CHAGFORD’S recycling yard Proper Job is opening its very own shop in the empty post office building in the town centre.

Staff are working towards opening the shop in time for Chagford’s late night shopping event on Tuesday, December 12.

The Uptown shop will stock a selection of good quality, affordable pre-loved items such as clothing, furniture, books and homewares. There will also be a range of reclaimed and up-cycled items from local fixers and makers.

All the stock will come via Proper Job’s yard half a mile outside the town, where more than two million tonnes of materials are recycled each week. Profits will be ploughed back into the not-for-profit organisation to fund free upcycling and composting workshops.

Charity chief executive Alison Sallis said: ‘It is something we have always wanted to do, to make Proper Job more accessible to the local community and to showcase what we have got down here.

‘It is a great opportunity and means we will be employing two new members of staff and filling up an empty shop space in the town, which is so important. Webber’s has closed, the post office has been empty for a year now, and the two banks have also closed down in the past year, so the town is looking quite empty at the moment.

‘Primarily we are there for the local community, but we also get a lot of people who come to Chagford just to see the project and we hope having a shop in town will encourage more people to come into Chagford town centre. It is really nice to have a central location.’

Proper Job was launched by the community back in 1995 as a composting scheme on the town’s allotments and Proper Job opened their yard opposite Market Field in 2000 as a response to Chagford’s lack of local authority recycling facilities.

‘The thing about us is, we pretty much take anything,’ said Alison. ‘We do reclamation, clothing, furniture and books and we take green waste as well, and turn that into compost. A lot of people come with a whole carload and we take the whole load. We then have eight staff at the yard who work on reclamation, sorting and repairing the donations before selling them at affordable prices, thus reducing landfill.’

The co-operative, which also runs the Courtyard Café and Shop in Chagford Square, employs 20 local people, and the opening of the new Uptown shop will take that total to 22.