Myakka are once again supporting Fair Trade Fortnight, an annual event co-ordinated by the Fair Trade Foundation.  Running between 22^nd February and 7^th March this year’s Fair Trade Fortnight centres on a campaign called ‘The Big Swap’.

Somerset based furniture and home accessories retailer, Myakka are supporting the Fair Trade Foundation’s big swap by encouraging customer’s to swap their plastic carrier bags for reusable, fair trade jute shopping bags.  For every ten plastic bags sent in, Myakka will send customers a brand new, hard-wearing jute shopper completely free of charge.  All the plastic bags collected will be sent for recycling.

“It’s not quite as easy to swap your furniture for a fair trade option as it is your tea, coffee or chocolate but we wanted to show support for this increasingly important annual event co-ordinated by the Fair Trade Foundation and came up with the ‘big bag swap’ as a way of taking part,”  commented Simon Whitehead, Director of Myakka.  

Last year, Myakka’s team were part of the record breaking fair trade banana eating campaign which took place between 6^th and 7^th March 2009. Over 380,000 campaigners each ate a fair trade banana during the 24 hour period, smashing the previous record. This year’s ‘Big Swap’ is aiming to generate over one million and one swaps over the two week period and change the lives of millions of suppliers around the World. Swaps are recorded through the online swap-o-meter which can be found on the Fair Trade Foundation’s website: www.fairtrade.org.uk.

To generate a swap customer’s simply need to send ten plastic bags with a return address to:  Myakka, Tythings Commercial Centre, Wincanton, Somerset, BA9 9EQ.  Customers will then be sent a reusable, fair trade jute bag completely free of charge and encouraged to visit the online swap-o-meter to register their swap.

Simon Whitehead actually flies out to India on 22^nd February, the first day of Fair Trade Fortnight, to meet with key suppliers and visit community projects which Myakka are involved in.  Simon will be approving the latest new furniture samples which will be launched in Myakka’s Autumn Catalogue between visits to SKSN School.  Projects include the supply of desks and benches to the local school, a youth training scheme empowering older children with the skills to earn a living and now an apprenticeship scheme to educate older children in carpentry.

Georgie Hopkins concluded, “Most people associate the fair trade label with tea, coffee and chocolate production.  There are many more items produced following fair trade principles which help to offer the people involved what we in the UK take for granted.  Fair Trade Fortnight and The Big Swap campaign is a great opportunity to raise awareness of this.”

Myakka is an active member of Ethical Junction, learn more

Tags: big bag swap, fairtrade, fairtrade fortnight

This entry was posted on Friday, February 19th, 2010 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Lifestyle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.