SINGAPORE - About 25,000 students from low-income families were the first to get to choose from more than 725,000 donated textbooks at Our Tampines Hub on Saturday, in the 40th edition of the FairPrice Share-A-Textbook project.
An annual initiative to help low-income families and promote environmental sustainability through the re-use and recycling of textbooks, the 2022 programme kicked off on Nov 1 when FairPrice called for the public to donate textbooks, storybooks, dictionaries, encyclopaedias and assessment books.
A record of more than 2,700 volunteers collected the used textbooks from various FairPrice stores and helped sort them at Arena@Our Tampines Hub.
FairPrice Group chief executive Vipul Chawla lauded the effort to promote sustainability.
In a speech on Saturday, Mr Chawla said: “We have been running this for many years, I’m really pleased that it is in its 40th year… And this year, while we had a target to collect and redistribute half a million books, we collected more than 725,000 books, which equates to almost 9,000 trees saved.
“Over the years, we have recycled 7.5 million textbooks, which equates to more than 90,000 trees saved.”
The programme has collected, redistributed and recycled that number of textbooks since its launch in 1983. And in the past decade, it has helped more than 300,000 people.
The public started collecting the used books on Sunday, and can also do so on Monday.
In 2021, a record 895,000 textbooks and assessment books were collected and redistributed.
At the event on Saturday, FairPrice also held the second edition of its Food-Innovation-Technology Hackathon, which aims to raise environmental awareness among youth.
The top 10 teams presented their proposals for a more sustainable future – the initiatives included waste reduction and retail innovation – to a panel of industry experts.
Kapaw&Co, a group of four students from Singapore Polytechnic, pocketed the top prize of $10,000 after proposing to reduce food waste by collecting unwanted meat trimmings and vegetables, and turning them into pet food.
Minister for Social and Family Development Masagos Zulkifli, the guest of honour, thanked the students for their ideas.
Mr Masagos, who is also an MP for Tampines GRC, said: “Your ideas may seem small, but this is how we start. We start from caring, from being aware, and we try to put all the solutions that we can into these problems.”
