Facts and statistics

Over 500 offices have joined Local Paper for London since the scheme began. Organisations range from Direct Line Insurance, The House of Commons and The Greater London Authority to local post offices and schools. This amounts to approximately 29,000 office staff on the scheme.

Annually Local Paper for London recycles 4,216 tonnes of paper equivalent to…
71,672 trees saved from felling per year
9,671m3 of landfill space saved per year
2,530 tonnes of C02 emissions saved per year

1,300 tonnes of local recycled paper is being purchased, with a sales value of £1.1 million per year.

Eco-footprinting paper
Using data generated from a Life Cycle Assessment of Local Paper for London to be published in 2003, ecological footprint analysis was carried out on the Local paper for London scheme. The ecological footprint of the local paper loop is just 14% of virgin imported paper. This is because it uses less than half of the energy, saves trees and is better than incineration.

Paper recycling and landfilling
UK office and printing paper (graphics paper) has the lowest recycling rate of all paper grades – 86% is landfilled or incinerated while wood pulp is imported to make paper.

Graphics paper includes all printed paper apart from newsprint. So it includes highest quality office paper such as letterhead and photocopier paper (as recycled on the Local Paper for London scheme), all magazines, glossy and matt, inserts in newspapers, wanted and unwanted direct mail and catalogues.

Incredibly, given all the hype around ‘buy recycled’ policies and the years that have gone by since we became aware of this issue, just 5% of graphics paper purchased has any recycled content, whether that be 25% recycled or 100% recycled. This could be much less than 5% actual recycled content.

The governments Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) have set targets to recycle an additional 180,000 tonnes of graphics paper by 2003/4.

Dumping paper in landfill adds methane to the atmosphere as it decomposes, with 21 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide. Therefore very tonne of recycled paper saves the equivalent of 600kg of carbon dioxide.

Consumption of paper
World demand for paper is growing faster than for other wood products. Paper consumption worldwide is predicted to double by 2020. With new demand mainly coming from countries in Africa, Asian and Eastern Europe.

Source – www.paperloop.com (2002) Pulp and Paper international, Brussels

In the UK we consume 4.8 million tonnes of graphics paper annually. That is 37% of total paper and packaging consumption. When you consider that we consume just 2.6 million tonnes of newsprint you can see this is quite a significant area.

Deforestation and paper pulp production
Paper production accounts for 42% of industrial forest use, or put another way 20% of the world’s wood harvest.

Source - Worldwatch Institute, Vital Signs 2000-2001 Earthscan

A report published in 200 by WWF shows that most of the wood used in Indonesia’s pulp mills still comes from clear cutting old-growth Indonesian forests, with some 800,000 hectares destroyed in the last 10 years alone.

Source – Christopher Barr, CIRFOR 2000, Profits of paper, The Political Economics of Fibre, Finance and Debts in Indonesia’s Pulp and Paper Industries.

Last updated 2nd Feb 2008