It’s now been a couple of weeks since the Highland Community Waste Partnership officially came to an end, on 30 March 2025.
As the dust settles, following a whirlwind few months of working to secure the legacy of everything we’ve done and learned over the past three years, our Highland Community Waste Partnership Coordinator, Georgina Massouraki has taken a step back to reflect on the journey we’ve been on and all that has been achieved since Keep Scotland Beautiful first brought partners to the table to develop a funding application to submit to The National Lottery Climate Action Fund.
The Highland Community Waste Partnership (HCWP) first came about in 2021, from a desire to develop a community climate action programme that focused on waste. Scotland’s carbon footprint estimates had recently indicated that around 80% of our carbon emissions come from the things that we make, buy, use and ultimately throw away. On a personal level, as a lifelong environmentalist and having worked for over a decade on everything from climate change to litter and waste prevention campaigns, I was reaching the very same conclusion. It all comes down to one thing: the way that we consume.
It is our appetite for ever more, cheaper, more convenient goods and services that drives environmental destruction. From the extraction of raw materials and resources from the Earth; the miles and miles of transport and storage that underpin mass global trade; all the way through to us, the consumers, who have come to expect access to anything and everything, as we buy what we are sold and throw things ‘away’ without a second thought. A system where this is often financially cheaper, at the hidden expense of overexploiting land and people in far-away lands.
Towards a more circular economy….
“The machine is too big” I would often say - how can we really change it? So, when I first encountered the concept of a circular economy, I was excited. It was the closest thing to a realistic and feasible solution to this complex, global problem.
The reality is that we’re not going to stop consuming - not really. It is the paradox of abundance, that the more we have, the more we use. And yes, what we have becomes disposable, we forget its worth. Global development, rightly lifting people out of poverty, means that more and more people around the world are becoming consumers, both enabled by, and further fuelling, perpetual economic growth. So, the best way to beat this is to become leaner, more efficient. Make better, smarter use of the resources that we have within the system, to get more and more out of them. Sure, it will be an awkward transition at first. The move away from what is cheap and convenient will feel costly. But ultimately, it will work better and benefit us all.
A circular economy is not just about recycling. It’s about designing waste out of the system, at every possible point. Designing things to last and be repairable, reusable and recyclable. And creating markets and systems that support this. This is where the Highland Community Waste Partnership played its part.
The Scottish Highlands are unique not just for the wild beauty of glens, lochs, moors and mountains. This is a region that is vast and remote, where people and communities have a long tradition of banding together and making do. Modern conveniences don’t quite work here. Vital connecting roads turn suddenly into single-tracks and transport is often marred by harsh weather. Resources can be hard to come by; waste hard to get rid of.
This was an ideal case study for exploring the circular economy, in a place built by and for resource efficiency and local, community-based solutions.
And so, having identified an opportunity, Keep Scotland Beautiful brought together eight community groups from across the region, all with a history of climate and community action, and together we identified three key areas of waste to focus and act on:
Food waste and composting – costly as well as wasteful, we looked at how we can prevent food, our most basic and valuable of resources, from going to waste. Not only does food waste cost us £1Bn per year in the UK, it also accounts of 10% of the world’s carbon emissions. And so, in addition to preventing waste, we also looked at how any food that cannot be eaten, for whatever reason, can instead be converted into compost -reducing its carbon footprint and helping to grow more food.
Sharing and repairing – this hits at the heart of consumer culture, and the endless stream of ‘stuff’ that we buy new and throw ‘away’ – what a waste! According to Zero Waste Scotland, we could save £104m by capturing just one quarter of the materials currently wasted in landfill or low value recycling. Never mind the environmental benefits from reduced extraction, manufacturing, trade and landfilling - that 80% of our carbon footprint. It is a simple premise, really: how can we make things last? And when examined at a local level, and from the bottom up, the solution is pretty simple. Helping people to share, borrow and repair what they already own, not only reduces waste but also helps them save money and build community.
Single-use items and packaging – this is close to home for us here at Keep Scotland Beautiful. Around 50% of Scotland’s places are blighted with food and drink litter and we have been working for years to not only clean this up, but also to prevent it from becoming litter in the first place, through proper disposal and, ideally, replacement with reusable alternatives.
A Partnership for large-scale change
And so, in April 2022, having secured three years of funding the National Lottery Climate Action Fund, we embarked on our partnership and set out to deliver a vast and ambitious programme of work.
As coordinating partner, Keep Scotland Beautiful provided the strategic and financial link between funder and partners, supported web and IT development and led the administration and direction of communications.
Partnership working is not easy. Although each of the partners brought valuable experience and deep commitment to the table, we were all separate organisations, spread out geographically and with different setups and approaches. One of my first challenges as Partnership Coordinator was to overcome these barriers and bridge the gaps, support decision making and suggest resolutions in order to facilitate a smooth collaboration.
The remote working technology pioneered during Covid became central to the project, (although, with varying IT setups and capabilities and no access to each others’ IT systems, this threw up challenges of its own). We eventually set up a regular schedule of meetings and check-ins -formal, informal and in-person- which proved crucial for relationship building and underpinned what ultimately became a great collaborative team. We developed, trialled, rationalised and simplified various processes for making decisions, keeping track of progress and pulling everything together under the banner of the HCWP. Over time, our respective work became better aligned, with a clear and common vision of what we were working on, how we would get there and what role we would each play. By the end of the project, what started out as a massive, sometimes clunky effort flowed organically and bore an abundance of fruit.
Despite the early challenges, the past three years have been extremely rewarding. Not only have we delivered a vast and varied programme of work, engaging thousands across the Highlands to consider how they use resources and enabling them to be more sustainable; We have also built valuable working relationships both between the partners and with other important stakeholders, like Highland Council, Zero Waste Scotland, Circular Communities Scotland, Highlands & Islands Climate Hub and Highland Adapts; as well as businesses and other local groups and institutions. We have put waste, consumption and the circular economy on the radar and shown what is possible: circular solutions really are feasible and their benefits reach further than simple waste reduction. People and communities have an important and valuable role to play.
Together we achieved more than we ever could have on our own, sharing ideas and learning, building on each others’ work, joining forces to achieve our goals. Getting to this point took time, we had to learn about and, understand, each others’ organisations, building a common vision and figuring out how to work together to achieve it. We made mistakes and learned from them. And ultimately, we built a strong foundation for future work.
In the final months of the project, we worked hard to ensure that the progress made and knowledge gained is not lost. We ran a series of webinars in March, to give partners the chance to speak about their work and share learnings with others across Scotland. Our hope is to inspire, inform and breed support for similar work, both in the Highlands and further afield. You can watch the recordings here.
In the summer we will publish a report and case studies on the impact of the Highland Community Waste Partnership – further supporting a legacy that will live well beyond the funded activity.
Looking to the future
The Highland Community Waste Partnership has shown what’s possible. But more action is needed to ensure that the circular models we trialed can be sustained and scaled up.
Longer-term, larger-scale funding is required to support this transition.
There is no doubt that policy, regulation and legislation will help - Scotland’s landmark Circular Economy Act reflects the big systematic change needed and paves the way, with the 2030 routemap highlighting some key milestones.
And we must all play our part, in a concerted effort, to ensure that we can keep Scotland, and the world, beautiful and thriving for all.
