SEVERAL local charities have been given a Christmas boost with small grants from SUEZ, the company which carries out kerbside collections of waste and recycling for Somerset Council.

The Onion Project, On Your Bike, The Christmas Sparkle Project, and Children’s Hospice South West each received a £500 award.

The money came through SCOPE, a not-for-profit expert practitioner service operated by SUEZ recycling and recovery UK.

Each year, SCOPE, which designs and implements solutions to help organisations reduce their waste and maximise resources at every stage in their value chain, divides the profits generated by those solutions among local charities as part of a Christmas fund to ensure they deliver social as well as environmental benefits.

This Christmas, it has shared more than £35,000 with 83 charities across the UK.

The charities are chosen by SUEZ’s 5,600 workforce, many of whom would have already donated time to support their nominated charity as part of the company’s ‘Day a Year to Volunteer’ programme, where colleagues are encouraged to take an extra day of paid leave to help a good cause in their area.

The Onion Project, which is based in Lydeard St Lawrence, is a trauma informed specialist organisation and community-focused social enterprise working with children and young people who are at high risk of being exploited or are currently being exploited in Somerset to offer flexible interventions.

On Your Bike, a registered charity founded in 2010 in Wellington but now based in Taunton, supports a wide range of people to gain skills and confidence through recycling and refurbishing bicycles for re-use in the community.

The Christmas Sparkle Project, which is run by volunteers, now gives nearly 3,000 Christmas presents to local children and young people in the Wellington and Taunton areas to ease the pressure on parents struggling to make ends meet and who cannot afford to buy gifts for their children.

The Children’s Hospice South West, which has a number of local charity shops, provides hospice care for babies, children, and young people living with life-limiting conditions and their whole family.

SUEZ chief technical development and innovation officer Stuart Hayward-Higham said: “The skills and experience we have within our core business can help product manufacturers design with the planet in mind and ensure they are not wasting their time, money, or the Earth’s resources.

“However, innovation can deliver much more in terms of social capital, and the not-for-profit status of the SCOPE programme means businesses that use it can deliver social as well as environmental outcomes for themselves and communities across the UK.”

SUEZ recycling and recovery UK has a £24 million a year contract for 10 years until 2030 in Somerset for kerbside collections of refuse, recycling, food waste, garden waste, clinical, and bulky waste across West Somerset and the Wellington area.

Across Somerset as a whole it carries out about 385,000 collections a week and also runs container delivery services and assisted collections and operates waste transfer stations to bulk and consign recyclable material.