'The shop local experts'

Dealing in plastic gift cards, Why Leave Town is often asked about recycling of the plastic in order to reduce our carbon footprint. The reality is though that the amount of plastic that we use is very small (you could easily fit the 160,000 cards that we have loaded through our programs in a corner of our small office).

 

We have also approached plastic recycling operations, and the volume of cards that we have is just too small to be viable to run through their system.

 

However, we are still conscious of not just throwing this plastic in the bin...and so we have come up with a way to 'reuse' rather than recycle. No we are not talking about reloading the cards (there are several reasons why we wouldn't do this). Instead, we are giving our plastic gift cards are new purpose, but turning them into a unique range of guitar picks!

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These are great collectables for any stringed instrument enthusiast, and will also put this would-be waste to use!

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But here is where it gets really cool...

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The picks will retail for $5 each plus postage. Now that doesn't sound that cool...in fact, it sounds a little pricey for a plastic home made guitar pick. However, all funds that are raised through the sale of these picks will go to supporting those in need.

 

Why Leave Town Gift Card have been used extensively for relief and recovery purposes. During the peak of the drought we had lots of organisations approaching us wanting to use our cards to distribute funds to local farmers that were doing it tough.

 

Local businesses were also suffering and so this proved to be the perfect solution. i.e. help a farmer out, and then they would go and spend their gift card at a local business. This doubled the impact of relief funds!

 

As well as organisations, we also had individuals purchasing cards on our website, and asking us to give them to those in need, and hence we setup a channel to do this. This has since been used to help distribute relief funds for floods, bushfires, Covid-19 and even the recent mouse plague. Covid restrictions are having a huge impact on local businesses right now, and so for every 4 picks that are sold we will be sending out a $20 gift card to one of local WLT participating stores.

 

It's a long way from offsetting some of the losses these businesses are suffering, but hopefully it still helps put a smile on their face during this difficult time. Plus it is also a way to reduce our carbon footprint while also helping money to continue to flow through local businesses.