Walking into the Children’s Scrapstore, the first thing you notice is the atmosphere. The walls are painted in bright swirls of colour, children can be heard squealing around the corner, and within my first half an hour there at least 20 strangers shoot me beaming smiles. “People love being here, and it really shows”, explains CEO Jeff Hill, who is also sporting a seemingly permanent grin. “Honestly, if you stand on the till and serve customers through the day, you’d be amazed.”

The scrapstore as a concept goes back a long way, and there are hundreds in the UK alone. “As far as I’m aware it’s an American idea”, says Hill, “[but] it’s happened in several places at once. We’ll never get to the bottom of who started it.” The Bristol Children’s Scrapstore, however, started life in 1982 as a Friends of the Earth project, headed by environmentalist and publisher Alastair Sawday. The primary service of collecting scrap and selling it on to the public is still essentially the same as it was back then, but from this original idea the charity has diversified into numerous separate projects, all with the common intention of using waste materials to encourage children’s play and creativity. For £13.50, members can fill a shopping trolley with as much scrap as possible. “It’s a commonsense idea”, says Hill. “And like most good ideas, it’s very straightforward. There’s the waste, there’s the need, and here’s a marriage.” Membership is open to any group involved with children, whether they be teachers, childminders, nurseries, parent groups, scouts, guides, church groups or afterschool clubs. Students are also welcome, as well as those who work with adults in a therapeutic setting.

The charity will accept almost any kind of useable scrap: material, foil, foam, paint, wool or anything else you can think of. The only stipulation is that all scrap has to be safe. “Safe is a relative term”, Hill explains. Hazardous materials and sharp edges are of course banned, but all scrap must also be new. “It can’t have held food, for instance – we’ll take unused food trays from manufacturers, but we won’t take anything that’s had food in and then been cleaned.” Of the 120 tonnes of scrap received each year, 99 per cent passes the safety criteria, and of the remaining one per cent, as much as possible is recycled. Unusable cardboard and paper are collected weekly, the metal donated to the local scrapyard and pallets given away for reuse. “We are currently investigating the possibilities of plastics recycling for the shrink wrap and other plastic packaging we end up with as waste”, adds Charlie Mason, Warehouse and Waste Resource Manager. The Scrapstore sells very nearly all of what it receives, helped by an informal trading system between the network of UK scrapstores. When stores receive large collections they can ‘swap’ their scrap for other stores’ surpluses. “This enables us to increase the variety of materials that we stock, to distribute more of the materials we source... and increase the overall amount of local business waste we can divert from landfill”, Mason explains.
Attached to the scrap warehouse is the in-house shop ‘Artrageous’. What started off as a small table with some glue and brushes has now grown into a fully-fledged shop that sells smaller arts and crafts materials such as paints, brushes, scissors, glue and glitter to the public as well as to Children’s Scrapstore members. “People come out and say, ‘What I really need now is some Sellotape, and some glue, and some scissors.’ And if you’re asked that enough times, it makes sense to stock it”, explains Hill. “It’s that mix between supplying the members with their bulk items and the very basic art and craft units that they need, like a pair of scissors or a cheap paintbrush.” Every Saturday Artrageous is home to the Super Saturday Sessions, where parents and children can play with the shop’s art and craft materials free of charge. The sessions are hugely popular, and in their early days attracted large numbers of people. “When we first started we had an extra room here, and we had 70 families on a Saturday. And they were coming from as far away from Swindon to visit. We’re hoping that we can find the space to re-expand into those sorts of numbers again.”

The Scrapstore also provides schools with bigger, more robust scrap items as part of its PlayPods scheme. Schools can sign up to have a shed installed in their playground, which is filled with play-enhancing fabric, tyres, crash mats, tubes and all manner of other fun items, and topped up every term to replace damaged items and refresh the play. There are 56 PlayPods nationwide. Twenty-eight are in the Bristol area, with the rest spread around London, Plymouth, Birmingham, Sheffield and Herefordshire. “We have associates in Australia”, adds Hill. “And I was just talking to somebody in Carolina this morning who wants to start one – who’s been here, seen it all, and has gone back to America enthused enough to start one.”With the recession, the charity unfortunately lost the funding required to run its roadshows, which took scrap out to more rural areas around Bristol. “[The funding] naturally came to an end, and it simply meant that we couldn’t afford to do it... In a city you can make something work because of the number of people. That’s the way rural services suffer.”

But with the recent resurrection of the ‘make-do-and-mend’ mentality, the warehouse has seen an increase in the amount of scrap shifted. There hasn’t been a noticeable rise in memberships, but existing members are taking more scrap than they used to. “And that speaks volumes about how tight the purse strings really are”, notes Hill. “It’s a healthy time for us in some ways, but I’d rather it wasn’t, because it’s a tough time.”

The future holds ambitious plans for the Children’s Scrapstore. Firstly, Hill hopes that one day every primary school in the country will have its own PlayPod. “The difference in the quality of life and experience for the children that have them available can be seen by everyone... the positivity that’s coming back is extraordinary. So we’ve got a problem, because we have to make it bigger, and we have to get it everywhere.” To this end, the charity is now drafting funding applications to open a new Children’s Scrapstore in Birmingham, four times the size of the original in Bristol. A larger warehouse would allow for more storage, and a more central location would make it well placed to distribute PlayPod materials nationwide. “We’re also going to have play on the premises for 0-19-year-olds. I want a skate park!” laughs Hill. “I want a skate park, and I want a play area. I want both parents and children, when they’re out to play, to be able to drop in.”

A number of scrapstores around the country have closed recently, highlighting the importance for charitable services not to depend on grants for their funding. It’s as a protection against funding cuts that the Children’s Scrapstore is a blend of company and charity. “Being structured to not be dependent on funding is really the key for the future... We’re structured like a company; we operate with targets and business planning... So we’re really trying to walk that middle path between being astute financially and effective as a charity”, explains Hill. “Not a huge number [of scrapstores have closed] but you hate to see them go, and they are vital... Your local scrapstore is such a value to the community. Support your local scrapstore!”