Recycling Rewards for Schools is a new initiative from the Leicestershire Waste Partnership (a partnership of local authorities) designed to help improve levels of recycling across the region.The scheme, which was piloted from 1st October 2005 to 31st March 2006, asks local people to pledge, or promise, to recycle their household waste and nominate a school whom they would like to benefit from their pledge. As people in the region keep their pledge and begin to recycle, points will be distributed across local primary schools, based on the number of pledges they have received and the amount of rubbish being recycled.

This means that the more pledges a school collects, the more points they will be awarded as part of the scheme. These points can then be exchanged for valuable equipment from a Recycling Rewards catalogue.There are lots of items to choose from, with different point values, so schools can choose to redeem their points for low value items such as digital cameras (350 points) or save them up for higher value equipment, like a Mac computer (5750 points).

Pupils can win prizes too. By asking their parents to help them persuade family and friends to sign a pledge and nominate their school, pupils can earn trendy new finger bands and wrist bands in the national recycle green and bearing the national recycle logo. Also, the best performing pupil from each participating school, in terms of pledges collected, will win for themselves an MP3 player.