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About this tool
Turn what your household recycles each week into energy saved, water saved, CO2 avoided and waste kept out of landfill.
Recycling saves energy because making a product from used material skips the mining, refining and long-distance transport that virgin material needs. This calculator multiplies what your household puts out each week by per-kilogram lifecycle saving factors for energy, water and greenhouse gases, applies a realistic capture rate for what actually gets reprocessed, and shows the annual total alongside comparisons like kilometres of car driving avoided.
Open Home Recycling Impact Calculator on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Enter the values you already know.
Fine-tune the options to match your scenario.
Read the result and use it in your planning or reporting.
Makes it obvious that a few hundred grams of aluminium beats kilos of glass.
A capture-rate input reflects that rejected and wet loads never get recycled.
Every per-kilogram figure can be replaced with one from your own regional dataset.
Aluminium, by a wide margin. Recycling it saves around 95% of the energy that primary production needs, because smelting alumina from bauxite is extremely electricity-intensive and remelting scrap is not. Per kilogram, aluminium saves several times more energy than paper, glass or plastic.
Yes, but the saving per kilogram is the smallest of the common materials — around 25% of the energy of making new glass, because sand and soda ash are cheap to process and glass is heavy to transport. Reusing a glass bottle beats recycling it, and the environmental case for glass rests more on avoiding landfill and quarrying than on energy.
A typical household recycling a few kilograms a week avoids somewhere in the region of a hundred kilograms of CO2 a year, comparable to several hundred kilometres of car driving. It is a real but modest number on its own, which is why capture rate and contamination matter more than adding another material to the bin.
Because contamination gets whole batches rejected. Food residue, grease and moisture spoil paper and cardboard fibre and can send an entire load to landfill, which turns the calculated saving into zero. A quick rinse and letting items dry is usually enough, and it is the single highest-leverage thing a household can change.
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