We use scary amounts of paper at Wragge & Co. In the last financial year, we used more than 24 million sheets of the stuff - that's 23,000 sheets of paper for every single person in the business.

We recognised that this quantity of paper was going to have a big impact on the environment and it's something that we could really do something about.

So, that led us down the paper trail. We decided to take a notional piece of paper and trace it.

How does the paper reach our office? Well, it starts off in a forest in Slovakia and from there it travels by road for approximately 200 miles to a paper mill in Austria, then another 900 miles by road and sea once it has been turned into paper. It then arrives at a central depot in the UK and from there our suppliers bring it to our office - either by electric truck or low-emission diesel lorry.

You've put your paper in the recycling bin, now where does it go?

The paper is collected and while it's still on site it is shredded and turned into confetti, and that's crucial as it means it is kept confidential throughout the process.

From there the paper is taken by van just down the road from our Colmore Row office to Smurfit Kappa. There, it is put onto a big conveyor belt and gets turned into heavyweight bails.

The paper bails arrive on lorry at Kimberly Clark's paper plant in Barrow-in-Furness, in the southern tip of the Lake District. It is off-loaded and then goes into the new production process.

Next the paper is mixed with water to form a pulp. The pulp goes through quite a complex chemical process to strip out all of the inks in the paper. This is a water intensive process but Kimberly Clark recycles as much of that water as possible to minimise its own impact on the environment. More water is now added to the pulp, but again the water is recycled in the process to minimise the overall volume used.

So, returning to that sheet of paper that left Wragge & Co: a portion of it leaves Kimberly Clark in the form of loo roll, but the bulk of it is turned into hand towel. And, that's the hand towel that we use on a day-to-day basis in all of our offices.

The reason we followed this paper trail is to help us understand that although we source our paper in the most sustainable way possible and we recycle it - which is definitely the best solution for paper once we've finished with it - there is still a cost to the environment. This is due to the raw materials and in the water and energy that is used to make the original product and the recycled product. And that's why the most important message is to use less paper in the first place.