ThinkMarketing

ThinkMarketing on £164k Funding Boost for Recycling Charity

 

Edinburgh, Scotland -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/02/2012 -- A recycling charity that helps some of the most vulnerable people in Fife has been given a major cash boost by the Scottish Government. Castle Furniture Project, set up 20 years ago in Cupar, has been awarded £164,273 from the Enterprise Growth Fund to help promote recycling across Fife, Perth and Kinross. The money will be used to develop the project’s household doorstep collection, repair, refurbishment and re-use of heavy domestic appliances such as cookers, washing machines and fridges as well as enable it to open a new centre in Perth.

Managing Director of ThinkMarketing, an Edinburgh-based sales and marketing company, who said, “It’s a fantastic choice to use the money. Recycling is incredibly important, especially with large household appliances like these, which take up so much space if they’re just dumped.”

Each year in Fife alone, over 9500 heavy domestic appliances are dumped, amounting to almost 440 tonnes of potential waste going to landfill. Only a fraction of broken, unwanted or abandoned cookers, fridge freezers, dishwashers, dryers and other appliances are being recycled, repaired and re-used. Last year, Castle piloted a small-scale experiment, which recycled 652 heavy domestic appliances and resold them, generating over £28,000.

Towards the end of last year, in a bid to reduce the number of appliances destined for landfill and promote increased re-use, the project launched its household doorstep domestic appliances collection service with the help of funding from the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (WEEE), which was set up by manufacturers.

“It’s important to deal with this type of waste,” said a source at ThinkMarketing, “and this project is doing it in a responsible way, creating jobs and benefiting the economy at the same time.”

Castle’s project manager Silv Ingram said: “Our experiences from last year’s pilots demonstrate a willingness among the general public to promote the recycling and re-use of unwanted appliances when doing so is made as simple as making a single telephone call. This year we aim to increase the number of broken, unwanted or abandoned appliances available for re-use to over 3000, a 400 per cent increase on last year’s pilot. This means that almost 150 tonnes of domestic appliances will no longer potentially end up in landfill.”

The funding will also enable Castle to open a 10,000 sq ft recycling and re-use centre in Perth, which will provide an additional sales outlet for unwanted furniture, refurbished domestic appliances and recycled paint as well as a ‘one stop shop’ information point to the general public on all aspects of recycling and re-use.

Our source at ThinkMarketing said, “It’s important to raise public awareness of schemes like this, because there’s still that inbuilt tradition of just taking things to the dump and forgetting about them. When recycling the items is just as easy, if not easier than that, then you get to the point where people are just doing it the old way out of habit. But we can’t keep doing that forever.”

http://www.fifetoday.co.uk/news/charity-wins-164-000-funding-boost-1-2190290

http://www.prlog.org/11831234-thinkmarketing-examines-this-years-successes-stories-and-style-at-the-oscars.html

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