AN OKEHAMPTON recycling business has stepped in to help a charity appeal in aid of Children?s Hospice South West by agreeing to take a massive collection of bottle tops. Wasteline, on the North Road Industrial Estate, has agreed to take around half a tonne of bottle-tops collected by Okehampton woman Margaret Cox. The bottle-tops can be recycled and turned into cash, but when the person who previously took them stopped doing so, Wasteline stepped in to help. The firm was set up by Richard Stagg and his wife Amanda and in the ensuing 18 months, Wasteline has been going from strength to strength. Richard Stagg said: ?We work with firms like Heinz and Kerrys in town ? we can take their waste plastic, cardboard and paper and recycle it for them.? The rubbish comes to the depot in small bales and is sorted and bundled into larger consignments. It is then sent to a larger hub in Somerset, which oversees the recycling of discarded items into new products. Mr Stagg said the firm had been growing since moving to its new site on the industrial estate aftewr outgrowing its previous premises. ?We have been on this site for about three and a half months. We have quadrupled our business in that time,? he said. At the firm?s outset, Mr Stagg initially invested in a small baler, but as the level of waste he was handling grew, he bought a larger one. He used to be a window and office cleaner, and through visiting many different places of work, he got to see just how much waste material could be recycled. As well as collecting waste from commercial businesses, he also had a number of farming clients, and took large quantities of plastic bags and sheeting used by them. The depot is an Alladin?s cave of discarded items; full of bags of cardboard, plastic, aluminum cans and other items. Mr Stagg said the recycling industry was one which was heavily regulated and also rather crowded. ?Unfortunately, there are some cowboys about,? he said. ?Lots of people think there is money to be made in recycling. You will not succeed if you see it as a way to get rich quick, you have got to get into it for the right reasons.? ?We try to educate the customers. We give businesses half a dozen bags and show them that they can separate their waste into different types, which makes it really easy and it seems to work well. ?It?s the money saving issue for a lot of big firms. They can save thousands of pounds they are currently forking out to have their stuff taken away.? Margaret said in under six months, she had collected enough bags of bottle-tops from people all across Devon to fill a van, but when she could no longer find anyone to recycle them, Wasteline stepped in. She said: ?Not only did he take all the tops, he took the plastic bags they are stored in as well. I also had lots of medicine trays from the pharmacists which Richard has agreed to recycle.? ?At the end of the year, Richard will total up how much he got for all the bottle-tops and donate the money to the hospice.? Margaret is still collecting bottle-tops for the charity ? anyone who has some, can drop them into Okehampton Newsagents or Chastey?s Shoe Shop.
