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Total Recyclables Collected: 37 032kg Collected this week: +173kg
Rewards given out: R 25 238 Registered Participants: 590

TrashBack is a social enterprise that changes apathy into action through an altered perception of waste. We are currently operating in the Hout Bay area of Cape Town, South Africa.

At the core of the TrashBack initiative lies our incentivised recycling project: uphinda-phindo! which operates in the Imizamo Yethu (IY) informal settlement and uses a unique voucher system enabled by the Broccoli Project. Participants from IY bring in recyclable materials and are rewarded with vouchers for their efforts, which can then be exchanged at local community stores. The vouchers ensure that:

  1. Participants are rewarded with beneficial items, such as food and clothing.

  2. Rewards are kept within the community, helping to stimulate the local economy.

Parallel to this runs our enrichment program which is centred around outreach and educational activities. The uphinda-phindo! participants are taken on outings, such as trips to Cheetah Outreach.

One of our latest additions, the UrBin clothing recycling program, involves supplying second hand clothes (at significantly reduced cost) to local community vendors. The proceeds are then used to fund the uphinda-phindo! rewards.

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Recent Posts

Cleaning Cape Town WE ARE ONE Colour Festival

TrashBacking at WE ARE ONE Colour FestivalCOLOURS! MUSIC! PEOPLE! All an incredible mix for an awesome party! Cape Town We ARE ONE Colour Festival was a huge success, with talented DJs and musicians performing and beautifully coordinated colour count downs! However, with all the powder comes lots of waste! To help event organisers SEED Experiences with keeping the festival clean, we ran our famous rewards for rubbish campaign whereby festival goers (TrashBackers) brought us empty powder packets in exchange for more powder!
the powder

Gosh there was a lot of powder! But, everyone wanted more and more and more…This is why TrashBack was perfectly positioned to help with this demand! The exchange rate for our campaign was set at 50 empty powder packets for one full packet. We could not keep up with the huge rush! What started as a slow trickle of colourful TrashBackers bringing in empty packets soon escalated into hundreds of powdered party animals all looking for more colour!

TrashBackers lining up for Colour

Eventually our volunteers were spinning with packets coming from everywhere! We were just grabbing as many packets as we could take and we were handing out powder as fast as festival goers could throw it! Unfortunately, during the event our power supply was cut and our computer died so we lost track of the exact stats. However we know that we gave out approximately 700 powder packets meaning our TrashBackers collected about 35,000 packets!! Well Done!! We are very excited by this success! We hope these type of environmental activations can demonstrate to people the value of waste and teach everyone to be more responsible with their waste!

Thank you to all our TrashBackers for participating and keeping Cape Town WE ARE ONE clean! Keep your eyes open for us at future festivals and events!

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