How many cardboard boxes does it take to build a pirate ship?

Posted in Environment, Our Community.

Captain Rummage and his trusty cardboard ship

Ever since we mentioned our recycling pirate on the backs of our packs, we've been getting lots more messages from people wanting to know more about 'Captain Rummage'.

To be fair, a lot of those messages are along the lines of 'I beg your pardon?' - but that's not all that surprising. Not every tea company has one. We won't go into too much detail about his origins (you can learn more here) but in short, Captain Rummage runs our community recycling initiative, The Cone Exchange.

Chris (as he's known to his mum) started The Cone Exchange as a sideline, a way to find creative uses for all the leftover odds and ends from our factory that would otherwise go to landfill. Over the years, it's grown to be much, much more - a key part in a network of community and national charities, craft centres and scrap stores.

As well as manning the Cone Exchange with his team of volunteers, Chris also dons his pirate gear to go out to schools and get children excited about 'turning trash into treasure'. Like in the picture above, where together they built a pirate ship out of surplus cardboard boxes.

So he's always up to something.

The latest drive is to help with the Yorkshire Rainforest Project, our mission to save a Yorkshire-sized piece of rainforest.

Given that The Cone Exchange is a community initiative, the Captain is aiming to contribute enough funds to the project to save an area of endangered rainforest the size of our local community (the postcodes HG1 and HG2, in fact).

By swapping with a network of local scrap stores, Chris has also developed a Craft Shop, where budding crafts folk can pick up all sorts of items from buttons to sparkly gems and card, with all the proceeds going towards the Cone Exchange's mini-rainforest project.

For more information, visit our Cone Exchange website.

(The answer's 158 by the way.)

Captain Rummage teaching kids how to turn trash into treasure

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