I spend my days pen-pushing so it's interesting to see where my words finally end up.

Working for a local newspaper, bringing the latest news to your doors and ensuring that you're up-to-date with what's happening in your community, demands a substantial amount of paper.

And as we in the newspaper industry are conscious about recycling, it's good to know that the paper can be re-used.

So what exactly happens to your Telegraph & Argus once you have finished with it? My mission, to coincide with the environmental theme of Local Newspaper Week, is to follow the progress of your T&A from the recycling bin to the tip.

And who better to guide me through this fascinating process than Bradford Council's recycling officer, Gerry McDermott?

along with other newspapers and items such as magazines and junk mail, into their designated recycling bins. Every four weeks the collecting wagons come round to collect the paper from outside 140,000 households across the district.

In my quest to find out what happens next, I jump aboard the recycling wagon on its Eccleshill round to follow our newspaper's progress from press to pulp.

Sitting in the cab, I can see, through the nifty in-cab camera, the lads loading the bins on to the wagon. It all seems a bit Big Brother' to me, considering that some councils around the country are contemplating controversial pay as you throw' schemes but I'm assured that it isn't.

From my glimpse of the alternative side of the operation that the public doesn't see, it's such a swift manoeuvre that you only see the rubbish tumbling in.

Loaded with yesterday's news and other recyclable rubbish ready to be regurgitated, we head back to the city's Household Waste Recycling Centre and Transfer Loading Station in Bowling Back Lane where I really get to see the recycling process in action.

Considering that the average person gets through around 38kg of newspapers each year, it's a staggering amount of paper to be turned to all manner of uses.

Gerry explains that Bradford's recycling vehicles can bring in around nine tonnes of paper, often in twice-daily visits to the depot.

Within what looks like a huge aircraft hangar, or Materials Recovery Facility to give it its full name, mountains of paper are heaped up. Magazines, leaflets, junk mail and plenty of your trusty T&As are shovelled on to the conveyor belt where a team of hand-pickers are waiting to sift and sort, removing any rogue items other than paper which may have become accidentally mixed in during the process.

Once it has been picked over and checked it is moved along another conveyor belt ready to be manoeuvred by the JCB driver speedily shovelling and shifting the growing paper mountain into place.

Gerry explains how the clean' paper is eventually collected by wagons delivering newsprint to West Yorkshire. "They call in and we shovel it up into the empty wagons so it's saving them going back empty. It's utilised both ways," he says.

Long before EU legislation was stepped up to encourage local authorities to recycle, Gerry was doing his bit.

In the 1980s he was managing more than 50 shoe shops. In a previous interview with him he had laughed when I asked what he did with all the boxes. "We had back-door recycling. We tried to get the customers to take the boxes with their shoes, but then the cost of removing the boxes was passed on to the local authority who were doing the collections," he recalls.

Conscious that this wasn't really solving the problem, and consider ing that the company he worked for had 5,000 shops, it hit on the idea of returning the leftover boxes to head office and turning them into cash by selling them on to a recycling company.

It's ironic that more than a decade later, Gerry is now co-ordinating recycling within Bradford as the city's recycling officer.

From his Harris Street office, Gerry's job is to make sure the material is moved on to the different companies for various recycling processes.

At Shotton, near Chester, for example, a £370m purpose-built paper mill, one of two in the UK, takes care of the Council's newspapers, magazines and junk mail by turning it back into newsprint. It's also the final destination for our recycled T&A.

"They deal with the majority of newsprint in the North but they also send it abroad as they are a multi-national company," says Gerry.

At Shotton, the T&A is pulped and de-inked, a process which involves cleaning it before it's pressed and wound back onto the huge rolls transporting newsprint back to the district.

"The content is about 80 per cent of such as the T&A and the other 20 per cent is virgin fibres that have come from managed forests," says Gerry. "The wood is turned into paper because paper has only got a certain lifespan so you have to keep adding virgin material to turn it back into newsprint. It's not like glass bottles that can be recycled time after time without adding anything to them."

Other companies collect cardboard and materials such as envelopes with plastic windows and telephone directories which have pages containing too much ink to be turned into newsprint, from retail parks and household waste sites scattered throughout the district.

Says Gerry: "Year on year the amount of rubbish we produce in the Bradford district is growing and we are running out of places to dispose of it. Landfill sites cause methane gas, which contributes to climate change and damages the environment. We must recycle as much of our waste as possible.

"Recycling at home is really simple and it's something that can involve the whole family. Recycling newspapers is probably the easiest to do! Paper is the heaviest material in the waste stream and can be recycled into new paper products within a week."

At one time yesterday's news was tomorrow's fish and chip paper. Now, having followed the T&A on its recycling journey, it is interesting to see that it's more likely to return to a news stand near you!