A sprue is a wonderful thing. When brand new, it’s packed with potential, just waiting to be turned into a new unit. Once it’s been picked clean, and any spare parts moved into the bits box, it can still serve a purpose – whether chopped up into scenery material, or melted into ‘sprue goo’ – but we all know just how quickly ‘dead’ sprues can pile up.
Sadly, in the UK plastic sprues aren’t widely accepted by council kerbside recycling services, meaning the vast majority end up going to landfill when they are eventually discarded. This is objectively a bad thing. There’s too much plastic going into our environment as it is, without adding in the accumulation of thousands and thousands of wargaming projects!
Fortunately, we do have the ability to offer at least some kind of solution to mitigate our hobby’s environmental impact. As a business, we have access to commercial recycling options which allow us to stop sprues going to landfill, and we want to offer that capability to you too.
From today, you’ll find a ‘Dead Sprues’ bin in our HQ Store in Nottingham, at Warlord Games Wigan, and on our stand at events we attend in the UK. Bring us your sprues, pop them in the bin, and we’ll get them recycled for you – it’s that simple!
There are a couple of things to note. Firstly, we can only accept sprues that we sell, as we know exactly what the composition of the plastic is, which is essential information for us to provide to the recyclers. Secondly, please don’t post sprues to us for recycling – we simply don’t have the resources to sort all that incoming mail! If you’ve got a load of dead sprues, save them up for a trip to either of our stores, or the next time the big yellow van comes to your local wargaming show.
We’ve also put together a little reward system to say ‘thank you’ for helping us be a bit greener. For every ten dead sprues you recycle with us (regardless of size, a sprue is a sprue!), we’ll give you a fresh one, absolutely free! These free sprues will be picked at random from a big box by our staff, and there will be all sorts in there, from recent releases to old favourites, a bit of out-of-production ‘dead stock’, and sometimes even pre-release ‘test shots’ – it honestly all depends on what we’ve got in the warehouse at that moment! Please note that bases aren’t included – it’s literally just a free sprue!
Thank you for helping us keep as many sprues as possible out of landfill! We’re doing what we can behind the scenes to get greener, and this is just one of the ways we’re working to reduce the environmental impact of wargaming.
