Free Eco Fundraising Run By a Teacher and Educator
It is so easy and it's free and we can tailor a collection specifically to your school. As a teacher myself, I know just how busy schools are so we provide lots of resources for the school's admin team or the PTA to use as part of their comms. We also pride ourselves on a tailored programme which supports Eco Teams within schools and are rapidly growing our KIDS ONLY page with free newsletters, galleries and more. We are happy to work with the PTA but equally happy to work with the pupils themselves! We offer two main collection types... IN SCHOOL COLLECTING We will provide your school with a free Ink Bin and all of the resources needed (available to view and download on our website) to collect home-use ink cartridges from the families at the school. COMMUNITY COLLECTING If your PTA is a registered charity, we support you to collect wider into the community by offering advice and resources for setting up collections in local supermarkets; stationers; Post Offices; libraries and so on. As a guide, a local supermarket collection may raise you £25.00 a week! We will work with you to spread the word into the community by providing regular blogs for Facebook, Twitter and so on. Posting information onto a local Plastic Free Facebook page is also very successful as people are always so happy to recycle their cartridges. COVID Understandably, lots of headteachers are wishing not to partake at present due to issues with contamination. One option that some of our schools have taken part in is the use of an outdoor Ink Bin by the school gates. Usually, a parent or member of the community is happy to donate an unused wheelie bin and we then provide external, waterproof stickers for that Bin. TONER CARTRIDGES Unlike some other companies, we do not accept toner cartridges as we believe that they are messy for you to deal with and they often mean that we can offer less funds for the cartridges which do hold value. However, we have worked hard to add advice and links on our website to support your school and wider community with recycling their large office cartridges. HOW CAN WE MAKE THE MOST FUNDS FOR OUR SCHOOL? Some schools simply want to be green and use our services for their school either to support their Green Flag status or for eco-education whereas others are keen to make as much money for their school as possible- we can support you with either! We accept any home-use ink cartridge but it is only the HP and Canon inkjet cartridges which we can give the school money for- up to £1.10 each depending on the model and condition. Unlike many companies, we do all of the sorting and listing our end. We usually simply provide you with a remittance and bank transfer as well as a total number of cartridges saved from landfill, but we can happily provide a complete breakdown of your collection too. Our firm belief is that it is our job to get the inky hands, not yours!
HOW DO WE SIGN UP? If you would simply like one Ink Bin for your school, its very easy to just order your Ink Bin by filling in a simple form on our website. We can get your Ink Bin ready for delivery in the first week back at school in January. If you would like to collect further, just start approaching friendly store managers locally and then get in touch with us via email- we will help you fill in one simple form to allow the school to collect in your community and then discuss how many Ink Bins you would like; where they will be homed and the design you would like. Whilst so many of us are working from home, it is also possible that employers would be happy to place an Ink Bin in their offices or at least spread the word for their staff to save their empties for once we head back towards 'normality'. However you choose your collection to look, we promise to keep it as straight forward as possible! FINALLY... Over our Christmas break, we will be working hard behind the scenes to create more educational resources for our schools and Eco Teams. If your school or community have a great story; some great artwork or even a fabulous school garden, we would love to hear more and include this on our KIDS ONLY page. With twenty years of teaching, our passion is education and keeping the world colourful!
ARE YOU ABLE TO SUPPORT US TOO? We are so passionate about our work- we believe it is a simple, free and sustainable way to support schools whilst they are in a time of huge funding cuts. I have experienced those funding cuts in person and it is so difficult for schools to function successfully when they do not have enough money for staff let alone the fun things that us parents would love to offer our children. Can you help us to help more schools by sharing this blog friends, families and colleagues who also have school aged children?