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Collecting Crisp Packets, Bottle Tops, Etc., For Charity

My ex's father used to collect used stamps (complete with ripped bits of envelope) "for charity". We could never fathom out who on earth would want these, but presumably he was sending them somewhere...
 
Charities for guide dogs for the blind accept stamps and sell them on to collectors to make money for their program; that one's legit.
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Thanks! So now I know. I am surprised though as I thought most collectors wanted unused stamps. Ah well, good to know the old guy wasn't wasting his time... :)
 
I have done work for Guide Dogs for many a year and they are always wanting your Aliminium.

And Stamps

And money
 
Meanwhile, back in the real world:
Golden Wonder's had its chips
By Peter Klinger

Brand championed by former footballer Gary Lineker has defeated its rival in a tough snack league

BRITAIN’S ferocious “crisp war” claimed its first big casualty yesterday with the collapse of Golden Wonder, the iconic brand behind Nik Naks, Ringos and Wheat Crunchies.
When it came to the crunch, it was Gary Lineker’s decade-long endorsement of Walkers that did for the 50-year-old crisp firm, which blamed its rival’s dominance for its demise.

Golden Wonder’s owners said that they had appointed an external administrator to try to salvage the Leicestershire- based company and protect 850 jobs. The administrators will run Golden Wonder in the interim while they try to attract buyers for the business.

But job losses appeared inevitable and it remained unclear last night whether the pension entitlements of workers at the company’s factories in Market Harborough, Corby and Scunthorpe would be safeguarded.

Adrian Wolstenholme, of administrators Kroll, said:

“Unfortunately, despite its well-known name and brands, Golden Wonder has suffered in recent years, primarily as a result of operating within a very competitive marketplace.

“The UK market is dominated by a single crisp and snack manufacturer and Golden Wonder has found it difficult to compete against this leader’s strength in the market place.”

It is thought that Walkers, which is owned by the PepsiCo drinks company, accounts for 45.5 per cent of Britain’s crisp market. It dominates smaller rivals such as Golden Wonder and the maker of McCoy’s, KP Foods, which is owned by United Biscuits. Golden Wonder’s market share is thought to be about 5 per cent.

Walkers has increasingly expanded the range of flavours it offers, prompting a sarcastic response from Golden Wonder on its website: “At Golden Wonder we don’t want to make nouvelle cuisine. We just want to make crisps. Good, honest, delicious crisps at that. After all, that’s exactly what the British public fell in love with and why they stick with us.”

But stick with Golden Wonder they haven’t.

Walkers’ flavour range, including Prawn Cocktail and Smokey Bacon, proved a hit. And the use of Lineker has also proved inspired, leading to some of the most popular television commercials in recent years.

Lineker, the former Tottenham Hotspur and England footballer, first appeared in a Walkers commercial in 1995. The company thought that it could cash in on Lineker’s nice-guy image, both on and off the football pitch, by promoting its crisps as so irresistible that even the football star would turn into a “meany” to lay his hands on a packet.

In a market that has been hit by soaring oil and gas prices pushing up production costs, and increasingly health-conscious consumers, the Walkers-Lineker pairing has proved an enduring success. The crisp maker claims that 11 million people eat its products every day.

The strain on Golden Wonder was apparent in its 2004 results, the last year for which financial details are available.

The company made a loss of £10.8 million on sales of £87.8 million. It said that the loss was significant and it also has a pension deficit. Affected workers may be able to receive some respite from the Pension Protection Fund, the Government’s pensions lifeboat.

Golden Wonder’s ownership structure was unclear last night but it is thought that Middle Eastern investors control the company.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0, ... 72,00.html
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On second thoughts, I could have put this story in the Irony thread:

Golden Wonder... the Leicestershire- based company forced out of business by Walkers, who sponsor the stadium at Lineker's old club, Leicester City.

The people of Leicester must have mixed feelings about this!
 
Just found this, on the Beeb's soccer pages about the FA Cup Third Round:

At the Walkers Stadium, [Spurs] made a crisp start, quavered slightly, played like right wotsits and got Monster munched in the last minute.

:D :D :D
 
Collecting crisp packets, bottle tops etc for charideee

A few weeks ago I was asked at work by one of my colleagues to save any empty Walkers crisps bags for a little girl who, according to my colleague, has been promised by Walkers that if her family can send in her weight in empty crisp bags they will get her a specially adapted wheelchair/private medical treatment/send her on holiday.

I mentioned to my colleage that I thought I'd read something similar a while back and that it was quite a popular urban myth (similar to the ones where people were urged to collect milk bottle tops for a similar cause). Has anyone haerd something similar to this lately?


(thread title edited to be a bit more clear... stu)
 
I haven't heard it lately, but it's an old-ish urban myth of the collecting useless rubbish for charity variety. What exactly is supposed to happen to all the empty bags when they've been collected?
 
This tells you all about the hoax:

http://www.shartwell.freeserve.co.uk/hu ... s-hoax.htm

Walkers became associated with a long-running hoax about collecting food wrappers which could be exchanged for medical equipment. The Walkers Crisp Packet Collection hoax became so well known that it was parodied by Walkers in their Gary Lineker "No More Mr Nice Guy" series of ads. In the ad (ca. 2000) schoolteacher Lineker exhorted his class to bring in Walkers crisp packets - the catch being that the packets had to be full for the crisp-munching teacher. If you're reading this because you are have been taken in, Walkers ask hoax victims to dispose of the collected wrappers in an environmentally friendly way. Perhaps Walkers could perform an act of goodwill by printing a hoax warning on their packets. Warnings about the hoax have been published in ScoutBase (Scouts online magazine) as Scouts and similar organisations are popular targets for the hoax. In some cases, hoax victims had received a phone call from individuals claiming (falsely) to be Walkers Snack Foods representatives.
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The Walkers site says this:

Potentially, any plastic can be recycled. The difficulty lies with separating the main parts. Unfortunately, because of the light weight of the flexible packaging used for our products, it is uneconomic at the moment to attempt to recycle. The process would use up more energy environmentally than saved to collect, clean and recycle the plastic. The best ‘recovery’ is via incineration and use of the energy produced.

Although it is not really a viable option to collect and recycle snacks packets, we do as a Company, have a policy of recycling materials wherever possible. Waste cardboard used in our factories is recycled. Also, we always try to use energy in the most efficient manner.
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And it doesn't mention any charity collection.
 
Re: Crisp bags for wheelchairs

Gipsy_Queen said:
I mentioned to my colleage that I thought I'd read something similar a while back and that it was quite a popular urban myth (similar to the ones where people were urged to collect milk bottle tops for a similar cause). Has anyone haerd something similar to this lately?
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My mother and grandmother collected milk bottle tops for many years for a charity called The Blind Babies of Bethlehem (or something like that). In those days, milk bottle tops were made of aluminium and it was cheaper to recycle aluminium then than it was to dig fresh ore.
So, it's not a myth (unless The Blind Babies of Bethlehem was a monumental con).
 
Didn't the lovely Blue Peter do a campaign for one of their charities involving collecting aluminium? I seem to remember lots of bottle tops and the like being bagged up! My mum had a pot near the sink where she collected them all......
 
It's probably Blue Peter that started the whole "collecting rubbish for charity" urban myths in the first place, however indirectly.
 
collecting milk bottle tops for charity

Following a request from a colleague asking staff to save milk bottle tops for charity, i decided to find out more.

Imagine my surprise when i went online and found a recycling company that does actually collect milk bottle tops for charitable purposes!

This is a great example of an Urban legend that has become fact (sort of). My colleague is trying the weight of a disabled lad in bottle tops, which is blatantly UL, so it seems the original UL is alive and kicking, but by a wierd twist of events it has led to charities benefiting.

Please see the response i got from GHS recycling (obvoiusly my personal details have been removed), my original email is at the bottom.


Let me try and explain! Milk bottles are easy to recycle but the material the tops are made out of can't be recycled easily. So when you put your milk bottle into your recycling bin the council will sort and deal with it but if you put the milk bottle tops in there they will be chucked into landfill.

The collection of milk bottle tops has received some very bad press over the years - people were collecting, mainly for wheelchairs, which never materialised. We got involved through Naomi House, a children's hospice in Winchester. They asked us if we would take the bottle tops that they were collecting so we set up a system for granulating them. Naomi House were then inundated by sacks of tops and decided to stop taking the tops at their offices. As there were a number of groups already collecting for Naomi House we decided to carry on on their behalf - it has since spread and we now have over 30 groups collecting throughout the south of England. We also have more groups collecting in other parts of the UK who are still trying to work out a way of getting the tops down to us in Portsmouth. As far as we know we are the only people in the UK who granulate milk bottle tops and pay money towards a charity.

I often receive small parcels of tops through the post from people all over the UK and we put these towards our own collection here - we are collecting for Naomi House.

The granulated tops are sent to a plant where they are melted down and used for hard plastic items such as children's toys and garden furniture - they are also made back into more bottle tops.

We reckon we have recycled enough tops to fill at least one olympic sized swimming pool!!

By the way we do recycle plastic milk bottles and collect from a number of local dairies but they go a different way to their tops!

Please let me know if you would like any more information.

Many thanks


Regards
Linda Renwick
GHS Recycling Ltd.




To: [email protected]
Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2007 10:16 AM
Subject: seriously, you collect milk bottle tops? Why not the whole carton?


Hi there,

This milk bottle top collecting milarky reeks of Urban Legend. Can you supply me with some facts please, and explain why the whole bottle is not collected?







 
When I was young, I remember my Grandmother used to collect silver paper. She was rather insistent about it. I think she claimed that it went "to the church in Africa" or something along those lines.
 
Very nice, but wouldn't it be easier to hand over a cheque instead? And if the UL is still widespread, then how many bottle tops actually reach this company?

Not that I don't want to see them succeed, mind you.
 
We used to have a long thread on the subject of unlikely charity collections and it began with a consideration of the Walker's Crisps myths. I can't find it now so I fear it may have been in Chat and pruned, not in this forum where it belonged. :(
 
No, it was just obscure and neglected. Now digitally remastered and happily merged with the new thread for all your odd-commodity collections-for-charity N&Qs.
 
Milk bottle tops (in the days of my yoof, when the bottles were glass) were made of tinfoil (aluminium foil?), and would have been fairly easy to recycle, and IIRC it was a common occurence to collect the tops then.

And furthermore, I'm also sure that the Walkers crisps thread used to be much longer - it seems that the redundant parts of it have already been recycled.. :(
 
Perhaps there's more - I'll search again.

And lo and behold, there was! Also merged...
 
Long, long ago and in a far away city I was persuaded to collect novelty key rings for "a little girl, ill, who wanted to get into the Book of Records" ... well, you know the usual spiel. Me and my (then) missus put up posters in the local pub, talked to friends at work and so on and by the 'closing date' (i.e. about two months later) had collected about one hundred harmless small bits of tat. I sent 'em off to the address provided and never got any reply.
Now I'm not really fussed, since no reply was promised and no real loss was experienced ... apart from the loss of self-respect that some effort for a 'charity' task was wasted. Some of those key rings were quite neat! :D But I think this kind of 'mass hysteria in the name of charity' happens more often than one would suppose.

Wish I still had the address that I'd sent those key rings to! :?
 
OMG a UL has its own newsletter!

how do i post the bottletop newsletter? It only takes the text when i cut and paste, and it must be seen to be believed. :lol:
 
OMG a UL has its own newsletter!

how do i post the bottletop newsletter? It only takes the text when i cut and paste, and it must be seen to be believed. :lol:
 
Re: Collecting for charity

Dingo~ said:
Indeed, it puzzled me for a long time as how charities that are reliant on donations can gain anything from useless collected items.
I am originally from Germany and back in the late 70's there was this thing going where everybody I knew at school was collecting chewing gum wrappers. Apparently for every 2000 collected somebody got a wheelchair...The stupid thing was that nobody had the slightest clue where to hand those wrappers in once you had enough. I fell for it big time and managed to colect at least 500 before I couldn't be bothered anymore.
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Same here - I grew up in Germany too and there was the same wheelchair story around - only we collected coke bottle tops. Not sure what happened to them, but as far as I know no one got a wheelchair...

At the moment, there is a promotion here in Australia - a popular brand of bottled water started producing special bottles with pink caps rather than the standard blue ones. If you buy one with a pink cap, a certain amount of money goes to breast cancer research, apparently.

That started a whole craze of pink things that promote breast cancer awareness or are auctioned or sold to raise money.

Does this sort of stuff really make a difference - or is it just making more money for the companies producing these goods?

I'm sure people get warm and fuzzy drinking a pink-capped bottle of water and believing they are fighting breast cancer. Or wearing a white plastic armbands that supposedly makes poverty history.

It's just...I don't know, I just can't get myself to think any of this makes a real difference, ya know. Like the coke bottle tops then. :rolleyes:

A website looking at the dubious side of the pink craze:

http://www.thinkbeforeyoupink.org/Pages ... aigns.html
 
Re: OMG a UL has its own newsletter!

llkit said:
how do i post the bottletop newsletter? It only takes the text when i cut and paste, and it must be seen to be believed. :lol:
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If it has an online version, post a link to it.

But if not, you'll have to snap it with a digital camera, upload the image to Photobucket or similar, and link to that image. (Don't make the image too big if you want it to appear directly on the thread, though.)
 
I remember the pull-top pop can collecting thing quite well.

There were yellow paper folders taped to the wall in the girl's gym change room at my high school. This would have been in the early 90's here in Toronto. Attached to the envelope was a plea for the students to contribute pop can tabs for a little girl's wheel chair. I remember being quite confused at the time; were "they" going to construct a wheelchair out of the tabs, I wondered? Later, a second sign appeared near the envelope asking us not to contibute our chewed gum into the envelopes...

Later, these pop tabs took on an quite a different meaning..if a young man gave one to a young woman, it would mean that he *ahem* wanted to "court" her...

???
 
If you read the small print a lot of these 'buy this product and we'll give money to poorly babies' is guff. Read the small print on the UNICEF/ Pampers add and you'll see what I mean. It says something along the lines of 'we will give £10000 to UNICEF'. That reads to me that they will give the money whether you buy the product or not.
 
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