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The Highland Community Waste Partnership's long-lasting legacy

A blog post by Georgina Massouraki

Over the last three years, the Highland Community Waste Partnership has brought together eight community groups in the Highlands to reduce waste and promote more sustainable consumption. In this time we’ve shared ideas and resources, tried new things and built an understanding around what works for Highland communities.

We’ve achieved so much and, in many ways, it feels like we’re just getting started! Now, with less than three months to go, we are focused on how we can make the most of this work, share our progress with others and build on it going forward.

Read on to learn more about what each of our partners is looking forward to over the coming months, both as part of the HCWP and beyond!

The legacy of the Highland Community Waste Partnership will live on through the members

Broadford and Strath Community Company

We are thrilled to be hosting Sustainable Skye on 1 February, an event bringing together the businesses, community groups, and organisations we’ve collaborated with over the past three years. This celebration will feature initiatives like Cosaig Growers, promoting sustainable food production, and Seeds of Scotland, supporting seed diversity through local and sustainable practices. We will also showcase our cardboard shredding project, which helps businesses create circular systems by composting or reusing packaging waste.

Our schools project will highlight the three Rs (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) while workshops on fermentation, sewing, and bike repairs will provide hands-on skills to reduce waste and extend the life of everyday items. E-bikes will also be available for attendees to explore their potential in reducing short car journeys. ReRoot, our local sustainable food systems group, will spotlight seed swapping, local growers, and their monthly summer markets.

One of our most exciting legacy projects coming out of the HCWP is our glass crushing initiative. By taking glass waste from the community and tourism industry on the Isle of Skye, the project repurposes crushed glass to maintain local pathways, reducing waste and supporting much needed infrastructure.

Other legacy projects include monthly food growing and swap markets, starting in April, and the ReRoot Film Club, which explores sustainable food practices. Thanks to funding from Film Hub and community contributions, the film club will run for six more months beginning in February, extending into 2025. Together, these initiatives build a resilient, sustainable future for the Highlands.

Highland Good Food Partnership

Over the past three years we’ve been working to reduce waste and create a more sustainable food system across the Highlands. As the project wraps up this spring, we’re focusing on final activities and planning for its legacy.

We’re excited to support The Old Forge Community Pub in Knoydart as they introduce food waste reduction measures alongside their new composting partnership with Knoydart Community Farm. We’re also helping more communities set up composting initiatives, with plans to launch a scheme in Ardgay before the project ends.

To ensure this work has a lasting impact, we’re creating resources for highlandcompost.scot, including real-life examples of community composting and an updated guide to help others get started. We’ll also share a report from our work with Stramash Outdoor Nursery in Fort William, showcasing what we’ve learned about tackling food waste in businesses. For now you can read our case study of the Kilmallie community composting project.

Looking ahead, we’re committed to promoting conscious consumption as it relates to food and building on the partnership’s successes. We hope to see community composting and food waste reduction continue to grow, with new projects developed collaboratively across the Highlands.

Keep Scotland Beautiful

We’ve led on several projects which focused on reducing the 11 billion items of packaging waste generated each year in the UK by our lunch on the go habits; building on past experience and expertise in this field such as the Cup Movement project.

In order to encourage more refill & reuse opportunities in place of single-use items we developed two campaigns working in parallel, #ChooseToReuse and #TryRefill.

#ChoseToReuse provided local food and drink to-go businesses with resources to promote reuse amongst their customers, including how to introduce incentives or cease use of “disposables” entirely. We have also run a trial of returnable packaging in partnership with Vytal and signed a variety of new locations up to the Refill app as part of our work as Community Refill Schemes. #TryRefill aimed to promote the existing zero-waste and packaging free shops in the region through our online directory, social media content and consumer engagement work.

We also collaborated with the National Cup Recycling Scheme to bring the Cup Box to the Highlands. This pilot was the first time businesses, communities and work places had a way to responsibly dispose of single-use cups.

Over the coming months, we’ll be focused on gathering data and evidence around how these projects have worked, to help inform future work for Keep Scotland Beautiful and beyond. This includes measuring the amount of packaging that we’ve managed to divert from landfill, and speaking to pilot participants and audiences to learn from their experiences. Keep an eye out for our project reports.

In addition to packaging waste, we also developed and delivered our Youth Climate Advocate training programme, accredited by the Carbon Literacy Project, to engage young people in local climate action, with a focus on waste and consumption. We’ve trained up 39 young people and will be hosting a farewell event for them in February, consisting of a Green Careers panel and online film screening.

We look forward to contributing to the HCWP webinar series at the end of March, which will showcase activity from across the partnership and share everything we’ve learnt.

And beyond that, we look forward to building all the knowledge and networks we've built over the past three years back into our work to reduce litter and waste across Scotland.

Lairg & District Learning Centre

We are aiming to deliver the last of our activities through the partnership over the next few months. This will include woodworking and sewing classes, using reclaimed wood and fabric, and hopefully a class or two on composting or growing plants coming into the Spring period. During March, we’ll be planning a celebration event centred on Highland Community Waste Partnership activities and showcasing what we have achieved through the partnership.

In the background, we will be gearing up to support the HCWP legacy, adding links and resources to our website to signpost people to the HCWP legacy website and the Highland Repair Directory as well as how-to guides to give people the skills to make a shift towards a more sustainable lifestyle. We will be using our experiences from the partnership as a basis for applying for other funding of a similar nature, as it truly has been an enriching and valuable project for our area. We also look forward to building what we've learned about climate change and waste reduction into wider LDLC activities going forward.

We hope to see organisations continue to work with each other to make a positive change in the Highlands, and across the UK. Reusable and returnable packaging schemes are a great idea, and we would like to see those gain momentum in the future. There are also some fantastic community initiatives taking place at the moment, such as in-vessel and community composting, and it would be wonderful to see these continue.

Lochaber Environmental Group

We will continue with the monthly Climate-themed book group that is run in conjunction with Caol Library on the third Tuesday of the month from 5 – 6pm. We also are hoping to be able to run two more of the popular Repair Cafés. We are working with Fort William Mountain Festival and are hoping to run one as part of their fantastic weekend of events in February, with another possibly running in March.

We are also working at the Highlands and Islands Climate Hub on a joint Hub gathering and HCWP celebration event which will be held towards the end of March.

We have been busy looking for more funding to allow us to take forward the Food Waste and Composting side of the project. We feel passionately that it is important for food waste that is generated in Lochaber to be processed in Lochaber and not driven many miles away to be processed. Reducing the food we waste and then composting the remainder to create a rich produce to improve growing is something that we can all learn and benefit from.

Whatever the outcomes of the funding applications, Lochaber Environmental Group will still be here in Lochaber, supporting our community to reduce their impact on the environment and help people, businesses, community groups and partner organisations to overcome barriers to behaviour change.

Lochbroom & Ullapool Community Trust

With support from our Highland Good Food Partnership partners, we are launching a community composting project this month, giving households the chance to transform food scraps into nutritious compost instead of sending them to landfill. This initiative marks an exciting step forward in reducing food waste in Ullapool and is set to continue after the partnership concludes in March, alongside other projects including the Highland Repair Directory.

Over the next few months, we’re hosting a series of sewing, mending, and upcycling workshops, coordinated by the The New Broom, and we also hope to establish a monthly sewing social.

Our final event will be the Re-Love Clothing Fair, taking place in early March. This celebration will showcase the achievements of the HCWP locally and create a space for the community to discuss how these events could continue after the partnership. We’ll also explore future opportunities to promote reuse and reduce waste in the village and surrounding areas.

Our vision is for sustainable consumption to be central to all personal and business actions across the Highlands. LUCT and The New Broom will continue to promote reuse and waste reduction. We have plans to explore innovative ways to divert unusable textiles from landfill, such as recycling them into new threads or yarn, and as part of the SCOTO Press Pause initiative, we are investigating how the hospitality industry can encourage slower, greener tourism, aligning with some of the work of the Highland Community Waste Partnership.

Thurso Community Development Trust

We are concentrating on promoting principles of circularity among our community and businesses and supporting local farmers and crofters. In the remaining months, we will fully focus on the sheep wool industry and rescuing local fleece from waste through our Cycle of Wool project. We demonstrate the great potential of wool and how it can be used in gardening, path building, house improvement and crafting, and at completion we will produce the pack of documentation that, we hope, our community will take further to build up new projects to utilize this amazing 100% renewable resource to its full capacity.

The Cycle of Wool will also be the theme for our celebration event in Thurso, that will take place on 1 February. The networking event and fashion swap will be followed by the concert that will celebrate the synergy of traditional wool crafting with modern day music, as beautiful tunes by Kate Young will accompany the mesmerizing motions of the local craftsmen spinning, waulking and weaving wool on the stage. This event will serve as a reminder that when traditional craft is being lost, we lose much more than just a skill - it is the whole segment of culture and folklore, our genetic memory that unites us with our ancestry.

Transition Black Isle

Between now and March, we have a series of Climate Cafe Black Isle film nights exploring the strands of the partnership's work with guest speakers from the local area. To conclude the Zero Waste Food Challenge workshops being delivered on the Black Isle, we held our first of the series in December where we focused on composting and food waste, showing ‘Six inches of Soil’ with local guest speaker, Alex Davies, wildlife, community and agroecological advocate. We are supporting Contin, Jamestown & Tarvie Projects in Contin to deliver the Zero Waste Food Challenge workshops from January to March this year.

We are also working with residents to hold a celebration event in March showcasing the work we have been involved with on the Black Isle. The event will include workshops on food waste and packaging, composting, fermentation and upholstery upcycling. It will also involve a relove pre-loved item sale, and clothes and textile upcycling with the Black Isle Repair Café (BIRC) sewing team.

With a new volunteer coordinator in place in the new year, The Black Isle Repair Cafe will continue to roam around venues across the Black Isle on a monthly basis. We are also planning to launch the Black Isle Library of Things in the new year. Transition Black Isle will continue to support the Black Isle Repair Cafe who have a paid volunteer coordinator in place to support the team of volunteers going forward. We will also be developing the Highland Repair Network to support existing initiatives in collaboration with BIRC, CCS Share and Repair Network, Mens Shed Network, and the Highlands and Islands Climate hub.

TBI will also host the Black Isle Library of Things and support its development and we are currently recruiting volunteers to manage the library. Climate Cafe Black Isle will also continue with support from TBI and local people who have been involved before and are interested in keeping it going. The celebration event has motivated a group of residents to explore how this could be a regular event on the Black Isle and plan to run like the Markets with a paid co-ordinator taking the lead in planning and delivering the events on a quarterly basis.

The Zero Waste Food Challenge will be a resource page accessed from the TBI website where residents can take the challenge from their own home, and community groups can download the resource so they can deliver the series of workshops in their community.

We’ll also be writing up our experience and learning around the Black Isle Repair Cafe, the Black Isle Library of Things and the Zero Waste Food Challenge as part of the Highland Community Waste Partnership's legacy.

Velocity Café and Bicycle Workshop

We also want to give mention to our Partner Velocity Café and Bicycle Workshop who, very sadly, went into liquidation at the end of 2024. Over the past three years, Velocity made invaluable contributions to the HCWP, from pioneering a single-use charge in their café, to innovative and successful waste reduction events, including the jumble trail, arts material swap and monthly climate book group, to name but a few. They even represented the HCWP in a BBC Alba documentary. We know they will be sorely missed in the Inverness community and hope that their work can continue in some form in the future.

For our part, here at Keep Scotland Beautiful, we look forward to supporting the partners in the activities above and working with them to ensure a lasting legacy for the Highland Community Waste Partnership, both in the Highlands and further afield. We also look forward to building this into our own work to address waste, litter and climate change across Scotland.

Look out for the HCWP webinar series in the week of 17 March. A legacy report and website will also be produced before Summer 2025.

For further information, please visit the Highland Community Waste Partnership website or our channels on Instagram and Facebook.

If you are interested in collaborating on any of the above, please contact highlandcommunitywaste@keepscotlandbeautiful.org

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