The recycling paper trail (From Gazette & Herald)

The recycling paper trail

RECYCLING is a difficult business in a country area like Ryedale.

Collecting small amounts from widely-spaced locations costs more than the recycling justifies, if cost has to be the final decider. There are now quite a lot of collecting points for waste round the area, but it is up to us to take the stuff there.

Apparently the UK is the fifth highest paper-user in the world, but so far only manages to recycle 38pc of it.

As this is the easiest material to recycle, it seems a good subject to tackle.

The first thing to do, of course, is to try to use less. Remember to refuse unnecessary packaging when shopping. If you take a basket with you for fruit and vegetables, most of them can go straight in without paper bags, making a real harvest festival of colour to take home.

Junk mail can be cut down by registering with the Mailing Preference Service, Freepost 22, London W1E7EZ.

Computers promised us the 'paperless office', but as far as I can see we now use more paper than ever we did.

Re-using the blank side isn't always possible as the paper has usually developed a curl and jams in printers and

photocopiers.

Good news from Ryedale's recycling manager is that not only newspapers, but all flat paper can go into the recycling bins (except telephone directories and cardboard).

That takes care of magazines, junk mail, paper bags - in fact, a surprisingly large percentage of waste paper is flat.

It helps to collect paper in flat containers rather than in a waste-paper basket which encourages you to screw it up and hurl it in. Most of the first drafts of my writing projects have been recycled as lists.

This means that mysterious snippets of text appear years later which can be quite entertaining.

Lists, and shopping lists in particular, merit a whole article to themselves, so I'll save them for later.

Updated: 15:18 Wednesday, October 01, 2003