The recycling never ends... Oct 01, 2009 14:27 by Huw Carrington
This month, Recycler Magazine, a monthly publication with news specifically on the recycling of ink and toner cartridges (it honestly surprises me how thick it is, and how little of that is down to the ads in it – I guess there’s more to this remanufacturing lark than meets the eye), celebrates its two hundredth issue. Because of this, my boss dropped a copy of its latest issue on my desk, and told me to have a read when I got a moment. That moment is now!
The first thing to really strike me when flicking through was a full-page ad with a quote in the middle; “Over 70 Million cartridges are used in the UK every year. Only 15% of these are recycled.”
So, let’s do some maths (and Roy’s got the decent calculator, so I’m hoping these numbers don’t get too complicated). The UK has a population of something like sixty-one million, so that’s an average of each person using one and a bit cartridges each year. So I guess we’re looking at about ten million recycled cartridges, and so eight or nine million people’s worth. Now, the population of Greater London is something like seven million, and I don’t think it’s hard to imagine how small an amount of the country that amounts to, even as densely populated as it is!
There are some big sections on both the remanufacturing trade in Brazil, and a celebration of two hundred issues of the magazine… but frankly, all that number crunching has exhausted me, so I’m going to leave it at that for now.
