of foil and 50,000,000,000 aluminium
cans are used in the UK.
- Recycling just 1 aluminium can saves enough energy to run a TV
for 3 hours or a 100watt light bulb for 20 minutes.
- Recycling 1 kg of aluminium saves 8 kgs of bauxite (Aluminium
ore), 4 kgs of chemical products and 14 kilowatts of
electricity.
- If all the aluminium cans in the UK were recycled there would
be 12 million fewer full dustbins each year.
Glass
- Glass milk bottles are reused 20 times before they are
recycled.
- On average, every family in the UK consumes around 500 glass
bottles and jars a year.
Batteries
- The UK generates 20,000 - 30,000 tonnes of waste
general-purpose batteries every year, but less than 1,000 tonnes
are recycled.
Fluorescent light tubes
- A fluorescent tube contains enough mercury to pollute 30,000
litres of water above the recognised safe level for drinking
- In the UK we dispose of around 80 million fluorescent tubes
each year, equating to 3,000 tonnes of waste, of which four tonnes
is mercury.
- Only about 2-5 per cent of fluorescent tubes are
recycled.
Toner cartridges
- In 1999 over 7 million toner print cartridges were consumed in
the UK. Three-quarters of these were thrown
away.
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