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Recycling scheme targets schools

Fundraising | Stefan Marseglia | 29 Apr 2010

A new recycling scheme targeted at schools across the United Kingdom is aiming to raise an additional £5m of funding for the education sector.

The ‘Support Your School’ initiative, run in association with Environmental Business Products (EBP), aims at turning used print cartridges and mobile phones from schools into cash, with £3 being given for every mobile and £1 given for every cartridge.

“We are keen for more schools to get involved and utilise this second-source of funding,” said Allison Parkes, manager of Support Your School. “We are trying to make the scheme fun for teachers and students to use and have already created things like word searches for teachers to use in class.”

However with the scheme only being up-and-running for a couple of months and with only a few hundred schools currently signed up, Parkes admitted that it may take more than just a year to raise the £5m target and signing up additional schools was the main aim for now.

Founder of EBP, Patrick Stead, is not worried by similar initiatives being used elsewhere to raise money. He stressed that while the scheme is a “refreshed version” of the normal initiative by focusing in on schools, the scheme was not trying to compete with others but in fact stand shoulder-to-shoulder to maximise the amount that is raised for both charities and schools.

Fronted by vocal coaches Carrie and David Grant, the campaign also hopes to reduce the number of ink jet cartridges which go into landfill by over 10 per cent throughout the course of the scheme, despite only 50 per cent of all cartridges given being suitable for recycling.

“We are not hitting you for cash, we are hitting you for your trash,” said Stead. “Our drive is to collect the raw materials by taking the cartridges down to their core components and then recreate them to sell on the high-street.”

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