Tag Archives: Scotland

Get ready to upcycle!

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Who doesn’t love a bit of upcycling? It’s fun, creative, often different and quirky, makes for great presents and could save you money. All that and I haven’t even mentioned preventing waste from going to landfill.

So what exactly is it? Well according to Wikipedia it is  

“The process of converting waste materials or useless products into new materials or products of better quality or a higher environmental value”.

The aim is to prevent wasting materials by using them to create new, better products. This also means that we are using less raw materials and probably less energy, reducing our carbon emissions in the process.

OK, so that’s the technical bit. What’s exciting are the endless opportunities for crazy and creative designs. Being a jewellery lover, one of my favourite pieces is a bracelet made from old bed springs which I bought at Camden Market around 10 years ago. Every time I wear it someone comments on it and they’re always surprised to hear what it’s been upcycled from. My friend Shona also gave me the best earrings made from 45″ singles for my birthday the other year.

The necklace out of laddered yellow stockings is my favourite!

Of course upcycling isn’t really a new thing. Making something new and beautiful out of something old is what people have done since times began, surely. So why not join in?

An example of upcycling events taking place in November as part of this year’s European Week for Waste Reduction are the Textile Reworking Sessions in Aberdeen, organised by Aberdeen University and the reuse organisation Aberdeen Forward. Staff and students at the university are invited to attend the workshop sessions to learn how to make a new piece of clothing or other textile product from waste material.

The university’s Students’ Association Climate Change Project is also joining in by organising a Student Design Competition where students are asked to design a piece of art using waste materials. The entries will be displayed on campus where other students can view the finished pieces and a prize will also be awarded for the best artwork.

Are you part of a community group, charity, local council, school, university or business? If yes why not organise your own action to take part in this year’s European Week for Waste Reduction? Visit our website to find out more.

For more upcycling ideas, try the UK Upcycling website.

And the award goes to…

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Earlier this year, I attended an award ceremony in Brussels, where the most inspiring and original events during the 2009 European Week for Waste Reduction were honoured. The winning events included a ten hour ‘fashion design marathon’ where Spanish design professionals, students and beginners alike took 4 tonne of pre-loved donated clothes and turned them into the latest in fashion. Another winner was the Swedish catering firm who ran a food waste campaign in 25 of their restaurants, resulting in a 25% reduction in food waste as well as financial and carbon emission savings for the organisation.

'Enrenou de Roba', winners of the award for best action by a community group during European Week for Waste Reduction 2009

What about this year’s awards? Well, now is the time to start planning your action for the European Week for Waste Reduction 2010, taking place between the 20th and 28th November. The week is a pan-European initiative of member states and regions coming together to raise awareness of the need for us all to reduce our waste, and change our behaviour, in order to ensure a more sustainable future.

Why not organise an action at your office, school, in your community or local authority? If it is raising awareness and encouraging people to reduce their waste, it is a perfect action for the week! How about a paper campaign to reduce paper consumption in your office, a ‘best waste free packed lunch’ competition’, a swap or second hand sale? If you are a local authority, you could team up with a local reuse organisation to divert reusable items from your local recycling centre, or use the week to raise awareness of a campaign, such as Love Food Hate Waste or Composting at Home.

Visit our website to find out more or to register your event.  Or email me if you have any questions. We’d love to hear from you! Who knows, it may be you on that stage next year, receiving that award…

Could be yours...

Recycle Week 2010 gets techy

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Remember when the concept of ‘recycling’ was limited to cans, glass and paper?

In a short time, we’ve advanced far from checking our empty drink can with a magnet to confirm if it qualifies for the Blue Peter appeal.

Don't be blue, Peter

The variety of recyclable articles now is staggering. And it needs to be for targets set out in Scotland’s Zero Waste Plan to be achievable. Launched last week by Scottish Environment Secretary Richard Lochhead, the plan sets a target of 70% recycling and composting for all waste by 2025. Yes, that is all waste, whether generated by businesses or households.

This year’s theme for Recycle Week (21st-27th June) reflects our need and ability to continue expanding the diverse range of items we recycle.

The year’s focus is ‘Love your electricals – set them free’, focussing on recycling old, broken or unwanted small electricals and giving them the chance to be useful again.

The UK currently produces around 1 million tonnes of waste electronic and electrical equipment each year – a figure forecast to double over the next 15 years. This makes it one of the fastest growing waste streams – increasing at a rate three times that of average municipal waste growth.

It seems a very apt theme, given Richard Lochhead’s comments last week that; “a top priority for any waste policy must be a reduction in the amount of valuable resources that are sent to landfill.” And that: “Separating waste at the earliest possible stage will help recover the maximum value from different materials.”

I don’t suppose there are many more valuable materials being sent to landfill than our once state-of-the-art televisions or Betamax VCRs (okay, maybe not the Betamaxes).

What I find even more astonishing, given the figures above, is a theory that many of us are hoarding our old electrical equipment. We’re not recycling them or putting them in our household waste because of the emotional attachment we’ve formed with them over the years.

It’s easy to see how the bond forms. Perhaps one wakes you from the bed that was warmed the previous night by another. Maybe one cleans your teeth before you shower or removes the 5 o’clock shadow from your chin. Another might dry, straighten or curl and style your hair, while you catch up on the headlines on another. You may not fully wake until one heats the water that brews your first cup of the day, with which you add a dash of milk kept cool in another and butter a slice of steaming toast that just popped from one. You may reach for a fully charged one from a dock and check your messages before glancing at a ticking one on your wrist, realising unsurprisingly that you’re late, again. Perhaps, you listen to your favourite playlist on one as you cycle to the office to sit in front of one, tapping away for the rest of the day…

"Pay attention, 007!"

Keeping an appliance in a drawer might seem like a more environmentally friendly option than sending it to landfill but there is more to consider. Many of these much-loved devices could be put to good use by someone else, or be broken down into components: recycling the valuable materials to help preserve natural resources.

Perhaps for Recycle Week 2010 you might set free an article that, once upon a time, made life a little easier for you.

There are now lots more places who will reuse and recycle our old electrical items throughout Scotland.

Find them at www.sort-it.org.uk.

Will Copenhagen change your life?

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My job, what I am paid to do, is to promote the idea of responsible waste management to businesses and people in Scotland on behalf of an independent environmental charity (Keep Scotland Beautiful).

You might therefore reasonably think that I am pretty one-sided when it comes to environmental issues and see Copenhagen (aka COP15 – the global conference on climate change currently underway involving 192 nations) as the last great hope for our survival. Not necessarily so, dear reader, for I was brought up to have an open, questioning mind and I too look at newspapers, read articles on the internet, watch television documentaries and I listen to the radio so know that the debate about whether we should be bothering to do anything about climate change, and whether climate change itself is even happening, remains unresolved as far as a lot of people are concerned.

Click to visit the official conference website

Indeed a recent poll (PDF) as reported in The Times under the headline “Global warming is not our fault” suggests that only 41% of people in the UK “accept as an established scientific fact that global warming is taking place and is largely man-made.”

This means that 59% of people are unconvinced. Some might have an inkling that something is amiss but they aren’t yet willing to state confidently that they believe man-made global warming needs to be sorted out.

And little wonder. For every message we hear about the importance of reducing energy, water and waste is a potentially conflicting message about the benefits of consumption (for the economy, for jobs, for the country) coupled with a body of scepticism including well-known figures who are quite happy to stand up in public and deny man-made global warming because they believe the science is flawed.

What is an individual person trying to go about their daily life supposed to think? Should we buy new products to help the economy or should we get things repaired or buy second-hand to help the environment? Should we spend time recycling our household or business waste or should we just send it to landfill and let nature take its course? Should we spend extra on train travel or continue to drive? These are real life decisions facing people up and down the country and the combined effect of all these decisions very broadly places each of us into one of several categories:

  1. People who believe the climate is changing as a result of human activity and are actively trying to reduce their own impact.
  2. People who believe the climate is changing as a result of human activity but don’t think individual actions can make that much difference and will wait to see what Government and policy makers decide before acting.
  3. People who believe the climate is changing as a result of human activity but think that trying to resist it is futile in the face of big business determined to maintain economic growth.
  4. People who aren’t sure about climate change and want to see more data to show the truth one way or the other but feel, on balance, that trying to reduce energy, waste and water is probably the best thing to do for the long-term survival of our species.
  5. People who believe that climate change is a distraction from other more pressing issues such as population growth, peak oil, pollution, depletion of raw materials, war, famine etc.
  6. People who do not believe the climate can change as a result of human activities (such as releasing CO2 into the atmosphere) and are ambivalent about the action on climate change.
  7. People who do not believe the climate can change as a result of human activities and think that climate change is a conspiracy to raise taxes and seek global domination.

The truth is that some of us will fall neatly into these categories and others will fall between the gaps or find our viewpoint shifting depending on who we’re listening to at any given moment. What is certain is that it is difficult for people on the ground, “ordinary” members of the public, to know what is right.

My own perspective is that we need to concentrate on facts. Hard evidence should guide our behaviour, not rumour or supposition. Is global warming happening? Is it directly linked to CO2 emissions? One useful source of information I found on the subject is a website called Skeptical Science. I should say from the outset that it tends to support the view that climate change is real and that we are causing it, but it also considers evidence to the contrary. It isn’t afraid to deal with issues such as the recent hacked emails and the potential for this to undermine the science. Other articles on the website look at the “hockey stick” debate which, briefly, is a controversy over a graph produced showing recent dramatic rises in temperature which used different sources of data to plot points on the graph. Some have argued that the sources of the data showing before and after the dramatic rise are so different as to render the whole thing inaccurate. Anyway, I find the website useful and hope you do too. It’s certainly not my only source of such information but it’s consistently thorough.

Back to the point, will the Copenhagen conference change your life? The short answer is: “it already has”. Government policy makes a real difference to people’s lives. In Scotland we have already committed, in the Climate Change Act, to an 80% reduction in CO2 by 2050. That’s massive! And it goes further than any global agreement currently in place. In fact it will be amazing if Copenhagen results in anything like that kind of agreement. But Scotland is doing it anyway. That is bold leadership and businesses and households in Scotland will be actively involved in reaching those goals. So your life will change, if it hasn’t already. But is change always bad? Scotland has tremendous renewable energy potential in tide, wind and wave power. It also has limited space for landfill so, climate change or not, placing all our rubbish in holes in the ground isn’t really a long-term solution.

Which brings me on to the other point I wanted to make, it’s not just global warming (whether or not that has been proven) that should impact on our decisions about how we act. There are a multitude of potential effects on our wider environment as a result of things we do. On a basic level it is anti-social to throw litter away because it is unsightly and someone has to clear it up. So it’s not always the environment that dictates our actions. That is why Keep Scotland Beautiful has such an important job to do. Even if we discover tomorrow that CO2 is completely irrelevant to the temperature of the Earth (roughly zero% chance of that happening) it doesn’t mean that power stations don’t pollute the air and make it less safe for nearby residents. It doesn’t mean that the raw materials used to make the products we use everyday aren’t going to eventually run out if we continue to send them to landfill. It doesn’t mean that rubbish from Scotland doesn’t end up in the massive floating plastic island in the pacific which leaches chemicals into the eco-system.

Being green isn’t necessarily about being fixated on one issue. It’s about wanting to preserve the good things that we have so future generations can continue to enjoy them. Pure and simple.

Just looking at the profile of the event in Copenhagen and how many column inches have been written shows how the environmental agenda has been brought to the forefront of people’s minds. And whatever we conclude about the effect of our activities on the wider environment we cannot dispute the importance of at least having the debate. On a practical level it matters hugely that 192 nations are sitting down and having discussions. It will be fascinating to see what they decide.