I TURNED up at Colchester Council’s recycling depot at Shrub End not knowing where the journey was going to take me.

All I knew was I needed to find a Gazette ready to be recycled, then keep track of it.

I travelled by car with Steve Langley, street care charge hand for Colchester Council, to meet up with a crew collecting paper in Gavin Way, Colchester.

There were Gazettes in most of the clear recycling bags and we picked up a sack to take back to the depot ahead of the crew.

There, the papers were emptied into a machine which compacts them into bales. They were then loaded into a lorry for the next stage.

The lorry was destined for Canvey Island.

After a 45-minute drive, I turned up at James Heys and Sons, in Northwick Road, where the sorting takes place.

As well as Colchester residents’ papers, their cans, plastics and cardboard also end up here.

Lawson Heys Jnr, one of the managing directors, showed me a mountain of papers which had come from the Colchester depot.

The papers were due to enter the sorting system, which was was being used to sift through cans when I arrived.

The job was not just down to the machiner, though, as workers were also needed to remove materials that should not be there.

Mr Heys told me the next stop-off on a newspaper’s journey was at Chatham, Kent, then a paper mill in Sweden, run by Holmen Paper.

As much as I would have loved a working holiday in Sweden, it had to be a phone call to Charles Thompson, UK director of recycling for the firm.

He told me our Gazettes are put in a giant washing drum, where they are broken down into fibre before being put through a de-ink system.

The pulp is then bleached, before going in the paper machine and coming out as nine-metre wide reels of newsprint.

From there, the newsprint is shipped back to Chatham and then sent out to printers all over the country.

I wondered why the paper had to go on such a long journey overseas.

Mr Thompson said: “There’s far more waste paper collected than can be processed in the UK, so some of it has to go abroad.”

He added that although it might seem to be an endless process, a paper fibre can only be recycled four times before it becomes useless.

However, nothing is ever wasted. In fact, Mr Thompson said the leftover sludge is burned and turned into electricity. Recycling is a costly process for local authorities.

Colchester Council’s waste and recycling service costs about £3.5million a year.

It means, on average, each household contributes £49 a year towards it.

The authority also receives about £1million a year in recycling credits from the county council, a figure which will change, depending on how much it recycles. Paul English, operations manager for street care and recycling at Colchester Council, said: “We have got a statutory duty to provide a service and, obviously, we feel we provide an excellent service.

“Our aim and goal is always to be the cleanest and greenest.”

Mr English said Colchester Council’s recycling rate was just under 40 per cent.

While the council was in the top quarter in terms of its performance for the past year, he said some local authorities were now recycling 60 per cent.

He continued: “A group of councillors are exploring different collection methods and different materials. All this will help in increasing our recycling figure.”

This includes the possibility you and I may one day be able to have food waste recycled. Mr English said the national trend seemed to be that less dry, recyclable materials were being collected than in previous years.

He said: “I think there’s more awareness and I think supermarkets are providing less packaging.

“The current climate is also driving us to a certain degree.

“Whereas people would just go and change something or replace something, people are generally making do.”