Recycling Paper
is a very easy product to recycle. It is clean, can be disposed of in your house, and it is quickly made into other products.
In fact, paper and card make up nearly half of the materials collected from households for recycling. It can take as little as a week for the paper that you recycled to return to you as a different product!
It is a fact that in the UK we import 60% of the wood fibre that we use for paper. UK households use approximately 6.3 million tonnes of paper each year. As a consequence, more than 30 million acres of rainforest are destroyed each year. This is not only expensive, but it also causes unnecessary pollution that could be cut out.
Did you know that 25% of the rubbish we throw away is paper? – That’s a lot! If we could recycle that amount, it would make a massive difference to the waste we produce.
Paper is a straightforward product to recycle. It is clean, can be disposed of in your house, and is quickly made into other products.
Even if we planted enough trees to supply the amount of paper that we require, without recycling, animals will not live in the new forests as they would in the old forests.
Recycling paper also prevents it from being taken to a landfill site, where, over time, it will turn to methane – 20 times more toxic than carbon dioxide and, therefore, awful for the ozone layer. If we recycle, not only do we save trees, but we also save energy and effort.
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Facts about paper
- Each family uses six trees worth of paper each year.
- Bristol residents recycle 91,000 tonnes of paper each year!
- Recycling paper requires less water and energy than making it.
- We are improving at recycling paper, but 5 million tonnes are still sent to landfills or incinerated yearly.
- Paper and cardboard are recycled separately.
- Yellow pages and other directories must also be recycled separately because of the dye in them.
- It takes approximately 17 trees to make 1 tonne of paper.
- It takes half the amount of energy and water to make recycled paper compared to pure paper.
- Pure paper is often bleached to make it bright white, which can cause water pollution.
