Birmingham City University’s new recycling scheme flop

• Mar. 5 by Jessica Dutton (0)

A new books recycling scheme at Birmingham City University has so far not been successful with the boxes remaining empty on the Perry Barr campus.

As part of a pro-active attempt to encourage students to consider the environment, the books recycling bin is an addition to the plastic and paper recycling bins already provided at Birmingham City University.

The bin has been placed in the Baker building, of the City North campus, Perry Barr.

READ International, winner of ‘Best New UK Charity’ in the 2007 Charity Times Awards, is a scheme set up in 2003 by a group of gap year university students that donates books across the world to schools with little resources.

Now there are over 500 student volunteers involved, operating from 22 university sites across the UK.

The scheme was originally started by a group of University students. The scheme has now donated 564,000 books across the world.

The bin has so far only seen itself be filled with empty food wrappers and bottles instead of any books they don’t need and are willing to contribute.

A spokesperson for READ International said:

“After trialling the project out over at Edgbaston campus with great success we decided to expand it over to Perry barr too, there are bins on the first floor in the Students Union, Baker and Edge, floor 6.

So far due to lack of advertisement as we have been waiting for flyers and posters to be printed there has been very little response however hopefully we can turn this around!”

One BCU student, Clare Evans, said:

“The bin is quite small, and the poster is also, so the set up is not too distinctive.

I think it’s a shame that students haven’t respected the scheme, but with more awareness I think it could really work.”

READ International are looking for donations of literature and text books, any books donated that are not appropriate are sold through Better World Books to generate funds to ship books and pay for books produced locally.

Birmingham Recycled will continue to monitor the progress of the scheme at BCU.