Recycling Ollerton and Boughton is a charity which provides work-based training placements to Adults with Learning Difficulties.

Founded in 1999, R.O.B. as we quickly became known, grew from humble beginnings when a group at Notts. County Council’s, Whitewater Day Service, headed by two parents, Mike and Joan Tomlinson, began collecting and processing aluminium cans and newspapers. A pilot project targeted 200 local houses and a great venture began.

R.O.B. now has two activity streams; one collects glass bottles and jars from fortnightly kerbside rounds in 11 local villages covering over 7,000 households, while the other provides a cardboard and paper recycling service to over 100 local businesses.

We have over 35 service users accessing the service, all of whom have very different abilities and needs. Support that we give each individual is tailored accordingly, with the aim of giving them as productive and rewarding a day as is possible. Access to the service is generally made through Notts. County Council’s Community Learning Disability Teams or their Transitions Teams. The recycling activities that we do, although industrious, are labour intensive by design. If we were to use modern, automated processes, we wouldn’t be creating the roles necessary to keep everybody busy and engaged. Each team, operating on our kerbside and our business collections would generally comprise 2 or 3 members of staff and 3 or 4 service users.

The sell-on value of our glass, cardboard, paper and aluminium provides us with about a third of our running costs, the major contributor being Notts. County Council, which pays for individual’s placements through their Health and Social Care budget