Doreen owner of Nmququ Car Wash, Du Noon

Its always great to meet an Entrepreneur! Today Doreen came to Swop Shop for the first time with 5 very full and heavy bags of Sheen Extreme cans. Doreen runs a busy little car wash just around the corner in Usasazo Street, Du Noon. She employes 6 people and mainly cleans taxis and cars. She hopes to grow her business and employ more people from the area. Doreen will be saving all her recyclables from now on and bringing them to Swop Shop. Well Done Doreen! You are doing a fantastic job!

Interesting Recycling Facts:
- Recycling tin and steel cans saves between 60-74% of the energy used to produce them from raw materials.
- 1 ton of recycled steel saves the energy equivalent of 3.6 barrels of oil, and 1.49 tons of iron ore over the production of new steel. Benefits of Recycling

Here are the stats for the 21st February 2012:

Putting the emphases on plastic!

This year at the Recycle Swop Shop we have made a few adjustments on why and how we work with our recycling. We learned from last year that cardboard was A LOT of hard work and with little value on the recycling market. Also cardboard has so many uses in our townships e.g. insulation, compost and compost for earth worm bins.

So we made a decision to put an emphases on plastic. We are now giving 3 tokens for each bag of plastic and 1 token for each bag of glass, tin or cardboard. We have noted an increase in plastic, which was the desired result, and decrease in everything else. We have negotiated a better price with our recycling buy back center, but this has come with some additional refining to our sorting process!!! That process was to sort PET1 into 2 different colours and remove ALL the lids. Hard work?…Yes, well rather tedious to say the least! Note: we already sort 1 PET (polyethylene terephthalate) clear coke, cooldrink or bottled water bottles, 2 HDPE (high density polyethylene) white or coloured milk, juice or shampoo bottles, 4 LDPE (low density polyethylene) most plastic bags and 5 PP (polypropylene).

The next step is to educate and reward the people bringing the recycling to remove lids and sort by colour. Meet Spokazi! She is our volunteer that heads up the team that sort the plastic and over the past 4 months has become such a valued team member. Thank you Spokazi – you do a wonderful job!

Lovely Spokazi - she heads up the ladies sorting plastic.

Here are the stats for last week and yesterday:

Princess with her little girl on her back.

We have some lovely people that come to the Recycle Swop Shop, one of them is Princess. She comes regularly and brings about 25 – 30 bags of plastic and cardboard that she precariously stacks and ties onto a trolley. This week we asked her some questions…Where does she collect her recycling? How many days does it take to collect? What does she like about Swop Shop? Here are her answers…

I collect my recycling from the streets in Du Noon. It upsets me that the people just throw their empty bottles on the streets, but I can turn their rubbish into something good for me. At Swop Shop I always know that I can come home with some food to put in the pot. I like that! I collect from the taxi rank and from the shops. It takes me from Thursday to Tuesday to collect all my bags. Its hard work, but worth it. I like to buy clothes here because clothes in the shops are very expensive, but here I can find nice clothes that I swap with my tokens. Its great!

Thank you Princess for sharing your story! Well done! This project is really working for unemployed people like Princess that make it their job to collect recycling and swap it at Swop Shop every Tuesday.

Community working hard

This week at Swop Shop we saw a real shift in the community of Du Noon and the ownership of this project. Our Operations Manager, Jita managed the day and all the volunteers were from the Du Noon community. Elliot and Spokazi sorted the plastic, a few ladies from the queue packed the cardboard, Jessica make sandwiches, Patiswa and Patrica worked in the swop shop and Jita handed out tokens. What a great day!

Today we had our first full loyalty cards! Well Done to the regular recyclers, they each received their 4 extra tokens and they were overjoyed!

We collected a total of 917 kg of recycling.

Cardboard & Paper = 363 kg
Plastic = 475 kg
Glass = 72 kg
Tin = 7 kg

Patrick and Don't Touch (his dog)

Hooray! Recycle Swop Shop is back up and running! Yesterday we saw many of our faithful regulars back with their Loyalty cards and lots of recycling.

Patrick and his Dog “Don’t Touch” were there with 19 bags of recycling which he brings to Swop Shop loaded up in a trolley. He has difficulty walking after a car accident back in 2010. Last week Keagan, one of our volunteers, ran to help Patrick push his trolley down the steep entrance and “Don’t Touch” ran towards him barking and warning him to keep away! Keagan was fine! It was actually great to see such a good relationship between a Man and his Dog. We don’t currently stock dog food at the Recycle Swop Shop, but if you would like to donate some bags to help feed Dogs like “Don’t Touch”, please email us. Maria@beyonded.org

We collected a total of 1266 kg of recycling.

Cardboard & Paper = 466 kg
Plastic = 506 kg
Glass = 273 kg
Tin = 21 kg

Here we all are in the cable car...no turning back Louise!

The 5th of December was National Volunteers Day and what an appropriate day for us to be taking our volunteers on a day out to Table Mountain! This group of hard working people, give their time and energy to the Recycle Swop Shop each week and we honestly could not run it without their help. So this was our way of treating them and making them feel special.

Big thank you to Table Mountain Cable Car Company for sponsoring our 20 volunteers the tickets to go up and down the mountain. Also a huge thank you to Kate at Melissa’s Food Shop Blouberg for the delicious sandwiches.

The day started out so sunny and bright and were singing in the car on our way to Cape Town. We sounded terrible & we got some strange looks from fellow drivers with this strange mix of Xhosa and English songs, but it was fun!

Once in the cable car we started to ascended into a mystical fairytale land…called a big wet cloud. This was strange & weird, but also quite enchanting in its own way. We ate our yummy sandwiches, told everyone how much we loved them and joined a guided tour where we learnt so many interesting facts about the fauna and flora. We met a Dassie, ate lots of Quality Streets and our calls to each other where lost in the mist. We were unable to experience the amazing panoramic view, but we created our own unique experience and enjoyed the day tremendously.

Jita and Jonathan working the strapping machine.

On Tuesday we used our new strapping machine donated by AviUmkhumbi Cape. Thank you so much for this useful machine. Rudi, who will be assisting us with transporting our cardboard to the recycling vender, donated this great little machine to us to strap the cardboard boxes into bundles. This will save time when loading the cardboard onto the trailer. Of course, in theory this is a brilliant idea, but we did face a few challenges. One of them being, our good old friend the wind! We will endeavour to refine the art of strapping & stacking.

Malaki... you can't hide in there!!!

It was really great to have our volunteer Kim back with her bright yellow washing up gloves and big smile!

Malaki was in charge of sorting the plastic with his team of 4 volunteers from the Du Noon community, they soon sorted the plastic in 16 huge sugar bags. To all our volunteers, great job! Lets hope the wind doesn’t blow on Monday when we go on our Volunteers environmental and cultural outing to Table Mountain.


We collected a total of 1485 kg of recycling.

Cardboard & Paper = 663 kg
Plastic = 479 kg
Glass = 294 kg
Tin = 49 kg

'The power of a simple gift'...bringing smiles to the children of Zusakhe creche Du Noon.

On Friday we hosted our yearly Christmas Party at Zusakhe Creche, Du Noon. You often hear the phrase ‘the power of a simple gift‘. At Beyond Education we believe that through a simple, gift-filled box we can together make a huge difference in each of these children’s lives.

Well, that is exactly what we did, together with the amazing generosity of our local business owners and the community of Table View, we gave over 190 gift boxes to the children from the Zusakhe creche, their Youth Group, Teachers, Staff and Home Base Carers. After they all received gifts, our volunteers handed out lunch. There was plenty of juice for all, followed by a delicious ice cream. We were all wonderfully entertained with beautiful singing and dancing by the Zusakhe Youth Group.

It was a happy fun filled special day for all the children and staff of Zusakhe. Huge thank you to Shelley and the employees of Woolworths Marketing, On Tap, Dairy Exchange, Junior Junction, Wimpy Rondebosch, Wimpy West Coast, Colibri Towels, Reckitt Benckiser, Active Displays, Coca Cola, Foo Foo Club and a few unnamed heroes from the Table View community, who supported and contributed in making this a memorable day.

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