Under the slogan 'Give your screwed up paper a detox at The Laundry', BioRegional is marketing its collection to small business starting in the Soho area of central London. It plans to expand the collections to cover all of central London over the next two years.
 Laundry staff, Bronwen Cooper and Ben Maxwell on the kerbside office paper collection in Soho, London |
The Laundry received over 100,000 for the two year period from several organisations interested in increasing recycling, including Shanks First Fund, WWF-International, WWF-UK, the JJ Charitable Trust, the Mark Leonard Trust and the Corporation of London.
Small businesses are traditionally poor at recycling due to the lack of space they have available to store materials, but BioRegional is hoping to overcome this by offering a regular kerbside collection of office paper.
Bronwen Cooper, promoter for The Laundry, explained: “Our aim is to increase the rate of paper recycling from businesses. We are achieving this by targeting small businesses who frequently have limited office space and therefore are not able to accumulate the six to 10 sacks of paper, as required for normal commercial recycling collections. Soho is filled with these types of small businesses and that’s why we choose this area to launch our collections. Later on, we will be expanding to other central London areas, including the City.”
Businesses can buy sacks from The Laundry for 55p each, which is cheaper than normal trade waste sacks, costing as much as 1 each. The scheme takes office paper, envelopes, post-its, but not newspaper and magazines, and cardboard can be taped up and collected at the same time. The scheme already has 36 businesses signed up to the weekly collections and has collected a tonne of paper.
Detox
The paper is collected by Laundry staff dressed in white coats. The paper is being stored with London Recycling before being taken to a the M. Real paper mill in Kent to be 'de;toxed' or de-inked before being turned back into 100% recycled 'E;volve' office paper which is sold back to the offices.
Ms Copper said: “The Laundry comes from the idea of washing the paper to clean it up. The ‘detox’ theme is therefore the paper getting ‘cleaned up’ – Detoxing is the new recycling!”
In the longer term the Laundry will be evaluating the costs and logistics of the local paper collection and will be making recommendations to policy makers for the scheme to be taken up across London and in other cities. It already has a grant from the Corporation of London to roll out the scheme across the rest of the capital and will be spreading across Covent Garden, Mayfair and the City over the next few months.
The project is related another BioRegional scheme, Local Paper for London, which collected paper from around 500 larger businesses. It found a low uptake with smaller businesses which didn't have the room to store the large amounts of paper required for a collection.
For more information go to The Laundry's website.
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