Learning a valuable lesson about waste

One of our long-standing sponsorships in South Africa is our support for the Wildlands Recycling for Life network. Wildlands rewards people for bringing in waste for recycling by exchanging it for food vouchers, education support, drivers’ license training, building materials, bicycles, vegetable garden equipment, water tanks, solar equipment and small business development grants.

They have even found an innovative way to recycle dirty and un-useable plastics, which may be thrown into community dumps, drainage lines and rivers, sent to landfill or incinerated – they are turning that waste into school desks.

The Wildlands Green Desk innovation combines a recycling initiative and sustainable development, and provides a much-needed product in a country with a shortage of around 3 million school desks.       

To date, our South32 Wildlands Enterprise Development has produced 500 Green Desks, with an additional 1,000 planned, and a long-term proposal to produce 3,300 desks a year. 

Encouraging people to remove the rubbish that blights their community is a great idea – turning it into school desks is pure genius.