February 13th, 2011 
Tushar Mathur 
There are all sorts of good reasons to raise money, and collection drives are a pretty common way of getting the cash you need for a charitable cause. Whether you’re looking to bolster the arts in your community, you need pledge money for a breast cancer walk, or you’re devoted to helping the Red Cross boost their funding for disaster relief, there are a lot of ways you can get others to donate money to your cause. Often, collection drives get local businesses to offer freebies (both products and services) for raffle as a way to encourage support. But if you’re looking to do something a little different, that doesn’t necessarily require any monetary donations at all, why not host a collection drive for bottles and cans? People can bring in bags of their discarded plastic, glass, and aluminum that you can turn into cash at the recycling center.
This type of collection drive is a win-win for everyone. Your friends, neighbors, and members of the community get to feel good in two ways. By bringing you their cans and bottles they are not only contributing to a charitable cause without having to spend a cent, they are also doing their part to embrace an eco-consciousness, reducing their waste and creating a more beautiful planet for all of us to share. You, on the other hand, have your work cut out for you what with hauling everything down to the recycling center. But you’re bound to get a pretty good turnout if you advertise appropriately and you’ll likely earn a good amount of cash for your charity of choice.
Now, you might need to hold a number of drives in different parts of the city in order to get the amount of money you’re looking for. Although you can do pretty well delivering bottles and cans in bulk, a day’s haul won’t get you anywhere near a goal that numbers in the thousands, for instance. However, by going to different neighborhoods to hold drives, you can get a lot of locals to walk or drive their recycling over to you. This will be especially effective if you advertise your intentions well ahead of time. By posting ads in local periodicals as well as going door-to-door a few weeks in advance with flyers, people will know you’re there and probably make an effort to save up and drop-off bags to you on the dates of your collections.
You might be surprised by the lengths people will go to in order to help a worthy cause. Although most of us live within our own spheres of worry (mostly about our own lives), we can become motivated to act, especially when all that’s being asked of us is not to throw something away. Your neighbors in the community may not be willing to send money to charity, and they might not even muster the effort to drive to the recycling center, but if you do the heavy lifting, so to speak, they could just be willing to give you a small hand, and thus feel like they’ve made an effort to improve the lives of others. In return, you’ll be able to reach your goal much more quickly and make a sizeable donation to the charity you hold dear.
Sarah Danielson writes for E-PAK Machinery, an industry leading manufacturer of in-line liquid packaging machinery. Whether you are looking for a bottle filling equipment or water bottling equipment E-PAK Machinery can tailor a solution to meet your specific needs.
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