FAQs

2 billion people don’t have their rubbish collected. Bin Twinning is helping to fund sustainable projects in the world’s poorest communities that collect rubbish, dispose of it safely, recycle as much as possible and promote waste reduction. This vital combination saves lives, creates jobs and protects the planet.

Bin Twinning raises funds for Tearfund’s global Environmental and Economic Sustainability programme. Local partner organisations in Bangladesh, DRC, Haiti, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan and Uganda are setting up projects to tackle the critical waste management issues in these countries. At present, when you Twin your Bin, it is possible to twin with a social enterprise project in Haiti, Pakistan or Uganda that is setting up rubbish collection services and recycling hubs. As soon as we receive photos from other countries, we will be able to offer those projects as Bin Twins.

For a one-off donation of £45, you can twin a bin inside your home with a project in Haiti or Pakistan, and your external wheelie bin with a project in Uganda. You can also twin a commercial bin for a one-off donation of £150.

If you donate £45 or £150 to twin your bin, you help fund an environmentally sustainable project in an impoverished community that is collecting household waste, disposing of it safely, creating a spin-off recycling business, and promoting waste reduction – an essential combination that protects people’s health, protects the environment and provides jobs.

Why £45? We have calculated that across our five main Environmental and Economic Sustainability projects in Pakistan, Haiti, Uganda, DRC and Nigeria, the average cost per direct beneficiary is £49, so we have rounded this down to a donation amount of £45.

Our sister charity campaign Toilet Twinning sends out framed certificates for people to hang in their loo. With Bin Twinning, we want you to be able to put your ‘certificate’ on your bin, so when you twin, we will send you a presentation folder (with info about the enterprise that you have twinned with) containing your chosen Bin Twinning sticker, so you can fix this to your bin.

If you are twinning your food compost bin, we recommend that you go for the small A7 sticker, as although A7 is very small, small is beautiful! You’ll be twinning with a great project in Pakistan. And A7 is the perfect size to affix to a small composting bin on a kitchen worktop.

If you are twinning a larger inside bin such as a kitchen pedal bin, we would recommend going for the medium A6 sticker – and you’ll be twinned with a brand-new social enterprise in Haiti.

If you twin your external wheelie bin, recycling bin or garden waste bin, we’ll send you an A5 sticker featuring a photo of the plastics-recycling project in Uganda. And if you give us your house number, we will send you the number stickers so you can add those to the sticker for a personalised touch! (We do not offer alphabet stickers, so we cannot offer personalisation if you live in a home without a number, and only a name. Sorry.)

For your Bin Twinning certificate, we have worked with a supplier that uses light-weight materials, alternative fibres, certified papers, recycled content, solvent-free adhesives, and is committed to creating wash-off and fossil-free solutions. As such, we have done all we can to create a sticker that is as environmentally friendly as possible, while still being durable (and, with the A5 sticker for wheelie bins, able to withstand inclement weather). Please note that the backing paper to the sticker can be recycled. (The ‘polished’ surface is achieved by running the paper over mirrored rollers).

With Toilet Twinning (and Tap Twinning), our sister campaign, it is possible to put your name on your certificate, as we print Toilet Twinning and Tap Twinning certificates on card. With Bin Twinning, because we are sending you a sticker to put on your bin, those have to be pre-printed, and cannot be personalised.

Yes – simply select a different delivery address when going through the checkout process and enter your friend’s details. If you are twinning a bin via the post or on the phone, you can indicate on your order form or over the phone that you’d like the sticker to go to a different address.

Yes. You currently have a choice of seven countries:

1. If you wish to twin with Pakistan, you will receive our Small A7 sticker, which is the perfect size for a small worktop composting bin.
2. If you choose to twin with Haiti, you will receive our Medium A6 sticker, which has been designed to go on a household pedal bin or interior waste bin.
3. If you twin with Bangladesh, Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Nigeria, Nepal, Pakistan or Uganda, you will receive our A5 sticker, which is made of a durable material that enables the sticker to go outside – on a wheelie, recycling or garden waste bin.

For businesses, schools, and churches in particular, you can twin with the Democratic Republic of Congo, if you donate £150 to twin your commercial bin. You will receive your Bin Twin on an A4 sticker. (Although, of course, it is completely up to you what you do with your stickers, and you can put the A4 sticker on any bin – outside or inside – as you wish…)

Twinning stickers within the UK are sent second class via Royal Mail. Our standard turnaround time for certificates is 5-6 days; however, you should allow up to 10 working days for your Bin Twin to arrive after placing your order, especially during our busy Christmas ordering months of November and December. If your Bin Twin is for a gift and the big day is looming, please email us at [email protected] and we’ll do everything we can to get your order out as quickly as possible.

For international orders, please allow 15 working days for European orders to be delivered, and 20 working days for orders to the rest of the world.

We ask you to consider adding a voluntary donation of £3 to cover the cost of sending your Twinning order to an address within the UK

If you have been waiting 10 working days – or your Bin Twinning order is urgently needed for a certain day – then please do get in touch with us. We will usually be able to arrange for a replacement order to be sent out. If Royal Mail second-class post is going to mean your Twin arrives too late, we will be able to send you a PDF of your sticker to print out as a demo, while you wait for your sticker to arrive. Also, you can go to our Resources section and download a voucher that says ‘Your Bin Twin is on its way’ if you wish to give that as a gift card, while you are waiting for the actual Bin Twin to arrive.

For international orders, please allow 15 working days for European orders to be delivered, and 20 working days for orders to the rest of the world.

We will send a Bin Twinning ‘certificate’ to pretty much anywhere in the world! The cost of twinning your bin from overseas is £45 sterling, converted to your local currency. A good comparison is the exchange rates quoted at airports or other consumer currency exchange shops. A £7 sterling mandatory postage charge is added to your overseas order.

For international orders, please allow 15 working days for European orders to be delivered, and 20 working days for orders to the rest of the world.

We have a map of our supporters in the UK and worldwide so that you can see your own twinning activity (and that of others nearby!). If you’re not on the map, and want to be, please get in touch via email ([email protected]) or call us on 0300 303 3053.

Our sister charity campaign Toilet Twinning sends out framed certificates for people to hang in their loo. With Bin Twinning, we want you to be able to put your twinning ‘certificate’ on your bin, so when you twin, we will send you a presentation folder (with info about the enterprise that you have twinned with) containing your chosen Bin Twinning sticker, so you can fix this to your bin.

If you are twinning your food compost bin, we recommend that you go for the small A7 sticker, as although A7 is very small, small is beautiful! You’ll be twinning with a great project in Pakistan. And A7 is the perfect size to fix to a small composting bin on a kitchen worktop.

If you are twinning a larger inside bin such as a kitchen pedal bin, we would recommend going for the medium A6 sticker – and you’ll be twinned with a brand-new social enterprise in Haiti. Although, if you prefer to twin with Uganda and have an A5 sticker, that will work just as well.

If you twin your external wheelie bin, recycling bin or garden waste bin, we’ll send you an A5 weatherproof sticker featuring a photo of the plastics-recycling project in Uganda. And if you give us your house number, we will send you the number stickers so you can add those to the sticker for a personalised touch! (We do not offer alphabet stickers, so we cannot offer personalisation if you live in a home without a number, and only a name. Sorry.)

You may have noticed that we used the word stickers and certificates interchangeably when it comes to talking about your Bin Twin. We’re not trying to confuse you – honest! Your Bin Twin, which carries the words ‘This bin is TWINNED with… a recycling project in [name of country] is a sticky certificate, so that you can fix it to a bin. With our sister charity, Toilet Twins are celebrated in the form of a framed certificate that can be hung in a loo. With Bin Twinning, some of you might refer to your twin as a ‘certificate’, others of you might refer to it as a ‘sticker’. Either is fine by us! But it’s basically one and the same thing – you won’t get both!

At the moment, we only have one country option per sticker size, and for each country, we only have one photo image on the sticker – so if you order two or more stickers of the same size/type – ie the outside wheelie bin A5 sticker – you will receive identical stickers through the post. In the future, we hope to have more country options for each sticker size – and then you will be able to have different Twins on your bins.

We chose to launch Bin Twinning in the cheapest and quickest way – and that decision meant we needed to mirror the Toilet Twinning website, and have separate websites for Bin Twinning and Toilet Twinning. To keep costs down, the websites do not interact with each other – but we put all orders in the post from the same office. So, we have a manual system in place in the office to try to put Bin Twins and Toilet Twins in the same parcel, to keep postage costs down. But we may not always be able to spot where orders should be sent together. If they arrive separately, please be assured that the postage cost of two parcels is far less than the cost of putting Bin Twinning and Toilet Twinning together on a single website platform. We will save cost wherever possible, and sending your orders separately, if it happens, is actually our way of protecting your donation, and making sure our overheads are as small as possible.

Online: The easiest way is on here on the website where you can pay by debit or credit card.

Cheque: If you would like to pay by cheque, please make it payable to Tearfund T/A Toilet Twinning, and send it with your an order form (which can be downloaded from the resources page of the website)

To: Bin Twinning, 1052-1054 Christchurch Road, Bournemouth, Dorset, BH7 6DS 

BACS Transfer: a payment can be made directly to the Bin Twinning account:

Account name     Toilet Twinning
Bank                       Barclays
Account                 53798860
Sort code              20-00-00
Reference             BIN then your name/school/organisation details

Please email us with details of amount and date of transfer and whether you would like any twinning stickers so we can track your donation.

If you would like to make regular donations please contact us via email [email protected] or call 0300 303 3053 and we will send you out a standing order form to complete.

We will happily issue you with an invoice. Please contact us by email at [email protected] with details of your organisation name, address and donation amount and we will send an invoice out to you.

If you prefer to donate via BACS, our bank details are:

Account name     Toilet Twinning
Bank                       Barclays
Account                 53798860
Sort code              20-00-00
Reference             BIN then your name/school/organisation details

Bin Twinning funds the work of international relief and development agency Tearfund. Your donation is used in their Environmental and Economic Sustainability programme. This programme is providing seed funding to social enterprises that are being set up to collect people’s rubbish, dispose of it safely, recycle as much as possible, and promote waste reduction.

The Gift Aid System allows Bin Twinning to reclaim the tax on donations from UK taxpayers.

Bin Twinning can claim 25% back on every donation/bin twinned ie. that’s £11.25 added to every £45 bin twin – at no cost to you. You can make a Gift Aid declaration to Bin Twinning if you are a UK taxpayer by completing the Gift Aid details when making payment on our website, or by completing the Gift Aid section on our order forms.

Litter picking kits are not eligible for Gift Aid.

We accept donations through CAF Vouchers/Stewardship Vouchers & Charities Trust Vouchers – please make them payable to Tearfund, and post them to us with your completed order form (which can be downloaded from the resources page of the website) To: Bin Twinning, 1052-1054 Christchurch Road, Bournemouth, Dorset, BH7 6DS

To twin a bin using your CAF Card, please visit CAF Online and search for Tearfund. (Tearfund manages all the CAF finances for Bin Twinning).

Please write ‘Reference Bin Twinning’ under Special Instructions. Once you have made your donation please contact us by email at [email protected] or telephone 0300 303 3053 to confirm the name and address of where you would like your Bin Twin certificates sent. As soon as we receive your donation from CAF we will send your stickers out to you.

To twin a bin or make a donation via your Stewardship account – please visit the Stewardship Website and search for Tearfund. (Tearfund manages all the Stewardship finances for Bin Twinning). When making your donation to Stewardship please add the reference “Bin Twinning”. Once you have made your donation please contact us by email at [email protected] or telephone 0300 303 3053 to confirm the name and address of where you would like your Bin Twin sticker sent. As soon as we receive your donation from Stewardship we will send your sticker out to you.

PLEASE NOTE: You cannot use Stewardship vouchers/Stewardship account for ordering litter pickings kits.

If you need to change any of your details, please can you make sure you contact us within 24 hours of placing your order, and we will be able to help: [email protected]; 0300 303 3053.

If you have been charged twice, we will check our account and if there is more than one transaction in your name, we can refund the transaction(s) made in error. Please note: We are not generally able to refund donations, as it is against charity law. PayPal will only allow us to process refunds up to 60 days after the original transaction.

Tearfund (the charity that Bin Twinning is part of) has very lean operating costs. Only 13% is spent on fundraising. The rest is spent either directly in the field or supporting field programmes.

Bin Twinning is a fundraising arm of Tearfund, and as such, Tearfund’s international team ensures that funds sent to partners are being used for intended purposes. On a quarterly basis, Tearfund’s in-country projects officer or coordinator will undertake field visits. The monitoring visit is undertaken in pairs i.e. a projects officer/coordinator goes with the finance officer to assess the physical evidence of the reported activities against the recorded expenditures. The aspect of value-for-money for each activity / asset is assessed as part of this audit.

Tearfund insists on field visits being conducted by both programme and finance staff so that they can talk to local people (beneficiaries), the local leaders, and other stakeholders in the implementation area, to ensure that the reports being sent in are not talking about other agencies’ project achievements/activities. If Tearfund’s country directors notice any management challenges, they arrange meetings with the Board of Directors of local partners – to raise any observed issues that require performance management.

Two billion people in the world’s poorest countries are living and working among piles of waste, because they don’t have their rubbish collected. They have to burn their rubbish to get rid of it, or throw it in waterways, or live among it. That means they’re breathing toxic air, drinking polluted water and battling sickness. Up to a million people in the world’s poorest countries die each year from diseases caused by mismanaged waste: that’s one person every 30 seconds.

And each day the waste mountains are growing. In cities in Africa and Asia (many of which lie in coastal areas where rubbish ends up in the ocean), municipal solid waste is expected to double in the next 15–20 years.

By donating £45 to twin a household bin, or £150 to twin a commercial bin, you are supporting a rubbish and recycling project in one of the world’s poorest communities.

Single-use plastics (SUPs) are plastic materials that are disposable and generally used only once before they are thrown away or recycled. Plastic water bottles, plastic cups and plastic bags are the most common SUPs.

The first thing we can all do is to reduce our use of SUPs such as plastic bags, coffee cups, plastic plates, cutlery, bottles of water and soft drinks. We can also use products without plastic packaging, such as bars of soap or shampoo bars. Reducing our use of SUPs will make the biggest difference. Sometimes, this can mean just going without them or choosing non-plastic options, or if that’s not possible we can use reusable products instead. If you can’t reduce or reuse, then recycling your plastic is the next best thing you can do.

We live in a world that is driven by consumption. When we demonstrate by our actions that we want to live in a less wasteful world, we are sending a powerful signal that we want decision-makers to act. We have the opportunity to use both our voices and our choices as citizens and consumers to urge governments and companies to make changes that will help people in poverty.

And our actions do have an impact. Each single-use plastic item we save is one less thing in a landfill site, ocean or incinerator – or one less thing shipped overseas for another country to dispose of. By choosing longer-lasting products rather than disposable ones, we are saving precious resources.

Many high-income countries – despite having more developed waste management systems than low- and middle-income countries – have exported their waste to poorer countries as a key strategy to deal with domestic waste.

Since China closed its borders to other countries’ recycling waste in January 2018, the UK has exported plastic waste to other countries in Asia, where concerns have been raised over inspections to ensure correct treatment of this waste. The UK’s Environment Agency has embarked on a major investigation into claims of fraud and corruption, including allegations that exported UK plastic waste is not being recycled. High-income countries must minimise their export of domestic waste. Under the Basel Convention, international legislation has recently been amended so that importing countries must agree to receiving shipments of plastic waste. When plastic waste is exported, we believe that source countries must ensure appropriate recycling facilities are in place in the receiving countries.

We produce a gift range – perfect as alternative gifts which also spread awareness.

The litter picking gift set contains a versatile all-weather Bin Twin (for an outside or inside bin), plus a foldable litter pick, hi-vis jacket and gloves.

If you apply gift aid to your order, this will only be applied to the £45 twinning donation (gift aid rules indicate that the £30 donation for the litter picking kit is ineligible).

You can use CAF or Stewardship for the Bin Twinning element of a gift set order; the remaining £30 will require a different payment method.

Please note that the litter picking kit (without a Bin Twin) is not eligible for gift aid, so CAF vouchers cannot be used.

We use all the money raised to fund Tearfund’s Tearfund’s global Environmental and Economic Sustainability programme.