Your Bag2School Customer Service Team Celebrate Paying £6 Million to schools and clubs throughout the UK.

(Left to Right) Tori, Paul, Nicola and Sarah

Bag2School Celebrate £6 Million Milestone At Soccarena Football Academy in County Durham.

Fundraising for their school & club is the children's goal!

Niall Quinn (Chairman of Sunderland Football Club) celebrates with some of the children who have benefited from the Bag2School fundraising scheme.

Northallerton-based company Bag2School has now paid out £6 million to schools across the UK who have taken part in its innovative fundraising scheme which involves pupils and parents sorting through their wardrobes and cupboards and donating unwanted items to their school.

Bag2School pays schools by the total weight collected, currently £400 a tonne, with 76 per cent of gross turnover given back to them. All the clothes collected by Bag2School are sold, either sorted or un-sorted, to importers and wholesalers in countries throughout eastern and Western Europe, Africa and Asia. 80 per cent of clothing goes into the reuse market as clothes and the other 20 per cent enters the recycling sector for bed manufacture, socks, blankets and the industrial wiper trade.

Bag2School was the brainchild of Marcus Fitch-Peyton, who has over 25 years experience in the ‘rag trade’. In 2001 Ted Childs joined Bag2School to help set up the business. Mr Childs said: “The reaction we have had from parents and schools over the past seven years has been unbelievable. Now parents no longer have to waste their weekends running jumble sales and it is an all inclusive form of fundraising. Unwanted textiles and clothes is a resource that every family has and according to statistics, 1.2 million tonnes enters the household waste stream going to landfill every year. Bag2school’s simple message is don’t throw that funding away!”

As part of their commitment to reducing the impact clothing has on the environment, Bag2School is now part of the DEFRA Sustainable Clothing Roadmap process which is examining end-of-life solutions for clothing. The company is serious about its role and as well as organising clothes collections they also offer presentations to schools about the issues of recycling and reuse to ensure that children become aware of the importance of sustainability and the contribution they can make.

To date, more than 20,000 schools across the UK have entered into fundraising partnerships with Bag2School, many staging collections every term. There are over 12,000 collections a year with 2 million bags collected and sold on, which represented over 5000 tonnes of textiles in 2008.

So successful has the scheme become, a sister company called Bag2TheFuture has been formed which works with businesses, faith groups, charities, sports clubs and community organisations using the same business model as Bag2School. The company launched a Dutch operation in 2007 and is expanding into the USA with a franchise based in Boston, New England which started school collections in September 2008.