Green’s have gone off the rails for local community upcycling project

At Green’s we believe that doing our bit for the environment is of the utmost importance. Whilst our primary business is manufacturing economisers and heat exchangers for our clients to help them reduce their carbon footprint, we also need to ensure we are fulfilling our own environmental duty at home and within our community.

Over the summer several of our engineers, including Chris Johnson, Plater/Welder, Ellie Barratt and Kristof Schneider, apprentices from Wakefield College, sought the opportunity to upcycle some waste materials into a functional product for Wakefield’s Cathedral Academy.

The academy set up a project to ensure replacement uniforms are available for all students enabling them to aid those who need to borrow uniforms or replace damaged uniforms without this impacting on their education, along with safeguarding students whose families don’t have the means to replace. Due to the substantial varying sizes and items of uniforms required, the academy struggled to keep them in order due to limited storage. Chris, whose daughter Joanna Johnson leads this project at the academy, saw this as a great opportunity to upcycle waste materials at Green’s to build a suitable unit.

He set to work with the help of the apprentices, using Green’s scrap materials along with equipment from the factory to create a sturdy, reliable and useful unit.

Joanna Johnson, Attendance Manager at Cathedral Academy, says: “This unit means we will be able to organise the clothes and shoes to keep a closer eye on the “stock” saving money on replacing unnecessary items. From an aesthetic point, if students aren’t rifling through shelves and drawers looking for items, we can hopefully replace what some of the students perceive as handouts. This will challenge the stigma attached to recycling, aid with the responsibility to the planet and contributing to the welfare of their fellow pupils, which is what the scheme was set up for”.