Games Workshop To Start Recycling Old Plastic Sprues!
March 8, 2023 by brennon
Games Workshop has announced that they are going to be starting to recycle plastic sprues and more at their high street stores. You can bring your official plastic sprues, old miniatures and paint pots to your local store and throw them into their sprue bins.
Recycling Initiative // Games Workshop
What can be recycled...
"Any old sprue of plastic Warhammer models, with or without components still on it. You can also hand over old plastic Warhammer models, as well as empty Citadel Colour paint pots. The paint pots should be empty of liquid, but don’t worry about cleaning them. The old acrylic paint residue can all be recycled too."
I certainly like the sound of this and it should be a good way to help the environment whilst also clearing out some of the scrap you might have lying around in your home! They have mentioned that you should only deliver Games Workshop sprues into these bins so no dumping your bitz from other manufacturers like Mantic and the like.
There is a list of participating stores that will be taking part in this trial at the end of March...
- Belfast
- Birmingham
- Brighton
- Cambridge
- Canterbury
- Carlisle
- Exeter
- Ipswich
- Glasgow
- Lincoln
- London (Tottenham Court Road)
- Kings Lynn
- Manchester
- Newcastle
- Norwich
- Nottingham
- Oxford
- Plymouth
- Reading
- Rotherham
- Salisbury
- Sheffield (Central)
- South Shields
- Southampton
- St Albans
- Swansea
- Warhammer World
- York
There should be one near you (hopefully!) if you want to help out. Old plastic sprues and paint pots can then be used to make playground equipment, garden elements or perhaps even some swanky new miniatures.
Will you be taking part in this little initiative?
"...a good way to help the environment whilst also clearing out some of the scrap you might have lying around in your home!"
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I hope this does some good, every little helps
Quite!
“official plastic sprues”? So no recasts or do they simply mean “no other brand”?
I assume only GW brand as they can grind it down and re-use it to make new minis.
If the recasts are made from old GW sprues, I don’t see a problem in recycling them. They might even be classed as conversions.
If I was evil I would hope they use more than 20% recycled material for their new models causing them to be brittle and crumble mawha haha (Luckily I’m not evil and wish them the very best in their endeavour).
Makes sense as I knew a guy who worked a plastic recycling job. Each material is coded differently in their systems and might be tweaked ever so slightly in production.
This is very much good thing so hopefully eventually this goes global.
So…. you buy over priced figures, then instead of throwing the trash into the trash, they like you to return it…for free. And then are they going to re-use the items you paid for and bring back for “no reward” to make more figures for you to buy ?. I guess we need to know more… are they “saving the planet” or just helping the stockholders with more profit…
A little from Column A, a little from Column B. I’m happy to play along if I can keep some plastic out of the city incinerator.
Given how absurdly cheap plastic is as raw material, this simply cannot save them any money. The only reason to recycle plastic is because it turned out it is really bad for things what live on this planet.
This sounds like a good thing, I tried asking the local council if they would have somewhere I could recycle sprues but they said because they didn’t know what they were made of they couldn’t take them.
And what are the odds this nice, pleasant green box worth of various different types of mostly un-recyclable plastics gets promptly thrown in the trash at the end of the week? But hey, thanks for making an extra trip to GW stores! And since you’re here, would you like to buy the latest box of space dwarves?
So cynical! haha.
I’m willing to believe that they at least have a plan to recycle the plastic in some way (although such plans don’t always work out).
But you’re absolutely right that it gives people another reason to pop into the store. I wonder if they’ll roll out the scheme to independent hobby stores…
Yes this is a good thing that GW are recycling old sprue. I have some doubts they are doing it themselves I suspect they have company they are working with because the recycling process is pretty complex and requires equipment to grind, wash, sort and package the material for use. No GW cannot turn it into new minis. You cannot just take random sprue out of a bin melt in down and put it into inject mould systems. For minis going through an inject mould you need a level of quality with the plastic to print the tiny parts. Making… Read more »
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It’s about time GW started thinking about recycling…