So where DOES all your recycling end up?

With Britain producing 30million tons of household rubbish a year - at a rate of roughly one ton per home - we're being encouraged to recycle more than ever before.

But what happens to household items such as glass, paper and tins once they're dropped off at bottle banks, recycling bins or collected by the council from the kerbside?

Tom Rawstorne followed an empty can of tomatoes, a wine bottle and a copy of the Daily Mail from recycling bin to oblivion - and back again.

CANS

I'm standing on a viewing platform overlooking a five-acre site piled high with 20,000 tons of scrap metal. It's come from across London and the South-East, and somewhere among it all is my empty can of plum tomatoes.

The can's journey began a couple of days earlier when I dropped it into a recycling bank at my local supermarket on the outskirts of Maidstone, Kent.

From there, it was transported by lorry to APM Metals in Sittingbourne for sorting and crushing. That firm will have purchased these raw materials from the local council, which then ploughs the income back into its recycling services.

There are two types of cans widely used in the UK - aluminium and tin. Aluminium cans tend to hold beverages and fizzy drinks, while tin cans hold foods (tin cans are actually made of steel but have a fine tin coating to protect their outer surfaces from oxidisation).

The sorting is done at a local prison, where inmates oversee a conveyor belt equipped with giant magnets that pick out the steel from the aluminium. While steel fetches between £60 and £100 a ton, aluminium is worth £800.

Back to the scrapyard, the tins are crushed into bales each weighing 8kg before being transported by lorry the ten miles to Thamesteel Ltd in Sheerness.

This mill is one of the last remnants of Britain's heavy industries and thanks to the spiralling demand for steel, especially from the Chinese, business is booming. Scrap prices have soared, and every single can counts.

Despite that, of the 1.8 billion steel cans the British open up every year (that's 600 per home), just one quarter are recycled.

Yet producing steel from recycled material saves 75 per cent of the energy needed for steel made from virgin material.

Making steel from recycled sources is much like making a cake - a few cubes of car, a sprinkle of shredded washing machines, a pinch of tin cans - the aim being to keep the copper content of the finished steel below 0.6 per cent. More copper than that and the metal's performance will suffer.

Into the electric furnace my tin can goes, where it is heated to 1,650C. The process takes 48 minutes, during which time impurities are drawn out by the addition of 3.5 tons of lime, forming a slag on top which is removed as a crust.

The molten metal is then emptied, or tapped, into what is known as a ladle furnace where it is refined for a further 25 minutes. After this comes casting - a process that sees liquid steel poured at a rate of 1,700 litres a minute to form rail-like billets 150mm square and up to 12 metres long.

These can be sold as they are, or reheated and rolled into rods, coils and bars producing an end product that, among other things, will be used around the world to reinforce concrete in construction.

GLASS

Every year, the average British family uncorks and unscrews 500 glass bottles or jars.

Faversham Industrial Reclamations in Kent is the collection point for 600 tons of glass a year (the equivalent of 1.8million empty bottles of wine) from Maidstone Borough Council.

Clear glass is the most valuable commodity, fetching about £30 a ton, followed by brown at £26 and green at £12.50.

It speeds up the process if glass is already roughly sorted into brown, clear and green, as it is at bottle banks, but with many methods of collection, including domestic recycling boxes, that isn't possible.

Once stacked in sufficient quantities, the mixed glass - including my bottle of red wine, which I left out in my recycling bin - is transported north to Berryman Glass in West Yorkshire, the country's leading glass recycler.

Although this transportation will very slightly increase the carbon footprint of the recycled product, recycling glass is still a good idea because it saves so much energy when compared with making it from scratch.

Every 1,000 tons of recycled glass that is

used to make new bottles and jars saves 345,000 kWh of energy, 314,000 tons of CO2, 1,200 tons of raw material and 1,000 tons of landfill.

Put simply, the energy saved from recycling one bottle will power a 100 watt light bulb for almost an hour or a computer for 20 minutes. In 2005, we recycled 1,259,000 tons of used glass but landfilled 1,400,000 tons.

Once in Yorkshire, the mixed glass is placed on a conveyor belt and sorted to remove the metal and plastic caps and collars that dress bottles from the neck up. This is done both manually and by using powerful vacuums to suck up the waste from the belts.

The glass, or cullet as it is known, is then dropped, waterfall-like, through machines that use laser, X-ray and digital technology to distinguish between colours and types of glass. As it falls, each fragment is scanned and identified and the information fed into a computer which activates air jets lower down.

These jets are fired at the specified piece of glass with pinpoint accuracy, blasting them onto separate conveyor belts. In this way the green, brown and clear glass can be separated out.

Once sorted, the furnace-ready cullet is sold on by Berryman to a manufacturer. In the case of my now fragmented bottle, this could see it being exported back to France to make another wine bottle or, alternativelyto a company such as Rockware

This firm, which is also based in West Yorkshire, makes 3.5 billion glass bottles a year for customers including Stella Artois and Gordon's Gin.

To make its green bottles, it will use up to 90 per cent cullet with the rest made up of raw materials including sand, soda ash and limestone. The ingredients are melted in a furnace that will reach 2,000C from which toffee-like strands of glass will be cut into 'gobs' and placed into moulds.

From there, they are reheated to 550C to allow for a controlled period of cooling that will ensure a strong, non-brittle final product.

A few safety tests, a good wash and then it's off. Au revoir, vin rouge - hello lager. Glass.

PAPER

To get a sense of the size of the recycling business in Britain, I go to the recycled fibre warehouse at Aylesford Newsprint. On a normal day, it will hold about 12,000 tons of newspapers and magazines - imagine half a dozen football pitches covered 25ft deep in paper and you'll get the idea.

Every year, it recycles one in seven of the UK's papers and mags - that's 500,000 tons - and that includes my copy of the Daily Mail, which is picked up from my house in a recycling bin by the council and transported direct to the plant (each ton of paper recycled saves 15 trees plus their surrounding habitat and wildlife).

All the paper produced at Aylesford is 100 per cent recycled, but ensuring quality depends on the right mix of ingredients - 70 per cent newspapers and 30 per cent magazines.

The magazines, which are printed on virgin newsprint, freshen up the mix by introducing new fibres into the process. The fibres within the newspapers are long and strong to start with, but will become damaged by continual recycling - hence the need for the magazine 'top-up'.

As with all recycling, the initial processes revolve around cleaning the raw material. Loaded on to a conveyor belt, the paper is fed into the fibre preparation plant where water and sodium silicate are added.

This swells the fibres and releases the ink, which is then removed by the addition of soaps and by bubbling oxygen through the now liquid pulp: the ink attaches itself to the oxygen and rises to the top, where it is skimmed off.

At about the same time, the mix is spun in a centrifuge, removing staples, grit and other heavier impurities (of the 500,000 tons of newsprint that goes into the plant, a fifth will be removed as waste - and burnt on site to provide 17 per cent of the mill's energy needs).

Once cleaned, the grey, watery liquid is bleached white with hydrogen peroxide and then sprayed on to fast-moving wire sheets.

Still almost all water, the next stages involve removing the liquid by pressing the sheets through 45-ton rollers until the liquid content comes down to just 9 per cent.

The paper, white and shiny, is then rolled onto a jumbo roll (9.3 metres wide, 108,000 metres long and weighing 40 tons.

According to the customer's requirements, the roll is then sliced, like a Swiss roll, into smaller sections that are wrapped and stored in their fully automated warehouse.

I spot a roll destined for Harmsworth Quays in London, where the paper I bought on Wednesday was printed. By next Wednesday, it could be back there again, white and pristine. From Daily Mail...to Daily Mail.