How to recycle milk bottle tops for charity
Add article to favouritesThis week’s guest post is from Ian Lambert, founder of HS4B, a charity for helping bankrupt people.
We’ve spoken in the past about recycling milk bottle tops as some local authorities take them for recycling, whereas others ask that you remove and landfill them. It seems such a shame to waste a resource, but Ian has plans to change that with his plastic milk bottle top collections.
It’s amazing sometimes, the money that we throw away, who would have thought milk bottle tops would have the potential to collectively be worth so much money……. And that’s the key isn’t it?….. collectively.
I have been saving them for nearly two years to give to my Mum who then passes them onto a friend and no doubt she passes on what she collects but after reading the article on My Zero Waste, I thought a proper rethink was needed about this subject.
Millions of people in this country throw them away into the landfill and no doubt they take years to eventually rot, which as we all know is bad for the environment.
I along with several other people are in the process of launching a brand new charity called HS4B (Help & Support for Bankrupt People), the aim of which is to provide a non judgemental environment both on and offline for people that have been made bankrupt. That is not to say a person can’t use us if they are heading for bankruptcy as the information we give will hopefully make the prospective bankrupt aware of what they are about to go through.
Discrimination of any kind is supposed to be illegal, but unfortunately it doesn’t work that way and bankrupts face a mass of positive discrimination that they are not ready for. To give you an example; A policeman is not allowed to be a bankrupt so they would lose their job…… could you imagine the outcry if becoming disabled or changing one’s religion whilst in a job got you fired! My God there would be total uproar in the streets. The problem with bankruptcy is that the general public don’t realise how much a bankrupt is actually discriminated against.
The people that have the lowest incomes generally pay the most which just can’t be right…… legal……. but not right. Higher interest rates, higher rent, higher mortgage and so on and it’s about time the practice was outlawed in my humble opinion.
It actually takes very little money to get a bankrupt back on their feet again, we are not talking thousands and thousands of pounds either, once back on their feet they become am productive member of society and contribute once again to the local community as well as the government purse strings.
Imagine what could be done with the amount of free money 70 million bottle tops a day produces! Of course it doesn’t stop there, Butter and Margarine lids, plastic lids from Jars like Coffee Jars etc and even those big bulky plastic tops that you get on your Softener bottles (used when washing clothes). Putting them altogether suddenly makes it worthwhile for a household to collect them and over a period of say a month it’s surprising how much you can collect.
Of course the really simple answer would be to put into force a law that said unless the packaging on ANY product was biodegradable, it is illegal. Do that and the problem is solved over night especially if you add in to that the company is not allowed to make non biodegradable packaging on English soil. Lets face it, it’s not rocket science and is very easy to fix. This is something the industry should have fixed for itself but like every other money making machine out there, who can be bothered to do it right when they make so much money doing it wrong.
I am going to be committed to this idea and want to get to a stage where we are collecting them throughout the country as I believe the revenue for this would be staggering. I would like to extend this to other products like cans etc but we must walk before we can run……
If you would like to help us and collect your bottle tops for us then please do get in touch our web site is www.hs4b.org and we have our contact details on the site. Please check out our forum which is where we will be coordinating the collections. We are in need of people to help organise and streamline this project for us and run a special group specifically for Tops and Lids so if you think you can help us we would like to hear from you.
Helping bankrupt people back onto their feet is a very worthwhile and cost effective exercise, the battle is half way won because they actually WANT to get off their bums and get back into society which will be easier done if we can remove the positive discrimination that comes along with bankruptcy.
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