Get books for cans in the bookstore of recycling

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An innovative idea by the Ex Libris Café of Polla (Salerno): customers who bring metal waste will receive the equivalent value in books.

Getting books in return for garbage? It happens in Polla, in the province of Salerno, at the ExLibris Café. The “bookstore of recycling” is a new idea to promote reading by bookstore owner Michele Gentile.

The system is quite simple: you go to the bookstore, or to any Metalfer metal waste collection centre, and you bring metallic waste of any kind: aluminium, lead, brass, copper, steel, etc… in return for this waste you get the equivalent value in books, depending on current market quotations of metal.

This way, if you bring 18/20 kg of aluminium cans you can get a book of the value of about 10€, while with 20 kg of brass you can get a dictionary, and with 12 kg of copper a geographic atlas.

“My bookstore is the only one in the Vallo di Diano area, which comprises 19 towns and 60,000 people – explains Gentile, the inventor of the Libreriamo initiative – The idea is to encourage young people to invest in books too, not just in bars or gambling rooms. This led me to imagine a new model of bookstore, a sort of franchising of recycling that with some work and patience would be able to support a whole network of recycling bookstores. The first of these bookstores, for now, is in Polla, and we are looking for young people who would be interested in starting a whole new concept of bookstore. The idea of a bookstore network came to me after I saw with my own eyes the positive impact it can have on schools, where I had enthusiastic reactions. For example, this May the kids of the middle school of Sala Consilina brought me 70€ worth of aluminium and got books for their classroom library in return”.

Source: Libreriamo