Circular Economy
The Circular Economy Bill giving Ministers and local authorities the tools needed to increase reuse and recycling rates, as well as modernise and improve waste and recycling services, has been passed at the Scottish Parliament.
The circular economy is a model of production and consumption, which involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling existing materials and products for as long as possible. In this way, the life cycle of products is extended. In practice, it clearly implies reducing waste to a minimum. It’s a sound commercial and societal model that localises economies, builds community resilience and ultimately reduces carbon emissions.
The Inverclyde Shed recently met with Circular Communities Scotland who represent a thriving network of charities and social enterprises that supports Scotland’s circular economy. It gave us a chance to think about how we have been sharing, repairing, refurbishing & recycling things for the last five years, almost as long as the Wombles of Wimbledon Common. Like the wombles, we do it on an ad hoc way, recycling tools donated by the families of men that have passed on through to collecting unwanted materials which we use in our workshop to make things.
Our workshop building itself an example of bringing a building marked for demolition back into active community use, retaining a steel frame and brickwork from the post war period, refurbishing and adding atleast another 60 years to it’s life whilst avoiding the loss of embodied carbon. We hope to host a repair café session and tool library in 2025.
“Communities don’t lack resources, but sometimes lack resourcefulness. If you look at the proliferation of waste, recycling and reuse companies, you’ll see that the linear economy of consume, and waste is huge and still growing.”
– Kevin Green, Port Glasgow 2025
Port Glasgow 2025 is planning an Inverclyde Resource and Repair hub within the Port Glasgow town centre. This hub will source, test, store and distribute assets from our corporate partners. These assets will then be made available to social enterprises and SMEs looking to start up within Inverclyde. The hub will also host a repair centre where commercial and domestic assets can be brought for low cost repair and reuse rather than filling skips at Pottery Street.
There is also a ‘Green’ or Bio Circular Economy where all of Inverclyde’s Community Gardens and our local authority use waste streams of nutrient rich material like grass, wood chips, cardboard & coffee grounds in our gardening to make compost. When we do buy in compost, we tend to go for sustainable composts produced from storm washed seaweed that is a naturally occurring waste.
Elsewhere in Inverclyde the Development Trust and Branchton Community Centre run successful food pantries which help reduce waste and get food out to individuals & communities that might need it.
All in all, there is a lot happening in Inverclyde but at the end of the day it comes down to individuals adopting circular economy principals, we used to call it ‘thriftiness’ – it’s been around for a long time but sometimes seems to have been forgotten.