You can now recycle your hearing aids at Tracy James Hearing
Tracy James Hearing have joined forces with Hearing aid recycling a charity that excepts old hearing aids and hearing aid batteries. They are then repurposed and donated for reuse for those that need them both in the UK and around the world (to Kenya, Ukraine, South Africa, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Uganda and Pakistan this year alone,)
As a registered collection centre for the charity, you can simply drop off any hearing aids you no longer need at our clinic in Wharf Street
Alternatively you can post them to Hearing Aid Recycling, PO Box 313, Chipping Norton, OX7 9FT
(Please ensure that any batteries are labelled new or used)
A little bit about Hearing Aid Recycling (HAR)
How do they refurbish your donated aids?
“We use Amjad Awawdeh as our charity ambassador when it comes to refurbishing aids, but we do also use a range of different organisations when it comes to programming specific aids. We check the basics (ear-hooks and battery doors), before they get sent to Amjad, if they need any added work. On this note, it’d be wonderful if you could leave ear-hooks in place if any aids of yours have them as we can dispose of any custom moulds, while keeping the generic hooks. This would be a massive help to us as the hooks themselves are hard to come by and are expensive for our small organisation or the people we send them out to, and without them the aids are clearly unusable. We ensure that basic functions are working; that the aids are clean, and remove any with physical wear that makes them unusable.”
Where do they send the donated aids to?
“As for where these aids will hopefully be going. So far, we’ve been able to send out to Ukraine (we are actually working on sending out 1000 to a group of audiologists in the country this December). We have also been working closely with a man called Fletcher in Malawi, he runs a huge collection of centres in that country which we’ve managed to help (from schools, too hospitals).
If you want a specific story, then we have been able to help a boy called Precious in Malawi who had suffered from severe malaria as a 7-year-old which caused major hearing loss. He lost his hearing and was mocked in class which subsequently led to him leaving school around the same time. Thanks to our donated hearing aids and Fletcher’s efforts we were able to provide him with a pair of Phonak hearing aids for free and, after almost 7 years, he’s been able to return to school aged 14.
These two examples are only a tiny example of what we’ve been able to do so far. Hopefully this gives you a good idea of how our organisation operates and is able to provide these devices to those in need for free.
We’ve sent aids to Kenya, Ukraine, South Africa, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Uganda and Pakistan this year alone, and are hoping to work with others to expand our reach even further!”
