It should be no secret that Tamara and I (Emma) are keen on recycling. I mean we’ve written about it multiple times on Shades of Green and we’ve even toured Portsmouth’s rubbish and recycling plant together. (Yes, we’re very cool people.) That’s why you shouldn’t be surprised that we’ve managed to transform this love of recycling into a way of making money for Portsmouth Green Party.

We’ve recently started working with Recycling for Good Causes, which helps turn trash into cash by recycling unwanted items no matter their condition, thus saving lots of items from landfill. Better yet, we can offer a local drop-off site, so that you don’t have to arrange to ship the items anywhere yourself.

What can Portsmouth Green Party recycle for you?

There are four main categories of items that Portsmouth Green Party can now recycle for you, not including the ink cartridges that we told you about in a previous blog, and they are jewellery, currency, gadgets, and stamps. Let’s look at them in more detail.

Jewellery

recycling jewelry

This includes:

  • Watches
  • Odd earrings
  • Broken items
  • Costume jewellery

How many of our readers have got pieces of broken jewellery or sole earrings in their jewellery box because you just don’t know what you do with it? I myself have two earrings that lost their partners several years ago and one necklace chain with a broken clasp, but I couldn’t put them in kerbside recycling and didn’t want to throw them in the bin.

Thankfully, I can now recycle them along with any other unwanted jewellery, no matter what material its made from or state it’s in.

Currency

recycling money

This includes:

  • Notes
  • Coins
  • Foreign currency
  • Obsolete currency (i.e. the old style pound coins, pre-Euro currency, pre-decimal currency)

I think we’ve all had that moment when you’ve come back from a trip abroad and you have $1.93 left in your wallet or €3.47 at the bottom of your bag. Unless you’re a regular visitor, you may not want to keep it in the house and it’s not really enough to bother exchanging it back into GBP, so it winds up stuck in a drawer. The same goes for out-of-date currency – for some reason we have like 20 francs in a drawer at my house because no one knew what to do with it.

Gadgets

recycling electronic equipment

This includes:

  • Sat navs
  • Games consoles and games
  • Laptops
  • Tablets
  • Cameras
  • Video cameras
  • Mobile phones
  • Portable music devices

Importantly, it doesn’t matter about the age or condition of the item. We can still recycle it.

This is actually fantastic because most places only recycle mobile phones. A friend of mine has been looking for somewhere to recycle her broken laptop for ages and the nearest place she could find to take it was Chichester and she certainly wasn’t going to make a special trip.  (I don’t blame her.)

Stamps

recycling stamps

This includes:

  • Loose used stamps
  • Stamp collections
  • First-day covers and presentation packs
  • Postcard collections

Yes, the things that you usually leave on the envelope to be tossed into the recycling can actually be used to earn money for PGP.

What will Portsmouth Green Party do with the money raised?

All money that PGP earns from these recycling efforts will be used to help make Portsmouth a greener (and Greener) place because while PGP is entirely volunteer-run, we do have a fair amount of expenses.

We will use the money to:

  • stand candidates at elections
  • create flyers for our candidates
  • print our newsletters
  • create protest banners

How can I get the recycling to you?

Just email me at "> and I’ll get in touch with a drop-off location.