March 9, 2020

Blackborough residents Sarah Ward and Elle Welch jointly were join winners at the Recycle Devon Thank you Awards, held at County Hall, Exeter on Friday, 6 March 2020, to celebrate Devon’s unsung recycling heroes.

Sarah Ward

Sarah is incredibly environmentally conscious and recently setup a recycling point in Blackborough for items, which are currently not accepted at the kerbside. Sarah has placed a series of boxes, all individually labelled, in the porch of the village hall for the convenience of residents to deposit items of waste such as crisp and nut packets, biscuit wrappers, bread bags, contact lens packaging, toothpaste tubes, toothbrushes and lots more. 50Kgs of waste has been collected since May 2019, which has raised money for a junior diabetes charity. She also setup the Blackborough Green Community Facebook Group and organised various green initiatives for the village involving the procurement of recycled children’s lunchboxes and brown paper tape, as an alternative to Sellotape for residents when wrapping their Christmas presents.

Elle Welch

Elle began collecting hard-to-recycle waste as part of a group fundraising initiative and to inspire her local community in Blackborough. She setup a collection point where she works and within six months, accumulated 700Kgs of waste for recycling with TerraCycle®, that would have otherwise ended up in general waste. She also setup a Facebook group to support her recycling initiative and to share recycling advice more widely with her community, which has nearly 400 members.