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Creating employment opportunities for people has always been high on the agenda at Fairtide. Through our in-house Employment Service, we have a high proportion of clients working both in and out of the centre. Community placements range from café to office and from pub to supermarket - mostly part-time paid work but also including some voluntary work at the local hospital and a lunch club.
The introduction of the National Minimum Wage effectively moved the labour market goal posts however, and made our job of placing people in community paid work a lot more difficult. This prompted us to try out more centre-based alternatives, including the highly popular repackaging of half a million Christmas cards for the Red Cross in 1998. The recycling project was born about the same time, initially with just two clients in mind, one of whom shredded a bit of office paper and another who crushed a few drinks cans.
Five years later, Peter Legge and Nigel Austin are still the mainstay of the project, but now handling a staggering 100,000 cans and 900,000 sheets of office paper a year between them, using industrial scale equipment. Nigel's crushed aluminium cans , collected from local pubs, clubs, factories and leisure sites, are taken to Swindon in half tonne loads, from where they are transferred to ALCAN's huge plant at Warrington, to be made back into more aluminium cans. Low value steel cans don't go to waste either as the Forest of Dean District Council collects these regularly to be recycled with their own. Peter's shredded office paper , collected from local estate agents, insurance brokers and the like, and sorted and weighed by other project workers, is sold commercially as a packaging material. ‘Shredpack' ends up all over the world, mostly protecting water pumps, ornaments and expensive ceramics ! We also sell some shredded paper as pet bedding through the local vets. Another service we offer is low grade security shredding for individuals and local companies.
Next on line came aluminium foil recycling with the help of the trade organisation ALUPRO, who facilitated a scheme whereby foil collection bins were placed on all the District Council car parks, and primary schools were encouraged to contribute through education and competitions. ALUPRO provided us with a baler, which is operated by the clients who also carefully sort out foil from non-foil. We've done nearly 4 tonnes since we started which must be millions of pie cases I suppose, but no-one's ever counted! We take finished loads of crushed foil in 25kg. bales to Avon Metals in Gloucester, where it is melted back down into ingots which will often end up in new car engine blocks. CORY Environmental, who operate the four Household Recycling Centres around the county for the County Council, have recently added foil banks too, much of which ends up at Fairtide. | 
