Whanganui's St Mary's School collects bread bag tags as an international act of kindness

Grace Harper and students at St Mary's School are collecting bread tags for a charity that purchases wheelchairs for those in need in South Africa. Photo / Bevan Conley

Bread bag tags can surprisingly be multi-purpose but at St Mary's School in Whanganui they are being used to raise money to purchase a wheelchair for a person in South Africa.

Year 8 student Grace Harper said it was a project that was introduced by teacher Cath Daignault after she saw a recent article in the NZ Herald about the tags being used to do a good deed.

"New Zealand bread tags are being sold for recycling to pay for wheelchairs for those who can't get one themselves," Harper said.

Daignault said a woman from a New Zealand recycling company said they would be interested in taking the tags but they were only interested in quantities in tonnes, not kilos.

"So I thought right, how can we make that happen so that's how it sort of came about," Daignault said.

Students involved in the school's service team then came up with a way in which they could collect bread tags.

Grace rang around Whanganui cafes and had five come on board with donations.

"I thought it was a really good idea and an opportunity to do something good," Grace said.

The students decided to make it an inter-house competition where students could bring in tags daily, drop them into a jar and were then allocated one point per bread tag to their house.

In the two weeks the project has been running, students have brought in hundreds of tags but Grace hopes to get lots more before the end of the year.

"I'm going to be leaving at the end of the year so I hope St Mary's does carry it on," she said.

To buy one wheelchair, the school will need to collect 200 bread bags full of tags that are packed into 10 black bags, equivalent to 200kg of tags.

The organisation was founded in 2006 by Mary Honeybun in Capetown. It provides two to three wheelchairs to adults and children in South Africa every month.

"This is our international service, we try and do something within our school, within our parish, then locally, nationally and internationally," Daignault said.

Grace encourages anyone from the community to drop any tags they have into the St Mary's School office.