Painting the town with waste

Tags: community involvement | environment | recycling

You're always going to have too much paint. Think about it: the chances of you having exactly the right amount of paint for your room/wall/fence is highly unlikely; and you're obviously going to buy too much rather than leave a big unpainted patch; so what do you do with the extra paint? You shove it in your garage/shed/porch or just chuck it in the nearest skip - a pretty big waste considering how we're always getting told to reuse and recycle everything nowadays.

In 2008, 380 million litres of paint were sold in the UK. This means roughly 53 million litres of paint (enough to fill 21 Olympic-sized swimming pools) is unused, stored in homes or garages or just thrown away. Community RePaint have turned this waste into something positive by encouraging people to donate their unwanted paint to community projects - just like myplace centres!

A spokesman from Community Repaint said: "We see 'waste paint' as a resource (as long as it's reusable) and strive to collect and redistribute more paint year after year."

It works by enabling individual projects to collect ‘half-tins' of leftover, domestic paint from members of the community at a donation point at their local council's household waste recycling centre or civic amenity site. Unsold and end-of-line paint is also collected from local DIY stores including B&Q and Homebase, trade centres such as Dulux Decorator Centres and local outlets. Painters and decorators also donate leftover paint from decorating jobs. This means all kinds of people who usually wouldn't be involved with community projects are provided with an easy way to recycle, and they can see the results in their own home towns.

People are often put off of recycling because they can't physically see the results or feel the benefits, but if they are given the chance to help improve the buildings in their communities they may be more willing to help the environment as well as their neighbours.

Community RePaint is an award-winning UK network of 65 community-based paint reuse projects, where paint is stored at local projects' premises and then redistributed to local charities, community and voluntary groups and individuals in social need. Paint is usually offered free of charge although projects encourage small financial donations to help cover their costs, or even use annual subscription programmes. The scheme forges links with the paint industry (it's sponsored by Dulux) and with local authorities to redistribute paint to as many charitable organisations and individuals in social need as it can.

The running of Community RePaint gives jobs to local people and offers work training and volunteer places which can benefit the long-term unemployed and people with learning disabilities, so it's a good scheme to have in your area.

If your myplace centre, or another community group or someone you know who is in social need could do with a repaint, go to Community RePaint website and click on the postcode locator to find your local Community Repaint project.