Like most things, making plastic requires energy and raw materials. The most important raw material needed to make 'virgin' (new) plastic is crude oil. You might think that it takes a lot of crude oil to make all the plastic items we take for granted in our everyday lives, but in fact the plastics industry only consumes about 4% of the output of oil refineries. The rest is used to fuel our cars and to provide us with heat, energy and so on. Making virgin plastic uses energy as well as raw materials and this is where recycling plastic bottles into new items demonstrates real benefits over producing virgin material. To produce 1 kilogram of virgin plastic takes 36.16MJ of energy, whereas it only takes 4.39MJ of energy to produce the same amount of plastic through the recycling process. This shows that the energy used to recycle plastic bottles is 8 times less than the energy required manufacturing the same virgin polymer. The energy saving equates to a saving sufficient to power a 60W lightbulb for six hours, for each bottle recycled! If you want to find out more about plastics and energy, download our free factsheet