How we are helping

Below are a selection of facts and figures regarding the environment - and how Reclaim-it is helping.

During 2005, more than 310 million Inkjet cartridges and more than 10 million laser toner cartridges were consumed in Western Europe.

It takes on average one litre of oil to manufacture every 15 Inkjet cartridges and 3.3 litres of oil for every laser toner cartridge made.

That's 53.7 million litres of oil just to provide Western Europe with its printer cartridges for one year - 85% of these cartridges end up in landfill.

At Reclaim-it, we aim to recycle approximately 95% of all cartridges that we receive. We process the cartridges, clean them and prepare them for shipment to manufacturers, who will remanufacture them for resale. The remaining 5% that cannot be recycled are safely disposed of under current environmental legislation.

There are currently more than 50 million mobile phones in circulation in the UK and it is expected that between 10 and 15 million people will replace their phone this year alone.

Most handsets end up sat in the drawer or placed in the bin to go to landfill and as they contain heavy metals such as copper, gold, silver and palladium it can cause harm to plants and wildlife.

The mobile phones that we recover undergo a 12 point check which includes the resetting of factory settings, full deletion of all contacts and messages and the destruction of any SIM cards that might have been left in the handset. Once the handset has been re-conditioned it is normally sold to the third world where most areas rely on mobile communication as no landline networks are available. For phones that are not suitable for this purpose we carry out the same 12 point check but then the phone is passed to a mobile phone recycling depot, where it is dismantled and recycled for raw materials.

A ream of paper uses 6% of a tree.

When calculating how many reams of paper an office uses in a year it is clear extra steps need to be made to conserve our woodlands.

According to a US conservation pressure group, one ton of un-recycled paper is the equivalent to 24 trees.

We are moving towards a paper free system but as anybody knows this isn't possible for all daily tasks. To try and limit our impact on the environment we use our paper three times. In other words, we print on both sides of the paper and when there is no space to print anything else we shred the paper and use it for packaging.

Due to the nature of our business we receive significant amounts of cardboard either in the form of collection boxes or cartridge packaging.

We compact and bind the cardboard which is 100% recycled.