More than 200 knives were seized in just 12 hours by volunteers in east London.
Binning Knives Saves Lives, a community-based organisation working to take weapons off the streets, collected 204 knives in Waltham Forest over three Saturdays in the past month.
The volunteers spend four hours each day going door-to-door on estates with a wheelie bin, telling residents about the impact of knife crime before asking them to hand any weapons over.
Since the initiative began in May, the group say they’ve spent around 50 hours knocking on doors collecting 450 knives in total.
Father-of-four Courtney Barrett, 45, who started the initiative, said: “We don’t tell anyone what to do and 99 per cent of people are responsive and listen and are happy to hand over anything which could be used to do wrong.
“Large kitchen knives are what we usually get handed but there can also be the bigger Rambo knives or machetes.
“Some of the things you find are really shocking.”
Earlier this year, the Standard revealed the number of knife crime amnesty bins, credited with removing 50,000 weapons from the capital’s streets, has halved in the past seven years, to 18.
Mr Barrett plans to use the melted-down blades to build a seven foot heart-shaped statue, dedicated to victims of knife crime in the capital in 2019.
