Measure your recycling with the new Recyclometer

Measuring the impact of recycling is always a challenge, especially when trying to communicate the wider benefits of what is, let's face it, a pretty mundane household task.

However, during the summer, along with other bloggers, I was brought in to help road-test Coca-Cola's Recyclometer, a brand new stats-crunching tool, which has been developed in association with WRAP.   After a few tweaks, the Recyclometer has now been officially launched, on the company's website and at Recycle Now. providing consumers with a means of calculating the wider impact of their recycling activity, by simply translating the action into energy saving data.

Saving energy and fuel resources are one of the key beneficial outcomes of recycling and the Recyclometer tool demonstrates the savings across a wide range of materials that you'd find on your cupboard shelves.

For example, simply totting up the contents of my recycling actions today reveals that I've saved enough energy to power a lightbulb for 12 hours.   Widen the impact of this nationally and the figures highlight that enough energy would be saved to power over 84,000 lightbulbs for a whole year.   That's quite an incredible figure from just a few juice bottles, a can, our local newspaper, a breakfast cereal box and a loo roll tube.  It also demonstrates how wasteful it would be if I just bunged these into landfill.

To work out your own stats, just click on the image above.  Alternatively visit  the company's own website, where there are also links to the organisation's waste-reduction actions, including lightweighting innovations, implementation of recycled materials and, more recently, their usage of plant-based fibres in plastic packaging.