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Here at The Ink Bin, we are used to getting messy hands! But in 2021, we want to support your school to get muddy hands too! As we all start to see light at the end of the Covid-Tunnel, yet still face a difficult and wintry few months to come; we wanted to spread excitement, anticipation and inspiration in the form of a new school project which can be the centre-piece of a larger school celebration- Summer Solstice. Why, you could even tie this in with an outdoor production of Midsummer Night’s Dream for your school leavers! In October, The Ink Bin started our monthly newsletters and gallery of inspiration designed with Eco Teams in mind- KIDS ONLY! Throughout 2021, we are going to use our newsletters as a walk-through guide to support your school to create a fabulous Summer Solstice Sustainable Celebration. We hope the end result will create a fabulous lasting legacy for the school- either The Corona Garden or The Solstice Garden. If you would like to receive The Ink Bin's monthly newsletters to give support and advice on how to create your sustainable school garden, please subscribe on our KIDS ONLY web page.

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?

The Ink Bin are thrilled to be supporting Communities For Horses charity in Swansea. Communities For Horses work to improve equine welfare and relieve animal suffering by providing free-of-charge education and support to horse owners in deprived areas. The Ink Bin are now working together with the charity to support their fundraising as well as their environmental endeavors through recycling supporters home-use ink cartridges. For certain HP and Canon inkjet cartridges, The Ink Bin will give Communities For Horses up to £1.10 each depending on model. It's an easy, environmentally friendly and free way to raise funds for such a wonderful charity! If you have any used or unused home-use cartridges, please drop them into their charity shop in Swansea or contact Lisa Lanafer directly.

Here at The Ink Bin, we are constantly looking to develop our eco-education and we would love your help! This year saw the launch of our KIDS ONLY page on our website where we publish our monthly newsletter for youngsters and we celebrate eco-artwork. But we want to do more! We are looking for passionate kids, teachers and sustainability experts to support the growth of our work by contributing their ideas and achievements for the world to share. We would love to hear what you are up to support keeping the world colourful. You can email us on recycle@theinkbin.co.uk with ideas, photos, artwork and feedback and in return we will aim to share it far and wide to inspire others! 2020 has been a challenge, so let's make 2021 the year for positive change!

This month we feature Greta Thunberg, a magpie's tale of litter and how to get your school's Ink Bin into a local supermarket! You can find all of our newsletters for Eco Teams, Key Stage Two teaching and passionate young individuals HERE

Families at Shaw Ridge Primary School in Ridge Green, Swindon are working with The Ink Bin to collect and recycle home-use ink cartridges from the community. Shaw Ridge School, having recently achieved their Woodland Trust Green Trees Bronze Award, are actively working to recycle as many cartridges as possible; keeping the world colourful with The Ink Bin. Every ink cartridge recycled saves it from from landfill and a life of up to 1000 years degrading! The Ink Bin recycle every last cartridge sent to us and can give the pupils of Shaw Ridge School some money back for certain HP and Canon inkjet cartridges. Other schools across the UK have earned over £400 this year through the scheme- could you support them to beat this? You will find their Covid-Safe external Ink Bin outside the school where you can drop any home-use full or empty ink cartridges for recycling. For more details please contact us here at The Ink Bin or email friendsofshawridge@gmail.com Let's fill that Bin!

Did You Know? By recycling ink cartridges, around 11 million gallons of oil can be saved in seven months! (source) We have proudly been working with Plastic Free Groups across the UK for eighteen months now and are keen to widen our support for these wonderful communities. Could your school, library, church, shop or other organisation give a home to one of our Ink Bins? Collecting is easy- we provide you with a lovely personalised Ink Bin in which members of the community can drop their empty home-use ink cartridges. Once The Ink Bin is full, you simply head to our website and fill in the simple form for emptying the Bin and we do all the rest. It's totally free and can even raise money for your organisation in the process. For HP and Canon inkjet cartridges, we can give your organisation up to £1.00 each! All other cartridges will either be refilled or recycled- we send nothing to landfill! To order your Free Ink Bin, please click here and help support us in keeping the world colourful!

Happy World Octopus Day! Thursday 8th October 2020 saw World Octopus Day and we couldn't let our inky friends go unrecognised. Octopuses have long been the creature of myths and legends and we would love to see your artwork to depict this fantastic underwater beast. For the very lucky artists whose pictures give us the inkiest glow, we will offer a copy of one of our all-time favourite books- Jonny Duddle's The Pirate Cruncher. As a teacher of twenty-odd years myself, I have had many a happy hour studying (and playing) with this amazing story of greed and skullduggery and I would love to share that with you too! Here at The Ink Bin, we are dedicated to keeping plastic ink cartridges from landfill sites and recycle every last cartridge that comes to us via our Ink Bins. We support schools and other organisations to collect home use cartridges from their community and send them to us for recycling. We would love to support your community too- whether it's a school, plastic-free group, church or refill room. Please do check out our website form more details- CLICKETYCLICK. So, please do email or text across your pictures to us. We would love to see how far we can reach, but for the lucky winner in the U.K. you will receive your very own copy of Jonny's book in the post. Photographs of your very own octopussy artwork can be emailed to recycle@theinkbin.co.uk or WhatsApped directly to 07712577528 Winners announced FRIDAY 16th OCTOBER 2020 via our Facebook Page- The Ink Bin Happy Arting! Becky x

Did You Know? By recycling ink cartridges, around 11 million gallons of oil can be saved in seven months! (source) We have proudly been working with Plastic Free Eastbourne and Parents For Future Eastbourne for nearly a year now and are keen to widen our support for these wonderful groups. We currently have Ink Bins around the Eastbourne area, including Towner Art Gallery and Stone Croft School- could your school, library, church, shop or other organisation give a home to one of our Ink Bins? Collecting is easy- we provide you with a lovely personalised Ink Bin in which members of the community can drop their empty home-use ink cartridges. Once The Ink Bin is full, you simply head to our website and fill in the simple form for emptying the Bin and we do all the rest. It's totally free and can even raise money for your organisation in the process. For HP and Canon inkjet cartridges, we can give your organisation up to £1.00 each! All other cartridges will either be refilled or recycled- we send nothing to landfill! To order your Free Ink Bin, please click here and help support us in keeping the world colourful!

As a long-standing teacher, I know just how busy schools are! We are constantly trying to make our Communities' workloads lighter by publishing supporting documents and files for admin teams and PTA members to share both with parents and the wider Community. Over the Summer, we instated an order form for schools to order their Free Personalised Ink Bin online and this has had excellent response. Now, our latest addition to the website is an easy-to-use empty form to help us organise your collection with as little stress as possible. Do let us know how you get along! Best wishes, Becky

We are thrilled to have been featured as this week's CARBON COPY INITIATIVE OF THE WEEK FOR LEAPING TOWARDS A CIRCULAR ECONOMY You can find out more about this organisation fighting for climate action via their FACEBOOK page.

The Ink Bin is a family run business with schools and the environment at its heart. Run by a teacher and her family, we understand how schools work and what they need. It is an easy and free way to fundraise which also offers great opportunities for education on recycling and climate crisis. With some creativity during our uncertain times of Covid 19 and social distancing, your school can safely collect from your wider community and use remote fundraising to support your school. Ordering your recycling fundraising Ink Bin is so easy. It's FREE and eco friendly too! We have a range of FAQs as well as supporting documents and blogs to get you started. Just follow the link through to our website.