Poundland expands Helistrat recycling contract
Retailer Poundland has extended waste management company Helistrat’s waste and recycling services contract to include an additional 250 stores.
The shops were gained through Poundland’s £55 million acquisition of the 99p Stores. This will be added on to Helistrat’s existing contract, which sees the company manage the back of store recycling services for 500 Poundland shops across the UK and Ireland, which they have serviced since 2014.
Helistrat has a dedicated account manager embedded within Poundland’s operations team while also providing a 360 degree ‘wraparound’ help desk service, recycling data management and reporting capability and full compliance auditing.
Helistrat director, Harvey Laud, said: “Working with Poundland over the past year has been a real success. Helistrat has developed a strong working relationship with Poundland and we look forward to expanding our services to further locations. New stores create opportunities to increase recycling rates and improve environmental performance even further.”
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Grundon partners with Oxford Food Bank
Grundon Waste Management has announced an ongoing fundraising and volunteering partnership with Oxford Food Bank, which will be carried out throughout 2016.
It follows the success of its Festive Food Share campaign, which raised more than £3,000 for the charity, enabling the distribution of over £60,000 worth of food.
Throughout December Grundon, which is headquartered in Oxfordshire, worked to persuade more organisations to adopt a greener approach to food waste disposal. This included encouraging the segregation of food waste and the adoption of a discount and distribute policy, with disposal as the last resort.
In return, the company donated cash for every new food waste customer it signed up and for every food waste bin it emptied from existing customers.
Grundon staff volunteered at the charity, helping to pack and unpack supplies, load vans and join distribution runs.
Clayton Sullivan-Webb, managing director, Grundon, said: “Seeing first-hand the great work the charity does to help feed vulnerable people in the community and reduce food poverty persuaded me that we could do more to help, both with fundraising and practical support.
“During 2016, we will donate five pence for every food waste bin we collect across our whole operating area. And, thanks to the fantastic feedback, we are also planning to extend our volunteer programme so many more employees have the chance to do something practical to support the food bank.”
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Minister praises bag charge donation
B&M Home stores has handed over a total of £16,000 in proceeds from the carrier bag charge to cancer charity Marie Curie, since the start of the levy in Scotland in 2014.
The money, raised in the first full year of the charge from 60 of the B&M Home stores across Scotland, has been welcomed by Scotland’s environment secretary Richard Lochhead. It will support people living with a terminal illness and their families.
Mr Lochhead said: “We want the charge to cut single-use carrier bag usage in Scotland to reduce litter and help the environment, but it is wonderful to see how this has evolved and now organisations such as Marie Curie are also benefitting.
“Congratulations to B&M on this kind gift, which I’m sure will be put to good use by Marie Curie.”
Scotland witnessed a reduction of 650 million bags during the first year of the carrier bag charge, with around £7 million being donated to good causes as a result.
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Plastics apprenticeship scheme launched
Technical compounder and recycler, Luxus, and its partner plastics piping manufacturer Polypipe, have launched a ‘Compounding Polymer Apprenticeship’ scheme in bid to encourage more young people into the plastics industry.
The two partners, Luxus and Polypipe, decided to adopt the initiative due to a lack of apprenticeships and training dedicated to polymer processing.
Apprentices will learn about the various types of thermoplastics and their processing characteristics in Luxus’ Technical Centre, as well as subsequent processes such as injection moulding to develop the finished pipe component at Polypipe’s Horncastle plant.
The first group of three apprentice technicians, Callum Ely, 16, James Laurence, 22 from Luxus and Kamil Ostrowski, 22, from Polypipe, have begun the new two year multi-site apprenticeship in polymer processing. It is delivered in partnership with training provider, Solutions4Polymers and funded by Cogent.
The new scheme is part of the Government’s ‘Trailblazer Apprenticeship Standards’ initiative launched earlier this year.
Simon Thompson, quality manager at Luxus, said: “We are really pleased to offer this new scheme to our technicians. It has been widely reported that we are facing a chronic skills shortage in engineering talent in the UK, which is particularly acute in the plastics industry.”
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Tesco chief to lead global food waste coalition
A coalition of 30 business leaders, titled ‘Champions 12.3’, last week (21 January) has joined together in a bid to help the global effort to curb food waste.
The ‘leadership group’ aims to accelerate progress toward meeting Target 12.3 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which seeks to halve per capita food waste and reduce food losses by 2030.
The group comprises executives of major companies, government ministers and executives of research and intergovernmental institutions, foundations, farming organisations, and civil society groups. This includes Dave Lewis, group chief executive of Tesco and chair of Champions 12.3, Dr Andrew Steer, president and chief executive of the World Resources Institute and Dr Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation.
They will inspire action by motivating others to meet the SDG target 12.3, showcasing food waste reduction strategies, advocating for more innovation and greater investment and communicating the importance of food waste reduction.
The announcement took place during the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, alongside the launch of The Rockefeller Foundation’s new YieldWise initiative, a seven-year, $130 million (£91,300,856) commitment to halving food loss and waste globally. The Foundation’s president, Dr. Judith Rodin, is also a champion.
Inspired by the “No More Food to Waste” conference in The Hague in June of 2015, the Government of the Kingdom of the Netherlands formally called for the coalition’s formation in September 2015, and is providing secretariat support for Champions 12.3, along with World Resources Institute.
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