Recycling facts

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.

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.

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 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.

The UK generates 20,000 - 30,000 tonnes of waste general-purpose batteries every year, but less than 1,000 tonnes are recycled.

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.

In 1999 over 7 million toner print cartridges were consumed in the UK. Three-quarters of these were thrown away.