Thousands of musical instruments are thrown away every year – but a growing number of UK schemes are giving them, and the children who play them, a second chance
Jason, a year 11 student from Manchester, sits tall with a cello resting in the space between his knees. Sunlight spills through the window of the practice room, pooling on the amber wood of the instrument. If you look closely, you might notice the faint scars of a crack that once left this 114-year-old cello nearly silent. Jason lifts his bow, straightens his shoulders. The first notes come tentatively, a whisper of horse hair on string, before growing into a clear, steady sound that fills the room.
Not long ago, Jason’s afternoons disappeared behind a bedroom door, the blue glow of a computer screen his only stage. Now, his weekends are spent performing classical pieces with fellow young musicians.
The cello – now his cello – came to him through a local charity, the Olympias Music Foundation. It has become an anchor, something to hold on to. “If it wasn’t for Olympias, I probably wouldn’t have been exposed to a lot of opportunities like I have,” he says. Rescued from disrepair, restored with care, the instrument has been given a new life – and in return, it’s helped Jason find his own.
Jason, with his ever-present smile, is an outgoing young man and describes himself as “joyful” and “curious”. Coming from a musical family he can also play the piano and guitar but his focus is now on his new love – the cello. “I enjoy music even more now,” he says. “I listen to it more and more.” His friendship group has always been expansive – he enjoys playing rugby, basketball and table tennis – but he says it has grown further as he spends more time talking and performing with his fellow musicians.
His father, Ifeanyi, sits nearby among a stack of books. He says that learning an instrument has helped Jason to focus more and become calmer. “I can see how happy Jason is when he plays.”
Next to Jason, 11-year-old Azra clutches her violin with pride. Her instrument was salvaged from a pile of broken violins and fixed up during a mending weekend organised by the Olympias Music Foundation. It was then given to her, free of charge. Without it, she wouldn’t be playing at all. Her instruments have grown with her, smaller violins returned then replaced with larger instruments as she grows in size and skill.
“Performing in front of audiences every year has given me more confidence,” she says. “My friends think it is amazing. They were very impressed when I performed for them at school.”
Jason sits with his donated cello
Although there are no official figures in the UK, it is estimated that more than 10,000 instruments are discarded each year. Some are beyond saving, some were never fit for purpose, but many are now being rescued, restored and reused thanks to a network of determined people who have created initiatives up and down the country. In an era of squeezed school budgets and shrinking arts funding, these efforts are doing more than just preventing waste – they’re giving young people like Jason and Azra tools to flourish.
The scale of musical waste is significant. The surge of musical interest during the pandemic – when more than a million adults in the UK took up new instruments, and retailer Gear4music reported an 80% sales boost – was followed by a government programme in 2022 that distributed 20,000 instruments to schools. But as the initial enthusiasm waned and instruments took inevitable knocks and tumbles, an unwanted consequence emerged: churn and waste on a substantial scale.
“We struggle to find people to fix string instruments,” says music teacher Clara Rundell, pointing to a heap of battered violins and cellos in the corner of her Manchester staffroom – nicknamed the “musical bonfire”. Her frustration is understandable, especially given the impending closure of the Newark School of Violin Making, the only university course of its kind in the UK. Its loss will make luthiery (the art of making and repairing stringed instruments) a critically endangered craft and exacerbate the current shortage of skilled repairers.
People are thrilled that their instruments are being used by young people who could not afford to buy their own
Replacing instruments often feels like the easier option, but this comes with its own problems. “Instruments are made from the wrong alloys, don’t have correctly fitting pads, and you can’t do anything to make them work properly,” says Emma Loat from Forsyth Music shop in Manchester, describing the influx of cheap online replacements that don’t meet basic standards of playability.
Since 2012, Arts Council England has tried to address some of these growing challenges through its network of 43 regional music hubs, each tasked with delivering the government’s national plan for music education. The hubs loan instruments to schools and students at heavily subsidised rates – around £33 per instrument per term or £11 for students on free school meals – and carry out repairs when possible.
Devon’s local hub operates from a warehouse just off the M5. Inside, 15,000 instruments – cracked violins, dented oboes and skinless drums – wait to be cleaned, fixed and sent out to schools.
An estimated 10,000 instruments are discarded each year in the UK
Technician Josie Sherwood plays trumpet in a contemporary pop band that performs regularly in nightspots in nearby towns. Today she’s wearing a black Devon Music Education Hub T-shirt.
“When instruments are returned to the hub, they come back cracked, bent and missing parts,” she says as she confidently picks up a violin she’s repaired countless times. “So my job is to maintain them.”
But even the most dedicated team can only do so much. In the past decade, the Devon hub has had to destroy 1,500 instruments that were beyond repair. A few have been turned into home decor – clarinets transformed into lamps, for instance – but there are limits to how far upcycling can go.
“It never sat well with us when something had to be thrown away,” says the hub’s business and operations manager, Charlotte Yarnley-Jones. So the team partnered with Normans ReTune Project, a national initiative that collects unwanted instruments, repairs or recycles them, and ensures nothing ends up in landfill.
The project was started by Nick Walker, who was working at Normans Education musical instrument supplier when he heard about the mounting piles of broken instruments sitting idle in music hubs. Realising the potential of their team of technicians, he founded ReTune.
Helen Michetschläger repairs a broken cello
“We’re proud that we can recycle or repurpose everything we collect, giving instruments a second life in education or performance,” Walker says. The impact was immediate. “We asked each other: ‘Is this instrument in good condition and viable for us to maintain?’” says Sherwood. “If not, we’ll send it to Normans. It’s a much better solution than throwing them in the skip.
In the first year, the hub sent three van loads of broken instruments, including 70 flutes and 50 clarinet cases. “It was exactly what we’d been looking for,” says Yarnley-Jones. “Our conscience is clearer now.”
While national partnerships like this have found a rhythm, smaller grassroots schemes are also tuning up. One of them began in a teacher’s basement. Dr Jo Yee Cheung, a music educator based in Manchester, started taking home damaged instruments that no one else would touch. She found that too often people were replacing instruments that could easily be fixed rather than repairing them. Eventually, she applied for funding from the independent, grant making Oglesby Charitable Trust, and launched the Olympias Music Foundation.
Violins catch the light in Helen Michetschläger's Manchester studio
The foundation supports young people from low-income households with free, high-quality music education. To source instruments for its students, Cheung launched the Recycled Orchestra Project under the foundation’s umbrella to collect unwanted instruments, restore them and pass them on to young musicians. More than 100 instruments will be repaired this year, including Azra’s violin, with students receiving up to 30 weeks of tuition annually as part of the foundation’s Learn to Play scheme.
However, repairing string instruments requires expertise, and luthiers don’t come cheap. To tackle this, Cheung brought in experienced violin maker Helen Michetschläger to run training sessions for music teachers. Dan Springate, a cello teacher with 22 years’ experience, was among the first to attend.
“One of my pupils, Isha, had a cheap cello she bought online. The pegs wouldn’t turn, and the bridge was too high,” he recalls. During a weekend course at Manchester Museum, he learned to replace the bridge, plane it, cut grooves for the strings and adjust it properly. “Basically, I fixed it. When Isha got it back, she said it was much easier to play,” he says with pride.
In an era of squeezed school budgets and shrinking arts funding, these efforts are giving young people tools to flourish
Now, Springate is teaching Jason on a donated and repaired cello. Teachers like Springate receive repair kits, manuals and access to videos to help them with common fixes that previously may have been regarded as too complex for the average teacher, and would have seen the instrument destined for the bin. The Olympias Music Foundation has now delivered nearly 40,000 lessons to more than 600 students from low-income families in the Manchester area.
The movement has roots in international inspiration too. The Venezuelan El Sistema programme – launched in 1975 to provide free classical music education to children in poverty – helped inspire UK projects. Cellist Julian Lloyd Webber was moved while watching the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra perform at the Royal Albert Hall in 2007 and persuaded the government to fund a similar music programme in England. It was called In Harmony. It started with programmes in three areas of deprivation, Lambeth, Norwich and Liverpool. Nina Kaye, a former agent to Julian Lloyd Webber, joined him to help set up a charity to support these programmes.
“We established that the thing we needed most for the In Harmony programmes were instruments,” says Kaye. “We created a website asking for donations of orchestral instruments, and they poured in.” Soon they were also supporting Nucleo, a west London initiative founded by Lucy Maguire, who visited Venezuela aged 19 and was inspired to replicate its model in her home country. Nucleo now provides after-school music to more than 450 children everyday in north Kensington, with half coming from the most income-deprived areas nationally, and a further 570 on the waiting list.
Nucleo took over the national instrument donation bank, run by Kaye, which accepts unwanted instruments and distributes them to programmes where there is a need.
“We get two or three offers of instruments a day,” says Kaye. “People are thrilled that their instruments are being used by children and young people who could not afford to buy their own.” Kaye ensures that instruments are in a fully playable condition when they are handed over and says she’s always amazed at the generosity of the donors. In one case, a handmade German cello valued at £10,000 was donated. When Kaye told the donor its true worth the patron insisted it be given to a promising young cellist from a London music college. To date, the bank has given out more than 3,000 instruments.
Back in his classroom, Jason adjusts his cello and gets ready to play his favourite song, Coldplay’s Viva la Vida. It might not be brand new, but it’s in tune – and so is the growing movement that brought it to him. With a little repair work, collaboration and care, instruments once destined for silence are making themselves heard again.
Tune in, waste out
Seven ways to prevent old instruments from ending up in the skip
1. Donate
Unused bassoons, closed-hole oboes or small double basses are especially needed by the Nucleo Project. When donating, details of the make, age and your location are required.
2. Ask around
A forgotten cello in a friend’s attic could change a child’s life.
3. Try before you buy
See if you can hire instead of buy. Music hubs and many shops will rent instruments.
4. Buy better
If you must buy, then buy wisely. Cheap instruments often end up in landfill.
5. Look after it
Keep to the maintenance advice when you buy. As Charlotte Yarnley-Jones from Devon Music Hub puts it: “Parents should know instruments are inherently vulnerable.”
6. Learn to repair
Think about training as an instrument technician: the role blends music with mechanical skills.
7. Dispose wisely
If it’s beyond saving, take it to a recycling centre. Most wooden or metal instruments can be recycled. Music hubs or partners like Normans ReTune can ensure broken instruments stay out of landfill.
Photography by Jack Roe
Interested in setting up your own musical upcycling centre? Learn more here
Be part of the solution
At Positive News, we’re not chasing clicks or profits for media moguls – we’re here to serve you and have a positive social impact. We can’t do this unless enough people like you choose to support our journalism.
Give once from just £1, or join 1,700+ others who contribute an average of £3 or more per month. Together, we can build a healthier form of media – one that focuses on solutions, progress and possibilities, and empowers people to create positive change.
