Three loads of scrap

I've had a great day collecting things for the Scrapstore. I met Becky in town then we went to meet a works manager from a well known furniture manufacturer, they make three piece suites. He showed us around the factory so we could see what kind of scrap they generate. It is such a big factory and they have so much waste, they sell as much as they can for recycling. There are large skips for cardboard, plastic bags, and wood, so they make money on those. But, we did get a lot of upholstery fabrics, some quite large pieces, and many different designs and colours. Also some leather offcuts, and leather sample swatches. The factory line manager was instructed to bring us out some sheets of wadding, foam sheets, and wood pieces. A fantastic find, my estate car was full to the roof, and we can go back there every two weeks.

After unloading that, we went out again, this time to a factory we visited last week, the manager had rung and told us to come for more. They have massive bags of polystyrene beads, the type they put in bean bags, and they also had a lot of boater type hats they made but have some left over. These are ideal for children to decorate. Again the car was filled to the roof.

After a cup of coffee and a biscuit back at the Scrapstore, we were suitably refreshed to go out again. I was now getting quite excited about finding more stuff. We went back to the vinyl man, and had another dive in his skip, he gave us a contact to visit who might be able to give us something, a small company that makes holdall type bags, so after we picked out a lot of wood from the skip next door, we went to see him. The boss was very enthusiastic about what we were doing, he said he would get some stuff bagged up for us and deliver it himself on Saturday. We had heard about a company that has massive sheets of foam on the same industrial estate, and managed to track them down. Sure enough a young lad brought it out to us on a pallet. After stuffing as much as we could into the car, we had to admit defeat and take it back to the Scrapstore, saying we would come back another day for some more.

We are now beginning to build up good relations with several businesses, and regular collections are being organised, much better than throwing it all in a big hole in the ground. We are only able to do a little bit towards recycling, a lot more effort is needed. Our premises is not really big enough, what would be wonderful is a Scrapstore on every High Street, how fantastic!