Get paid for recycling
11:45am Thursday 7th April 2011
CHILDREN from north Durham have been learning about the importance of recycling.
Pupils at South
Stanley Infant and Nursery School in Stanley, have been collecting empty yoghurt pots They earn 2p for every container from TerraCycle, which turns the collected materials into affordable, eco-friendly upcycled products such as lunch bags.
Teaching assistant Carol Jackson said: "South Stanley Infant and Nursery School joined the Danone Yogurt Brigade in October 2010 and to date we have collected over 200 yogurt pots and bottles earning money for the school. "The money will be used to help develop an outdoor play area.
"But the real value for the school is how excited the children get about how many plastic pots they can save and enabling us to teach them practically the importance of resource conservation and recycling."
The school is part of a free nationwide programme called "Brigades" that pays organisations such as schools and charities to collect difficult to recycle waste that could otherwise go to landfill. The firm uses the waste material to make a wide range of products such as folders for schools, pencil cases, shopping bags, notepads and more.
Mrs Jackson added: "It is great to see how excited they get about how many plastic pots they have collected. It is quite inspiring."
Ends Schools, organisations or individuals can learn more about the programmes or sign up to a brigade for free by logging on to www.terracycle.co.uk
BIC and recycling firm TerraCycle are launching what is being hailed as the first programme for collecting and recycling writing instruments in France.
Recycle your inhalers at the Co-Operative
After our stories recently about the 250 tons of out of date, surplus and redundant medicines that are
destroyed in an incinerator each year and the slightly more up beat story about the ability to
recycle your unwanted medicines to help people in developing countries, I was interested to hear another recycling story shared by one of our facebook fans.
David posted up about the latest initiative between the Co-operative Pharmacy, GlaxoSmithKline and Terracycle.
The three companies have pioneered a initiative to enable patients with respiratory illnesses to recycle their inhalers at
40 participating Co-operative Pharmacies across South Wales and the South of England.
This scheme is the first in Europe and is on trial for six months. Around 35 million inhalers such as Ventolin are used in the UK each year, generating 450 tonnes of waste which ends up in landfill or is incinerated.
The inhalers will be collected in participating Co-Operative pharmacies and collected monthly by Terracycle where different parts of the inhaler will be recycled. The part which still can’t be recycled are the blister strips.
Here’s what happens to the components:
Plastics
The plastics will remain on site for processing, after which the recycled components will be sold on for use in new products.
Aerosol
The recovered aerosol will be sent to a specialist company who use compaction and gas-liquid separation in order to recycle the metal components and collect any remaining liquid or propellant gas. The gas is then used as a replacement fuel in high temperature incinerators and cement kilns and no part of the aerosol container goes to landfill.
Blister strip
The blister strip which previously contained medically active ingredients will be treated by a specialist process in accordance with clinical guidelines.
There are still quite a lot of unanswered questions i my eyes about what will actually be happening to these inhalers, but I’d love to know what you think about the story!
TerraCycle, one of the fastest growing eco-friendly manufacturers in the world, has spent the last 10 years turning non-recyclable waste – including yogurt pots, bottles and crisp bags – into products such as tote bags, purses and shower curtains, and is now raising funds for schools and charities.
The scheme has been launched in partnership with recycling company TerraCycle UK, which will be responsible for collecting the used inhalers for recycling.
