Riley, aged nine (left) and Archie aged six Meet Archie and Riley who are some of Crow's youngest suppliers of empty aluminium drinks cans. The pair along with three-year-old sister Izzy-Kay have been saving any they use, picking them up off the streets and asking their grandfather to save any he comes across. They're bagging them up and bringing them to Crow Recycling where they get 30 pence per kilogram. They're aiming to raise some extra pocket money and to contribute to their local rugby club. Disabled volunteers at Crow Recycling will crush and bale the cans and sell them on in bulk to be recycled. The proceeds will help to keep the charity up and running. Office manager Lucy Lynch said: "At Crow we pay 30 pence per kilogram for aluminium cans brought to the warehouse and 25 pence for large loads collected locally in our van. "It's great to have the three children bringing us cans. Aluminium is ideal for us because it's infinitely recyclable - recycled cans are just as good as new ones - and it's cheaper to recycle to extract from the ground." Crow is open for drop offs of aluminium cans Monday to Thursdays 9.30am to 3.30pm except for bank holidays and an annual summer shutdown. More information here.

Work for a small organisation on a budget and need to sharpen up on the General Data Protection Regulations? Getting up to speed on the basics with an online course doesn't have to cost anything. A good place to cover the basics is this course with the Netherlands based University of Groningen. The time estimate is a total of 16 hours recommended as four hours a week over four weeks. As it's completed independently online with no live interaction the 16 hours can be done in a shorter time period than four weeks. The catch with the free version is it can't take longer than four weeks. The free version doesn't include the course assessments and has no certificate at the end. If Another drawback is that it was written in the early days of GDPR when Brexit wasn't a current issue. That means the section about European courts is not all that relevant to people working in the UK dealing with data from UK customers. But apart from that it's a useful summary for those working in small organisations who deal with customer e mail, invoices and contracts. Another plus point is that it's a university course so the information is coming from legal academics who scrutinise and interpret detail of legislation for a living. If you want to do it hurry though as the free version will be taken down on February 9. For those short of time as well as money Irish workplace training company Alison has a free online course here. This one rather grandly claims to teach everything participants need to know about the GDPR in three hours or less. There's no extra charge for a certificate - useful for [...]

Zarah meets staff, volunteers and customers at Crow Recycling Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana saw how waste paper is sorted for recycling and shredded for animal bedding when she visited Crow Recycling. Crow staff and volunteers explained how confidential waste paper is destroyed and packaged by Crow’s shredding and baling machines. That makes it ready to be used as packaging, as animal bedding or sent to a paper mill to be turned into toilet paper. She found out about how non confidential paper such as surplus flyers is sorted and sold on for recycling. She also saw how used aluminium drinks cans are crushed and baled to be sold on to metals dealers ahead of being melted down to make new cans. Zarah met some of the disabled volunteers who sort, shred and bale paper and help with can crushing and baling. She met some of the volunteer trustees and staff. Zarah also visited the Crow Recycling Scrapstore, a shop selling reused materials for arts and crafts. She met some of the customers and enjoyed browsing the jewellery making supplies. Chairman of trustees Bill Smith said: “We were delighted Zarah could visit us and we value her continuing support as our local MP. “ Zarah also offered useful advice about fundraising.

Earlier on this year copies of one of Ireland's daily papers kept dropping through a neighbour's door in our Coventry street. Increasingly frustrated he kept coming round with them. He couldn't understand why we'd ordered a paper covering a country we don't live in any more to be delivered to a house we don't live in any more either. The trouble was we had neither ordered the copies or paid for them. It was a situation where applying the principles of the GDPR would have saved everybody time and the newspaper's management quite a bit of money. Storage limitation, in other words not keeping data any longer than it's needed, is one of the principles of the GDPR. It seems sensible enough but the legislation isn't all that specific. It's worded so that organisations can decide how long they need data for their specific circumstances. The catch is business owners and managers are expected to be able to justify it. Most organisations pick a way through it by having a written data retention policy and adhering to it. The new year is a good time to get started, especially if it's a quiet period for your organisation. The Irish daily newspaper that dropped through the neighbour's door came unstuck for two reasons. First of all it was more than 13 years since a relative had bought a subscription as a present. It seems unlikely they needed to keep the data for that long. So they hadn't complied with a reasonable data retention policy. There comes a point where it would have been fair enough to treat any repeat business from us as that of a new customer. They just had to decide when and do [...]

Chairman of trustees Bill Smith with a pair of the safety boots Crow Recycling celebrates after receiving £350 in National Lottery funding Crow Recycling based in Coventry is celebrating after being awarded £350 in funding from The National Lottery Community Fund.Crow Recycling has used the funding to pay for steel tipped non slip safety boots for people to use on work experience. Crow’s mission is to provide work placements for disabilities by recycling office waste paper and cans and running a Scrapstore selling reused items for arts and crafts. At the moment volunteers on placement are expected to provide their own safety boots but now Crow has a supply to lend.This new National Lottery funding will support disabled volunteers, particularly those on short term placements from school or college who don’t own safety boots.National Lottery players raise over £30 million a week for good causes across the UK. The National Lottery Community Fund distributes a share of this to projects to support people and communities to prosper and thrive.Chairman of Crow Recycling trustees Bill Smith said: “Thanks to National Lottery players, this grant means that we can lend safety boots to our volunteers. That means they don’t have to buy them or ask around to borrow them and removes a barrier to volunteering with us.”Crow Recycling is in Orchard House, Sparkbrook Street, Hillfields, Coventry, CV1 5LB.

From left to right volunteer Tracy Windross, Scrapstore manager Kathy Heart and volunteer Jan Stanley The Crow Recycling Scrapstore celebrated its 10th anniversary this month. The membership shop selling a host of reused items for arts and crafts was set up in 2012. Since then it has been providing bargain resources to crafters, families, schools, nurseries and childminders. The occasion was celebrated with cake at a recent Saturday opening.

Crow Recycling is open Monday April 11 to Thursday April 14. The Scrapstore will close at 2pm on Thursday instead of the usual 3.30pm Crow Recycling is closed Friday April 15 (Good Friday) to Tuesday April 19 (the day after Easter Monday) Crow is open again after the Easter break Wednesday April 10 Thursday April 21 After that opening times go back to normal. Please note normal opening times don't include Fridays  

Here at Crow Recycling we need some help after getting a very generous, huge donation of around 12 large boxes of CDs and DVDs The problem is that we no longer accept CDs and DVDs. We have no way of recycling or repurposing such large quantities, they are not what our Scrapstore customers usually buy and we don't have the staff and volunteer time to sell them elsewhere. The outfit that takes our surplus second hand books doesn't do DVDs or CDS. Lucy Lynch, admin and external relations officer at Crow Recycling said: "You don't have to be a Scrapstore member to take up this offer and if you would like to Ziffit or car boot them be our guest. You just need to be able to collect some or all of them during our opening hours which are Mondays to Thursdays 9.30am to 3.30pm. E mail us on info@crowrecycling.co.uk to let us know you are interested and sort out a date and time to collect them."

The Crow Recycling Scrapstore will be open from 10am to 1pm on Saturday April 2. Fabric, plan and patterned paper and  card, sketch books, jewellery making supplies, wool, haberdashery and a host of other reused crafting supplies are in stock. Come and have a browse. The Scrapstore is a membership shop. Annual membership costs £10. Once membership is paid supplies are at bargain prices such as £1 for a ball of wool and £1.50 for a metre of fabric. Crow Recycling is a charity providing work placements for disabled people. The stock is donated and Scrapstore takings go towards keeping Crow up and running. More information here.