Recycling Swap Shop



The Swop Shop



Edge of Africa runs a Recycling swap shop for children under the age of 18 in the township. The idea is that kids collect plastic, glass, metal and paper food containers that they find in the local area during the week and bring it to the swap shop on Wednesday afternoons. The recycling is weighed by Edge of Africa volunteers and exchanged for tokens depending on the weight of materials collected. Once armed with their tokens, the kids can then exchange tokens for goods from the Edge of Africa Swop Shop. Popular items include toiletries like shower gels and shampoos, crayons and colouring books, toys and clothes – a few little luxuries for children who have nothing.





Kids happy with their purchases!



Everything in the shop is priced as realistically as possible so that the children learn about the value of goods, the concept of working to earn rewards whilst also cleaning up the local environment. All the materials collected by the swap shop are taken to the local recycling centre but the plan in the future is to make things out of the materials that are collected that can then be sold in the Swap Shop. Ingenious ideas so far include brooms made of plastic bottles and candle holders made from tin cans.

Showing off new clothes

Today, only about 15 children came to the Swap Shop but last week, because it was the Easter holidays there were about 50. That’s a fantastic achievement but now the shop needs to be restocked as kids will only keep on coming if there is good stuff for them to buy. Edge of Africa relies on donations to keep the shelves stocked, and these usually come from volunteers that have seen the shop in action. Needless to say I’ll be making some donations of my own but if any of you who are reading this have stuff you can send over or would like to pledge some items that I can buy on your behalf while I’m here then let me know – you would be making some very poor children incredibly happy!

Items we desperately need include:

• Good quality children’s clothes
• Colouring books, pencils, crayons, stationery etc
• Toiletries – shampoo, shower gel, deodorant, hand wash, face wash
• Simple kids toys