“As a police officer in inner London since 2005 I’ve had the privilege of working alongside Helicopter Emergency Medical Service (HEMS) crews, like KSS, as they attend serious incidents. To see them working in front of you is amazing, doing things that are normally done in a well-lit, sterile hospital at the roadside with traffic passing by. They really are heroes, and I take my hat off to them.
It was great to hear that KSS were so supportive when I first went to them with the idea of raising money by collecting used coffee pods for recycling.
At first I was just collecting from friends and neighbours in my road, and every six months we’d take a 20kg box down to the post office to send off.
As word spread people started leaving bags of pods outside my door while I was at work. Then our local village post office offered to become a collection point and we started building up a network of volunteers across the county. When the crisp packet recycling scheme started, I started collecting those too.
Now, because of a Government-backed initiative called the Flexible Plastics Fund, which means retailers are encouraged to take items for recycling, both the coffee pod and crisp packet schemes have come to an end (so please don’t offer me any more!) and charities can’t benefit.
I am delighted to say that between them the two schemes have raised a total of £88K for KSS since 2017. Once the final payments have come through it should be well over £90K, and I am planning on taking part in various sponsored activities to get us over £100K mark. Information on these will be available here.
I’m pleased with what we’ve achieved, but the thing that gives me a buzz, is spotting one of the helicopters and knowing that we have played a small part in getting it in the air.
Although I won’t be raising funds through recycling, I will continue to be a 100% committed supporter and volunteer with KSS.
My thanks go to the thousands of people who have supported us and my fellow volunteers who made the schemes so successful. To the crews and wider charity team, thank you. You are such a brilliant bunch of people and make this charity what it is.”
