Car boot sales, Depop and setting aside plenty of time to rummage through charity shops are Scrapstore development worker Lauren Dunn's top tips for Second Hand September. She's signed up to the Oxfam initiative and pledged not to buy any new clothes for a month. She said: "With charity shops I generally try and go to all the ones in the city centre if I'm looking for something. You have to set aside a bit of time to rummage and visit quite a few to find what you want. "I once found a pair of Doc Martens in my size - I'm only size 2 so I couldn't believe I'd found them in a charity shop and they were only £8. Scrapstore Development Worker Lauren Dunn "Car boot sales are pretty good places for second hand clothes. They're usually a lot cheaper than charity shops because people want to get rid of things quickly. I've found children's clothes for 50 pence and of course because children grow so fast they're hardly worn. "They're really good for toys as well - I bought two boxes of Thomas the Tank engine toys really cheaply and they were played with for ages. "You have to get up early though - they usually start really early and if you go later on all the good stuff has been sold. "I sell clothes on ebay and I'm quite interested in Depop for buying second hand clothes. Then there are Gumtree and Preloved. "If you need something as a one off for a job interview or special occasion consider borrowing an outfit from a friend. "At the moment I'm knitting a blanket with wool from the Scrapstore - [...]

    We're taking a week's holiday this summer. Crow Recycling including the Scrapstore will close for the annual holiday at the end of the day on Friday August 16. We'll be back open again on the morning of Tuesday August 27. There's plenty of time to stock up on craft materials from the Scrapstore before we close. There are extra bags available for our office waste paper customers - just ask our van driver to drop some off. Apologies for any inconvenience.

  Schools are invited to bring a class to visit Crow Recycling in the autumn term. Free school trips will be available during the autumn term 2019 thanks to funding renewal. Crow hosts school visits on Mondays and Tuesdays, one class at a time, with each visit lasting 45 minutes to an hour. Pupils tour the warehouse and get hands on sorting paper and sorting used drinks cans. They also see can crushers and balers in action and have a go at feeding paper into industrial paper shredding and baling machines. The visits are ideal for key stage two but can be tailored for older or younger children. Crow is a registered charity set up in 1985 to provide work placements for disabled people. School visits are supervised by staff and volunteers with disclosure and barring service checks. Find our school visits page here. To sign up for e mail updates on school visits click here. To arrange a school visit e mail crow@talktalkbusiness.net.    

  Non confidential paper collections will be charged at £3.60 a bag (including VAT) now that Crow Recycling is dropping the annual registration fee. Both one off and regular collections will be £3 per 10kg bag without VAT and £3.60 per 10kg bag including VAT. Crow Recycling is dropping the annual registration fee which sees customers pay a flat fee and get the first 100 bags free. This brings the service into line with confidential collections which are charged at £5 per 10kg bag without VAT and £6 per 10kg bag with VAT. Prices including the loan of bags to store the documents and collection in Coventry, Warwickshire, Solihull and parts of Leicestershire. Contact us to find out if Crow can collect from your location. Any queries give Crow Recycling a call on 02476552444.    

  Do you need ring binders, box files, dividers, large envelopes, Jiffy bags, document wallets or wrist rests? We have all these in our office supplies section of the Scrapstore. New ring binders and box files are 75p Second hand ring binders and box files  are 10p Wrist rests are £1 Dividers are 10p Large envelopes are 60p Large Jiffy bags are £1 Small Jiffy bags are 50p Plastic document wallets are free Paper clips are free Rubber bands are free Prices are for Scrapstore members. Annual membership costs £10, Opening times are Mondays to Thursdays 9.30am to 3pm and Fridays 9.30am to 12 noon.

    The Crow Recycling Scrapstore has some second hand plywood to sell thanks to a donation from a building site. The sheets of 18mm exterior grade plywood, some painted, are approximately 120cm by 240cm. They cost £5 each for Scrapstore members. There is also a second hand wooden picket gate measuring  91cm high and 88cm wide. The gate costs £3 for Scrapstore members. Scrapstore membership costs £10 per year. Opening times at the Scrapstore are Mondays to Thursdays 9.30am to 3pm and Fridays 9.30am to 12 noon.

  The fantastic Leamington Repair Cafe is our latest new Scrapstore member. Leamington Repair Cafe volunteers host regular events where people can bring broken possessions. Volunteers will fix them or show the owners how to fix them or make it a joint effort. Their Facebook video shows volunteers everything from furniture to clothes. Many of our Scrapstore members are organisations - we ask people shopping as part of an organisation to bring the organisation's Scrapstore membership card with them. Find the Leamington Repair Cafe on Facebook here.

  Pupils from the Woodlands School in Coleshill weren't able to visit the warehouse so Crow Recycling took some of the warehouse based activities to the pupils. In my role as education development worker I visited the special school to talk about recycling generally and about what we do at Crow. I took some non confidential waste paper for a paper sorting exercise and a mixed box of steel and aluminium cans for a can sorting exercise. We talked about what we can recycle and how it benefits us. Thanks to the Woodlands School for inviting Crow to visit - it was great to meet the pupils and talk about what we do.  

  The aluminium can crushing machines are running this week turning our star recycling metal into bales ready to be driven to a recycling plant and melted down. Then it can get made into anything from more cans, bicycles and buildings to aeroplanes. Aluminium is a pretty plentiful metal  - there's loads of it in the earth's crust. So where is the incentive to recycle? Quite apart from the environmental benefits of recycling it's a great deal cheaper to recycle used aluminium than use new. That's because aluminium occurs as an ore, in other words mixed with other substances. To separate it needs electrolysis, a process which needs large amounts of expensive electricity. At a local level here in Coventry it means we can pay people small amounts of cash for aluminium cans, crush and bale them and get paid by recycling plants for the bales. For some reason they're called biscuits, we don't know why. Aluminium can be recycled over and over again without getting damaged or degraded. Compare that to plastic - for a start it can be harder to get the recycled stuff up to the same standards as the new - no problem for our recycling star aluminium. Image by Jasmin Sessler from Pixabay Plastic is light and takes up loads of space in our van. But we still get paid by the tonne. The price paid for plastic we had sorted into its different grades would hardly cover the diesel of driving it to the plant given how many van loads it would take to make up a tonne of such light material. Meanwhile cheap or reasonably priced oil, one of the main ingredients of plastic, is an [...]

  We are closed on this year's early May Bank Holiday which falls on Monday May 6 this year. We're open as normal the rest of the week.