I was browsing Facebook one day when I saw an advert for the Duracell Big Battery Hunt. I am always looking for new recycling schemes, anything to encourage my children to be involved in recycling or even to make it easier for me to recycle more. The Battery Hunt resources were fantastic and I sent them straight across to the school and showed my 5 year old.

As the PTA Secretary for Buildwas Academy, I then let everyone at school know about the competition and how we could help reduce these batteries going into landfill. Some parents were super enthused about it and the first batteries were handed in to me the very next day.

I under-estimated how much fun me and my daughter would have with this! I posted on a local community Facebook page and within minutes we had several neighbours offer us their batteries. It has been quite a logistical challenge to arrange all of the collections, but well worth it to see our battery pile grow. These could well be batteries that would have ended up in the bin, if we hadn’t highlighted the environmental impact and arranged to collect.

My daughter has really enjoyed knocking on peoples doors, meeting them, telling them all about the Duracell Big Battery Hunt, asking if they know how long a battery stays in the environment for and collecting the massive bags of batteries. We didn’t know that batteries actually weighed so much!

Ava has really stood out in her efforts to collect batteries, a school day is quite long for a 5 year old, but she’s been so enthusiastic about collecting these batteries and telling all our friends and family about the cause and why it is so important to our “world”. She has her own box at home to collect the smaller amounts in and I take the large bags to store safely in my workplace. Even on World Book Day after an exciting and tiring day at school, she walked with me to a local house to collect more batteries and insisting on carrying them the whole way (so heavy!).

We have had some great success stories with collecting these batteries, from children knocking on their neighbours doors to ask, from parents collecting them via their workplaces (hospitals, shops, schools). I’m not sure we will be able to collect enough to win the main competition, as I only found out about the competition two weeks ago, but we are giving it a good go!