Starting this Wednesday, March 14, Lanzarote and La Graciosa will also be able to recycle writing instruments that have reached the end of their useful life, such as pens, mechanical pencils, markers, permanent markers, correction pens or highlighters, preventing their final destination from being the waste dump, thanks to a collaboration campaign by the Cabildo, developed by 'Lanzarote Recicla'.
The Councilor for Education and Waste, Carmen Rosa Márquez, explained that "due to the characteristics of this material (heterogeneity of its size and its composition of metals, plastic polymers and dyes, among others) and not being packaging, today there is no system designed for the recovery and management of these discarded writing instruments and their recycling is restricted to a few recycling companies around the world." Thus, the collected material will be sent to a specialized plant in France, along with what is recovered in other islands of the archipelago.
To this end, the Cabildo of Lanzarote has joined the initiative of the ARBol project (Action for the Recycling of Pens and other writing elements) through the participation of educational centers that are part of the 'Recicole' educational recycling program. In total, about thirty centers will participate in the collection of this material, as well as the Island Library and the four clean points of Lanzarote where this waste stream can also be deposited.
Educational centers on the island that want to join the campaign, promoted through the Recicole project, can do so by requesting the collection of this writing material through Lanzarote Recicla (lanzaroterecicla@cabildodelanzarote.com).
At the end of the school year, the Waste area of the Cabildo will remove the writing material collected by each participating school, as well as that deposited in the network of clean points and in the Library, and it will be stored in the Zonzamas Environmental Complex for subsequent shipment to Gran Canaria, in coordination with the ARBol Project and with the collaboration of Martínez Cano Canarias. There it will be joined to the rest of the material collected in the rest of the islands that have also joined the initiative and will be transferred to the peninsula to be recycled, through the TerraCycle and BIC Foundation, in a recycling plant located in the South of France.
This project was born in the Canary Islands in 2015, driven by a group of students from the CFGS Environmental Chemistry of the IES Politécnico Las Palmas, to collaborate with the program created by the TerraCycle and Bic Foundation for the recovery and recycling of writing elements that have reached the end of their useful life.