Your box, your donation!

Bring it back and change it to hope!

SPAR Hungary has been working together with the Hungarian Maltese Charity Service for more than a quarter of a century, and they pay attention to the most needy not only during the festive period, but also during weekdays. From March 31, 2022, there will be another opportunity to do so thanks to a special initiative that prioritizes environmental protection aspects in addition to social sensitivity. The organizers of the program ask the public to redeem the aluminum cans collected at home in the machines found at designated SPAR and INTERSPAR stores, and then at the end of the redemption process, select the button offering the opportunity to donate. In this way, the value of the sleeping boxes will serve charitable purposes, as the customers can help the holidays of disadvantaged children in the summer camps of the Hungarian Charity Service. The children of the disabled and the poorest families, although for various reasons, are cut off from many opportunities, live in a restricted living space, and their childhood years do not pass like those of other contemporaries. The opportunity-creating programs of the Hungarian Maltese Charity Service are primarily about them. By offering the price of sleeping boxes, customers can give children in need experiences that they could not get anywhere else.

Every box goes back... - and is reused multiple times

In 2021, users returned more than 20 million boxes in the amount of 320 tons in the machines located in selected SPAR and INTERSPAR stores, which is approximately 2 percent of all the boxes sold in Hungary, which means that SPAR collects the most boxes among the retail chains in the country . Thanks to the cooperation with the organizers of the Minden Doboz Visszajár initiative, the returned product is reused multiple times: by not going into the trash, the environmental burden is reduced in the first place, the metal collected in this way can be used again by the economy, which improves productivity, and the charitable goal is hundreds, provides a cloudless holiday to a child with a difficult fate. The cooperation between Returpack and SPAR Hungary goes back to 2010. Since then, more than 30 sub-box return machines have been installed in the stores of the chain, typically in INTERSPAR hypermarkets. On average, 20 million cans are recycled in the machines operating here every year, which means that more than 220 million aluminum cans - about 3.5 thousand tons - have been recycled in the nearly twelve years that have passed since the start of the cooperation. This quantity reduced the emission of greenhouse gases by 14 thousand tons.

We can save a lot of energy

Using Hungarian statistics as a basis, the recycling of boxes returned in the vending machines in selected SPAR and INTERSPAR stores is equivalent to saving the annual energy consumption of 55,000 people - i.e. a city the size of Zalaegerszeg, Békéscsaba or Eger. Returpack carries out its environmental protection activities by collecting and recycling approximately 70 million aluminum beverage cans, i.e. more than 1,000 tons, each year. Through the Minden Doboz Visszjár program, the company is a member of the international Every Can Counts program, which is a non-profit initiative working to promote the recycling of aluminum cans in 19 European countries and Brazil.

Details of the initiative are available on the following website: www.mindendoboz.hu/adomany

The list of SPAR and INTERSPAR stores participating in the exchange of aluminum boxes is available at the following link: https://www.sparafenntarthatojovoert.hu/szelektiv-hulladek

(Source: Editorial)