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Make Space For Nature
Make Space For Nature
Zero Waste Scotland: how small changes create big wins for people and wildlife
Our everyday plastic and waste choices ripple through Scotland's entire ecosystem, affecting our landscapes and wildlife.
Andrew Pankhurst from Zero Waste Scotland explains how rethinking waste can transform our environment and economy. Discover Scotland's circular economy – an innovative approach where products stay in high-value use for generations, not moments.
Learn from the carrier bag charge success story that achieved an 80% reduction in use and fewer bags on beaches through simple policy changes.
While Plastic Free July drives environmental action, Zero Waste Scotland focuses on reducing all single-use items. Surprisingly, food waste and textiles cause greater environmental harm than plastic, scoring highest for carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, land use, and water consumption.
Understanding these impacts helps us prioritise the most effective solutions. Explore innovative programmes like Stirling's Ditching Disposables initiative and Glasgow's Borrow Cup scheme that make sustainable choices convenient.
Andrew offers a refreshingly non-judgmental approach: "Whatever you can do is fine." The simple reduce, reuse, recycle framework gives everyone an accessible pathway to better choices, without overwhelming guilt.
Ready to join Scotland's waste-free future? Listen for practical tips and ways to protect our wild places and wildlife, while creating a healthier world for everyone.
Information:
Hi and welcome to Make Space for Nature from NatureScot, the podcast that celebrates Scotland's nature, landscapes and species. I'm Kirsten Guthrie and in this episode, tim Hancocks and I chat to Andrew Pankhurst from Zero Waste Scotland about the growing movement towards plastic free living. We explore how reducing all waste isn't just about tackling climate change, but also about protecting our precious wildlife and natural habitats. Zero Waste Scotland's at the forefront of tackling Scotland's climate emergency. As Scotland's circular economy public body, they're challenging our traditional take make waste economic model that's putting enormous pressure on our planet's resources. We discuss practical steps we can all take to reduce waste, including participating in Plastic Free July, and how small individual actions make a massive difference. So whether you're a plastic free veteran or just curious about taking your first steps toward reducing waste, this conversation is packed with inspiration and practical advice to help you make changes that stick. So hi, andrew, and welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us today. Now could you start off by telling our listeners a bit about Zero Waste Scotland and what the organisation does?
Speaker 2:Thanks very much for having me on. Yeah, zero Waste Scotland is kind of Scotland's national public body for the advancement of the circular economy, which sounds quite complex but actually just means we're here to support moving to a different kind of economy where materials and products are kept in use for much, much longer and materials are cycled constantly back in a high value state. So it's kind of like, I guess, in a way, taking the concept that we're all familiar with of recycling and taking that to the absolute nth degree, applying that to all products, materials, and that real kind of high value focus on keeping things in use for as long as possible great, thank you.
Speaker 1:Obviously very important organization and all the work that you guys do. And you know, as we're heading into the summer holidays, it's becoming even more kind of relevant, I suppose, when more of us are out hopefully outside, depending on scottish weather, fingers crossed and so it's an ideal time to chat about ways to help reduce waste and help you know, help nature. So one initiative we've heard of is Plastic Free July and, and that's a global movement that Zero Waste Scotland supports. So tell us about a bit about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean Plastic Free July has been running for quite a number of years now. I think it sort of came about in the aftermath of what we sometimes refer to as the kind of Blue Planet moment, that kind of sort of big wave of action against using so much plastic. That kind of kicked off with the second series of Blue Planet. It's maybe about six or seven years ago. So I think it's sort of, you know, inspired by that movement and it's not something that Zero waste scotland has any role in organizing, but we've always supported it and kind of done activity in and around it because of its focus on reducing single-use plastics. So there's quite a few different like weeks of action or days of action that already exist that are focused on things like recycling or um, we used to do one on reuse, the corpuscular, only those kind of things.
Speaker 2:But plastic free july, I suppose, is specifically about reducing single use items and that's what draws us to it, I suppose, because that's quite a key part of developing a circular economy is kind of looking at ways to design out waste, and actually methods to reduce single-use plastics are often focused on that kind of thing. So things about like, well, a lot of the activities are looking do we even need to use these things in the first place? Can we do them without them all together? Or where we do need them, can we look at systems and schemes where reusable items are prioritized instead and we're starting to kind of build some of those systems and processes in a society that help us actually design out or do do away with waste altogether. So that's kind of really been our interest in it.
Speaker 2:It's probably worth saying from zero waste scotland's perspective that's not really specific to just plastics either. We're quite keen as an organization to move away from reusing single-use items made of any kind of material, just because they are symptomatic of a kind of throwaway society. It doesn't make any more sense to make a stirrer out of wood and use it once and throw it away than it does with plastics. There are different environmental impacts to both those materials but ultimately they're both kind of wasteful activities. So it's not really the plastic bit really that attracts us to Plastic Free July as something that we like to champion. It's the kind of overall focus on reducing single use that really chimes with our kind of vision and purpose, if you like.
Speaker 3:Yes, it's great to hear that these initiatives are making a difference and that it's being reinforced and supported by government policy. What changes have you observed in public attitudes towards single-use plastics or, as you say, overuse of single-use items in general?
Speaker 2:There's a few things you can point to where you can really sort of see that things have changed in and around this area. So one of the first things I worked on when I first started at Zero Waste Scotland was the communications around the carrier bag charge which was coming in at that time. So you know that was back in kind of about 2014. The carrier bag charge came in. You know there was a charge on bags, but actually what happened off the back of that was actually most supermarkets just stopped providing them all together to the point where now we've got just a really sort of quite ingrained system of people taking bags for life to do that big shop once a week and that's that's really stuck as a behavior. So that's a really quite significant change in kind of plastic reduction. We did some studies about a year after the ban came into effect and it said there'd been an 80 reduction in the amount that was used. And although that study hasn't been repeated since, marine Conservation Society do beach cleans and kind of. They keep the data from that and they sort of publish it annually and when we were doing some engagement with them last year around the consultation around the charge on single-use cups. They sort of showed us the data for how many carrier bags they found on beaches and that has reduced by 80 as well. So the two figures track so that kind of seems to add up to a fairly compelling case that actually the single-use carrier bag problem has has been quite significantly nipped in the bud, you know, looks to tune of about 80% based on those two figures. So that's a really successful thing and that gives us hope for other types of initiatives that we can take forward that will presumably have a similar effect.
Speaker 2:We also worked at Zero Waste Scotland in supporting Scottish government in some of the activity it did around introducing the single-use plastics ban, which came in a couple of years, back 2019, and there was a kind of range of items that they decided to ban straws, plastic cutlery, plastic plates.
Speaker 2:About a year before that as well, they'd also banned plastic cotton buds as well, and so we did quite a lot of like attitude surveys and awareness surveys and stuff like that and found like a very positive response from members of the public saying they support those things. They don't really require them to do anything either. It's just that those items are no longer going to be available. But we definitely saw that there's kind of key public support towards those things and then, kind of moving on from that, we've been, as I said earlier, like supporting government around the public consultation for charging for single-use cups, which are kind of not entirely plastic, but they're kind of plastic coated cardboard, and it's one of the reasons why they're so difficult to deal with, because they're made of two materials fused together. But in terms of something that we use a lot of that contains plastic, that's another thing that we're seeing quite high levels of public support for as well.
Speaker 3:It's really encouraging that you can see the support and willingness of people to get on board as soon as they hear that these changes are being made or that these issues are being brought to light and put into policy. Could you let us know some of the biggest challenges that Scots face when trying to reduce their plastic consumption?
Speaker 2:I think some of the challenges are around planned versus unplanned behavior. So if you look at we talked about the kind of carrier bag charge and why that's been successful If you're heading out of the house to do your entire weekly shop for the week, you know that's why you're going out. You know like that's probably the reason you're leaving the house. So you're like I need my shopping list, I need my Nectar card, club card, whatever it is You're really thinking about that. You know you've done some prep. You kind of thought about what meals you're going to buy and you then say, oh yeah, I also need to remember my bags for life. But quite a lot of the other types of single-use stuff that we use is kind of unplanned. It's kind of like oh, it's trains late, I'll grab a coffee. Well, I didn't think that was going to happen when I left the house this morning. Or, oh, I've got time, I might just grab lunch here rather than wait until I get in because I'm starving. So you buy your lunch on the go and it comes with all these forks and single-use plastic container and all this. So I think that's part of the challenge and it's something we've thought an awful lot about when it comes to the proposed charge on single-use cups is how do you, how do you support people to make the right choice there when a lot of the time it's not planned behaviour? We did a pilot in Stirling called Ditching Disposables, which was all about providing well. Not all the cafes about 18 cafes participated. We got a good take up of it right across Stirling city centre and gave them a sort of supply of reusable, returnable, reused cups for coffee and hot drinks or cold drinks, whatever they do, and said just charge people a £1 deposit and they'll get their £1 deposit back when they bring it back, or they can just swap it for another cup and the deposit stays in the system. It's just interesting to see that that kind of model was actually quite popular and I guess I'm interested to see where we can do more of that kind of thing just to make it a bit easier for people to make that right choice when they're when they're making decisions on the fly, because so much of like what generates single use is just convenience, like the modern day on the go eating and drinking culture. That's where the vast majority of it comes from. So it's it's looking at ways that we can tackle that. But they're the kind of key challenges.
Speaker 2:The other challenge that I think from a kind of single-use plastics point of view which still has a long way to go and has improved but there's kind of a lot more we could do is just packaging. So, in terms of like, when you bring your kind of weekly shop home from the supermarket, you still end up with an awful lot of single-use packaging which for a lot of purchases it is kind of hard to avoid. So fruit and veg you can more or less buy unpackaged for some things. That was getting better for a while and I think it's maybe starting to get worse again. There has been some good strides, uh, in in terms of that supermarkets have made where stuff that used to be excessively packaged is no longer excessively packaged.
Speaker 2:But I still feel like when I'm emptying my recycling bins every week, you know there's an awful lot that's going in my kind of plastic bin and I'm like that's another one, another, one, another one. It just feels like it's a bit of a challenge, like if there isn't an alternative to that, I don't really know what citizens can do. So I would like to see kind of that continue as well, that move towards um a reduction in the amount of packaging that we get yeah, I think you've touched on my next question a bit about some of the practical barriers that all people be experiencing.
Speaker 3:And, like I say, I think Scotland's probably we're probably better suited than some other countries as far as the amount of things that you can't avoid, like you say, like a prepackaged fruit and things where you know you want to buy a mango or whatever it is in there. There aren't any loose ones that you can get or whatever it is, and there aren't any loose ones that you can get. But as far as things like cost concerns or availability or plastic-free alternatives or, like you say, even if it's plastic-free, if it's still single-use, there's still more things being generated. Do you let us know how we address some of those barriers?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I mean there's different ways. There's some kind of legislative stuff that is shifting at the moment in this area that should help on that point of packaging. So there's a thing called extended producer responsibility, which is basically a kind of like polluter pays type principle, but it takes the view that it's the manufacturers of products that are putting all this plastic packaging on the market. But then there's kind of a societal cost to collecting, disposing, sorting, recycling and, you know, sort of getting back into the system of doing that, and that's picked up by the taxpayer through. You know, that's your local authority that does most of that and it picks up the tab we pay for that through our council tax. So basically we, we pay for the problem that producers are causing, which is not really fair. So extended producer responsibility responsibility says no, they have a responsibility. And so there's a system that we've, which we've had for a long, lot of years but didn't really work as well as it could have done. So there's a kind of a revision been made to it quite recently, which means there's a more effective series of charges on packaging producers to say you have to pay this amount to a levy scheme that then goes to support local authorities to do that collection and you can pay less by producing less harmful packaging. So there's an incentive on them to then say, okay, we need to use more kind of recycled content or make our packaging more recyclable. And it drives this shift over time to just sort of less packaging, less harmful packaging, more recyclable packaging and all the rest. So it's only that revision has only just started, so I don't think we're really starting to see the benefits of it yet. But over the coming years we should do. So that's kind of promising.
Speaker 2:But in terms of where those costs are still hitting ordinary people, I guess I would say, well, look, do what you can Like, don't feel too bad about, bad about. If there's a cost factor as to why you have to choose something that at the moment is less sustainable, then you know, just do what you can. You know whether you're stuck in that kind of quandary of like, maybe, maybe cost isn't a factor for you. You know that's not what's pricing you out of taking the more responsible option, but the option simply isn't there. Like, oh, I'm at a coffee stand and I don't have a reusable cup and they don't offer one, and what do I do?
Speaker 2:We have this debate sometimes in the office, but like it's like, well, maybe maybe just split and see, get home. I mean, that's something that you could do, you know? Oh well, I don't have a sustainable way of drinking this coffee, so I guess I'll just wait and do that in my house, where I've got reusable cups and they go in the dishwasher and I've had them for five years and there's nothing wrong. I don't know. I mean, like that's just a suggestion. People shouldn't feel that they need to like give up stuff, but you do have that option if you want to use it. So yeah, just sometimes it's worth kind of planting that seed, maybe just going out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, it'll save you a fortune in coffee as well.
Speaker 3:You're so right as well. I've had that debate in our house as well, where sometimes you look at some of these great plastic alternatives and you're like, but is the answer making more stuff, even if it's not plastic?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely no. That's good news to hear about the companies. You know paying in a way and hopefully you know you'll begin to see the change there, because I'm the same it's. You know fruit is definitely the fruit cartons are the ones that go in the recycling an awful lot. And you know we can talk about Plastic Week 3 July. We can talk about different weeks of months, of whatever, and these, these are really good initiatives. They do help people form new habits. What strategies or initiatives do you think have proven most effective for turning these kind of temporary behavior changes into permanent behavior changes?
Speaker 2:um, well, I think the the carrier bag charge is definitely, definitely one, because that definitely feels to be something that, you know, people have embraced en masse. That's kind of just become so mainstream now. Um, I mean household recycling I would put on there as well. It's a funny one because there's still quite a long way to go with household recycling in many ways. Like we have data that shows that the average general waste bin you kind of what we used to call landfill bin, although landfill is now becoming less of a disposal route for local authorities, moving more to incineration as time goes on but anyway that bin, about half of it, is stuff that could have been recycled. So we're doing quite well. We've got a recycling rate in the high 40s as a nation, but we've still got our general waste bin that's sitting with about 50% of the stuff that's in it could have been recycled. So I guess it's completely mainstream, it's completely embedded and it's completely normal, but we just do it about half as well as we could. So that's a bit of a funny one. But I mean, I think that definitely has become a permanent behavior and it's something that everybody does.
Speaker 2:We did some research on this. It's like we called it the circular living tracker because we're interested in circular economy and how that applies to people's lifestyles right, but it's basically just asking people about all this kind of stuff that we're talking about on this show and it's like what are the kind of most common behaviors that you do? Reusable shopping bags was number one. Recycling was second. The third thing that came up on it was being more aware of food waste. So that's an interesting one for me, because a big part of my role is is campaigning about food waste and trying to change, you know, hearts and minds and encourage food waste reduction. And it was interesting that the wording was thinking more about food waste, because I think that's kind of probably, as far as it goes, like we're not yet seeing the definite raised awareness of food waste as an issue and some awareness of the things you can do about it.
Speaker 2:I think there's good awareness, but perhaps they're not translating into habitual behaviors. So to me, if you said what's in your sights, that's the kind of number one thing that you would want to be moving along into. One of those permanent behaviors next, that would be the one I would say. Food waste is just tricky because modern lives are so busy and there's so many different factors that cause food waste and very kind of low understanding of some of the the key areas around it.
Speaker 2:People are not very good at meal planning because it's a hassle. You know people not necessarily that well upon how to store food so it lasts the longest. So we might put things in a place where it's going to go off after a week, whereas maybe like apples are a good example, like they'll keep for like three times longer in the fridge, but nobody puts apples in the fridge. It's all stuff like that. So there's a lot of awareness still to raise on that. But yeah, so that would be my. That's kind of my number one kind of next permanent behavior I'd like to see start to embed is action around food waste reduction.
Speaker 1:And on the food waste. Actually, that's a really good point about apples. I'm going to go home and put my apples in the fridge soon as I finish this, but I was just going to ask about that. Food waste is a huge contribution to carbon release, isn't it? It's quite a high level.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, we have, for many years, a tool called the Carbon Metric. We have for many years, a tool called the Carbon Metric, which is a way of looking at the impacts of what we throw out from our homes, which, for a long, lot of years, was, like, done by weight. What's the biggest problem? Well, there's absolutely tons of cardboard and there's loads of plastic, so they must be the biggest problems, and that's the view that people took, whereas when you put those things through the carbon metric, it actually shows you that, although food waste makes up a much smaller proportion of what we throw away, it dwarfs the others in terms of its environmental impact, and that's because there's so much more intensive emissions involved in producing it that when you throw it away, you're just throwing away emissions. All those emissions happen for nothing, which is not the case with cardboard and even plastic to some extent, which is, you can mass produce it and it has an impact, but it doesn't have the same kind of impact. And we've then recently updated the carbon metric to evolve it into this thing called SWIFT, which is Scotland's Waste Environmental Footprint Tool, which is basically just a carbon metric all over again, but it looks at more things than just carbon emissions. So it looks at biodiversity loss, it looks at land use, it looks at water use and it looks at one other thing that always escapes me, but it's five things in total.
Speaker 2:So, on that, household things like food waste food waste scores highest on carbon emissions, on land use and on biodiversity loss, and it also ranks really highly on water usage and the other one which I just remembered, which is air pollution. So food waste is a really really big problem Also. Also, textile waste scores really highly across all of those factors, even though it's a really small amount of what we actually throw away. Like by weight it's very small, it's about four percent, but it's over 30 percent of the carbon footprint, for example, of what we throw away. So these are kind of things that Zero Waste Scotland has kind of developed to help us see, I guess, more like the true picture of what we're actually doing. It's about saying, yeah, there's kind of a lot of this stuff, but it doesn't have anywhere near the impact that this stuff does. And actually, even though there's less of this, this is more of a problem and that's where our efforts need to go that's fascinating.
Speaker 1:They're actually really interesting insights as well and useful for the general public to know these things as well. And you know we've we're giving plastic a hard time and you know we'll single use plastic. Sorry, but you know, are there any plastics that can be a good thing? Is there such a thing as good, good plastics?
Speaker 2:this is a really interesting question. It's something we had many, many debates about in the aftermath of that kind of blue planet moment, like where do we stand on this as an organization? This is an organization. We're here to kind of keep stuff in use for longer and focus on reducing waste wherever possible. So if you want to make something that will last for 400 years and can be used for like 400 years, you make it out of plastic because it's really hard wearing durable material and we know from all the problems that we see with stuff kicking about in the ocean. You're like it's going to be there for like 400 years. That's terrible, right? So if you want to make stuff that lasts and that can be used time and time again, plastic is a great thing. If you want to make something that you use to stir your tea with for three seconds and then it sits in a landfill site for 400 years, that's crazy. So plastic is neither good nor bad, it's just really long-lasting. It's what you do with it that matters.
Speaker 2:So actually, to answer your question, yeah, there's loads of instances where plastic can be a good thing because, like I say, you can make things that last a really, really long time with it. So like, yeah, that reusable cup scheme that I mentioned, the cups were all made of plastic, but they were made of the kind of plastic that's still going to be around in you know, 2225, you know. So it's. It's about looking at that kind of what is it? What is the long life of this thing, or what's the intended life of it? And if, if it's meant to be used once and discarded, then making it out of a material that lasts hundreds of years is a really bad idea yeah, I suppose it suppose it's thinking about the purpose, isn't it the long-term purpose of it?
Speaker 1:It was just when you're talking about plastics there. I was thinking about Tupperware from the 70s and 80s and I'm pretty sure my mum still has Tupperware from the Tupperware parties of the 80s at the time and it's still going strong, whether that's a good thing or not.
Speaker 2:I don't know, but yeah, it's still going strong. Absolutely I was. I was doing a thing with the scouts the other week my son goes to scouts, or sometimes volunteer and they dug up the time capsule that they had buried in the year 2000 and they had all this sort of like stuff in that kids were into. Then it was like, I mean, it's like pokemon stuff, but it's like plastic stuff, you're looked brand new, it had not aged a day. I mean, if it had been buried underground. But it just kind of made me think, you know, actually this could have been down there 200, 300 years, it wouldn't have been any different. So it just kind of brought home to me that idea of, yeah, how long things can last, but what's the intention? How long is it meant to last?
Speaker 3:The last. But what's the intention? You know how long is it meant to last. Lucky thing about pokemon it seems to make a resurgence, so that's so, if you can, you can dig it up and give it to the next generation of kids. Yeah, although although I'm sure their intention is for you to buy more, but yeah yeah, they're all fighting over yeah so you've mentioned a few times, andrew, the, the circular economy. Could you tell us what in your mind, what a truly circular economy would look like in Scotland?
Speaker 2:Well, that's an interesting way to phrase it a truly circular economy. Because I guess what that would look like is an economy where products are designed to stay in use for as long as possible, so they're actually manufactured to last last, to be repairable, to be remanufactured, which is a kind of sort of higher level version of kind of refurbishment, where you learn from its first life what, what made it fail, and then you engineer that not to happen the next time, so that in theory, its second life should last even longer. So there's there is some examples of remanufacturing happening in Scotland with things like gearboxes and all that where, technically speaking, the remanufactured gearbox should last even longer than the first one because you've learned from its first life what parts fail and all that fascinating stuff. So all these things, products and services much greater focus on rentals, so that businesses are kind of retaining ownership of the asset, whatever that might be, so that they continually kind of retaining ownership of the asset whatever that might be, so that they continually refurbish it, keep it in use, and it's not on you to say, oh, we just sell. We make more money by selling loads of them. They break after five years and then someone comes back and buys another one. There's there's a lot more money to be made in kind of servitization of products and services and all this kind of stuff. So that's kind of what a truly circular economy looks like. And materials basically very rarely leave the economy. They're kind of cycled back in and wherever possible, that's in a high-value state, as that could possibly be. So you're recycling a very small amount of stuff, because that's actually sort of almost always downcycling the material. What you're trying to do is keep it in high-value use.
Speaker 2:The problem with that vision is that it seems so very far away from where we are right now that sometimes it can feel a bit unachievable. We've sort of been talking a bit in the office about framing this more as what we're working towards is an economy that's more circular. There's more of this type of activity taking place and we're starting to see a gradual shift towards this over time, because that feels a bit more achievable for people to get on board with a bit less oh, if I'm not doing something that's like wildly innovative and circular, it's probably not worth doing. No, all efforts towards creating a more circular economy are welcome, and sometimes I think that's maybe a better way to look at it are welcome, and sometimes I think that's maybe a better way to look at it.
Speaker 2:So that could be a business just kind of offering I don't know, one range where it's repurposed or refurbished or you can bring it back into life and they'll refurbish and give you a new one, but that's not maybe their core business.
Speaker 2:See how it goes, see if it kind of grows popularity over time and eventually overtakes your kind of linear model which is just sell something to a customer, then customer uses it and throws it away.
Speaker 2:So it's kind of like trying to encourage this sort of shift and people to see the real value in it as well. Like, in a way, the circular economy is a promise to the future that you can still have prosperity, we can still have lots of economic activity, but it's not going to ruin our environment, you know, whereas when you look at the linear economy, the kind of take, make, dispose economy, there's no way you can look at that and say that it has the promise to still give us prosperity and kind of good standards of living and not wreck the planet. It's going to do the first bit up until the point in which you don't have a sustainable planet to live on, but then it's probably not going to do either of those things, whereas actually a circular economy, if we do it properly and we implement it right, can give us both of those things yeah, it's funny you mentioned that with the end of.
Speaker 3:You know, if we keep doing this, this linear style that you know we're not going to have a good planet to live on anymore. You know, makes me think of the, the circular economy you only ever see in those sort of tv shows, with some kind of a disaster, dystopian future where they're forced to not throw things away and just use what they've got in whatever bunker or silo or wherever they might be hiding out. So you know, but it shows that you know, without it being quite so dramatic as is that you know there are ways that we can make sure we get the most out of it, and I think we've spoken before on this show about becoming a member of a local tool library and things like that. So, rather than buying a brand-new drill you're going to use a couple of times, or whatever power tool it might be, just borrow one from the tool library and everyone can use the same one, rather than there being 50 of them all down the same street all sitting in our cupboards.
Speaker 2:It's such a brilliant circular economy model. It encapsulates it to me, what that is about and what it means to people. The tool library I mean I was a member of the one in Stirling for years. It's not there anymore, which is a real shame, but I've kind of done the house up now so I'm kind of less in the kind of regular need to be using it. But like it was, it was amazing. You go in there and be like do you have a chisel I can use? I've got tons of kind of grout to get off the kitchen flange, but oh, what you need is a pneumatic chisel. What's that? And they're like oh, okay, let me a pneumatic too, which is a bit like a pneumatic drill, but it's like a chisel and it did. It did what would have taken me three back-breaking weekends in about an hour. Oh, brilliant, which was amazing. But I mean, when would I ever need to use that ever again?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Literally never. But it cost me well kind of nothing. It was a very reasonable membership fee for the year. So by the time I paid that to me, I'm like I'm not even paying for this and I'm also thinking about someone else will have that out next weekend and it'll be in use like most weekends probably, whereas if I bought one I'd use it once and I'd be like wow, it's amazing, did the job. I'd never use it again, it'd be sitting in the attic. So that's the thing it's about getting things used and doing that so that where that whole product as a service is kind of almost mirroring that, but from a business's point of view saying, not everybody needs to own a version of everything, we can do this sort of rental provision or servitization of things and it just makes much better use of any given product or item. You know.
Speaker 1:It's funny actually, because library books, that's the norm, you know, to go to the library. But it's trying to use that in different ways, like I used to help out at a out a toy library, which was brilliant because toys are only ever useful for a certain period of time in your child's life. So it's replicating that model. But, as I say, it's just, it's like almost the norm to go to the library and borrow books, so why isn't it for everything else in life?
Speaker 2:you know as much as possible anyway yeah, and I think in a way, part of the job that we've got is to try and paint that picture that that's a, that's for ordinary people, that's a better future. It's like a better, it's a better sort of society. It's one that kind of shares and borrows and you imagine you kind of you walk down the high street and you've got stuff with you that you can get repaired or you say I'm going to get a new part for this thing. It's much easier to get a spare part for something you can. Maybe things are designed to be easier to fix yourself, so that's really satisfying. But also it means that things stay in use for much longer.
Speaker 2:We've all got more kind of skills. We're a bit more invested in the products that we own because we're trying to keep them going and there's a virtue in having had something for ages rather than seeing the virtue in something always new. Do you see what I mean? So that creates lots of different types of businesses and lots of different types of kind of more local economies where, you know, maybe there's more local type businesses that are kind of benefiting from this stuff and that money kind of stays within the community more than it does with kind of big corporations. I mean we sort of see that we work a lot with kind of reuse sector. You know there's sort of charitable or third sector organizations that kind of do like furniture reuse and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:There's brilliant stories out of those projects where they are taking something that people would have just thrown away, so they're rescuing stuff from being wasted, but then they're selling that but for a very reasonable price. It's giving people more affordable access to products, but then that money they take they use for social good, you know. So that actually that's kind of doing something else good in the society. And they're also brilliant at doing sort of employability schemes and bringing people into work that would probably struggle to get work otherwise. So then, into work that would probably struggle to get work otherwise.
Speaker 2:So then you're creating new taxpayers and new council taxpayers wonderful, wonderful stuff. And you start to see how this is the circular economy is, like that's a better economy for all of us, you know, like there's really really good stuff to come out of it. So I think that's the job that we have. It sounds quite technical and quite difficult, but you just got to paint that picture of it being. This is something really inspiring, and it's going to benefit us all, you know, more so than the model we have now what are the real behavior of changes we need to see?
Speaker 1:you know, a lot of organizations are are doing certain things, people are doing certain things, but what are the real behavioral changes we really want to see to make a difference for our environment? What? What do you want to become as standard?
Speaker 2:I think the biggest and most important thing is just trying to instill people the three R's the reduce, reuse, recycle mindset. Because if you look at all things through that very simple prism, that kind of really helps you to guide you to always make the best environmental choice. So it's kind of reduce, reuse, recycle in that order. We want to reduce waste first and foremost. So that's's kind of do I need to get it at all? Kind of just not bother. You know kind of borrow one rather than actually own one. And then reuse is kind of well, can I get one second hand? And then at the end of life, when it's knackered, okay, then I need to either recycle or maybe it can be repaired or passed on to someone else.
Speaker 2:So it's like it's that mindset and you can apply that to absolutely anything like, for example, if we have a clear out of the loft or something like that, then you may mix it more of a kind of logistical operation rather than just taking everything to the, to the recycling center and don't be like right, we use, reduce, reuse, recycle, what? What can we do here? How can? Is there any further use we can have for this, or do we need to find a place that this could be donated to. Could we put it on a whatsapp group and see if anybody wants to come down and pick it up? And then your last kind of protocol is recycle.
Speaker 2:Or when you're thinking about you know getting something new, it's like, right, well, do I actually need it, or can I get one somewhere? You know like borrow one for a bit and give it back? Can I buy a secondhand one? Can I get one that you know needs to be repaired? Or I can recycle it somehow? So it's just kind of like using that mindset it always helps guide that choice to be the most kind of environmentally beneficial one.
Speaker 1:All these tips you're giving. They're really practical and I think that most people can apply them in their lives. But I wonder, do you ever feel like as an organisation, do you come across as preachy or judgmental? Do people turn off from what you're trying to say To me? I think all these tips are fantastic, as I say, but how do you inspire meaningful change across Scotland without keeping people off, I suppose?
Speaker 2:um across scotland without without keeping people off. I suppose it's difficult because I think no matter how much you're paying attention to tone and the you know the sort of the way that you're framing things, people probably do just feel overwhelming. There's so many messages about what we need to do and you need to do this and you do that, and so like I think it's difficult, no matter how carefully you tread, not to occasionally make people just feel a bit overwhelmed and like there's so many things they have to do they don't really know where to start. So that's the difficult thing. I mean, in a kind of specific sense we do a lot of kind of um, like surveys or focus groups and things like that to really understand how people feel about certain things and if there's certain messages that don't resonate with them for those kind of reasons, then you avoid those and pick the ones that kind of speak to them a bit more. We do sort of do that and take the care to do it, but I think even then it's it's hard to cut through. I think what our kind of like attitude surveys tell us is that people really do quite strongly care about the environment, but it's always behind a bunch of other considerations cost of living, the sort of stressor kind of family life, all these different things. Just being super busy, like modern life is just so busy that that tends to trump doing the environmental thing.
Speaker 2:So, in a way, you've just got to try and make things as easy as possible, as simple as possible, and also just set people do you know? So, in a way, you've just got to try and make things as easy as possible, as simple as possible, and also just set people. Do you know what? Whatever you can do is fine. If you can't do everything, that's all right. You know, we're all kind of doing stuff that you know is maybe not great for the environment. Like you know, I I sort of come on things like this and give advice. So I really do feel like I should try and do all these things.
Speaker 2:Even when you're trying to live that kind of really virtuous and really live that kind of reduced reused, you can't always do it and you've got to let yourself off. This is the linear economy that we are in. You are swimming against quite a strong tide, trying to be all zero waste and all of that sort of stuff all the time, right. So if you're doing what you can when you can, that's great. Keep doing that. You know it's not trying to put too much pressure on people, I think, because there's a lot of systems that need to change around us all to help us do all this stuff a bit more easily. And when those things change and that's a lot of the stuff that zero scotland and other great organizations are kind of working to change some of those systems around us it'll be a bit easier. You know it won't be as much of an ask. So it's we keep doing our bit but we need to keep trying to change the system as well.
Speaker 3:I think we're coming towards the the end. Now, andrew, can you let us know what innovations or alternatives um to plastic or or anything else that that might be single use that you're aware of, that's coming in that excites you for the future of advances that we're doing? That will hopefully have a big impact.
Speaker 2:But one thing I've really got my eye on at the minute. I mentioned earlier on that we did a sort of small scale pilot in Stirling around reusable cups. But there's a group of people in and around Glasgow that have got a scheme called borough cup off the ground which is taking that idea and doing it in a much bigger, more sophisticated way with like big chains. You know we did all our stuff with like independent cafes and stuff like that because they were easier to engage. You just need the managers to say yes, whereas getting into kind of big chains is kind of like head office and there's a lot of, you know, it's just a lot of. So anyway, borrow cup is happening in some of the big chains. It's happening a lot of independence too. There's kind of like smart tracking stuff on the cups. They're kind of getting big data off the back of it and you know, really going for it.
Speaker 2:I'm seeing people with them all the time, even when I'm not in glasgow. People kind of have them on the train and things like that. So I think that's really cool because if they can crack that that's one of the things that I've been talking about, which is kind of making one of these changes that makes it easy for us to do the right thing. It's like when you buy a coffee, like you know how they if we the barista says to you, yeah, do you want one or two shots in it? Like it would be great to get to the point where they say, yeah, do you want that in a single-use cup or do you want to just borrow this one reusable one for a quid? And you'd be like, oh, I'll borrow the reusable one for a quid, please.
Speaker 2:You know, it's just like. It's as simple as that. It's the kind of sugar in or not. Do you want a reusable one or a disposable one? And it's just that simple for you to make the right choice of the reusable one, please. And then you just bring it back or whatever. So I really hope they are able to crack it because it's it's looking so promising. The whole scheme looks amazing. So I'm wishing them all the best and hoping that that scheme really kind of comes off so that maybe there's a model there that we could see that rolled out to other cities and other parts of scotland.
Speaker 1:That's quite exciting actually, and fingers crossed that that does go far. And you know, talking about changes, you know Scotland's recently banned disposable vapes, which has been a great result for the environment, and you know we did chat to climate campaigner Laura Young on a previous episode about this, so it's great to see this now happening. So one final question for you what other legal or other changes would you like to see?
Speaker 2:Well, I suppose I talked a bit about the proposed single use cup charge that governments kind of had a consultation on just towards the end of last year. So I think that, in tandem with a scheme like Boracup, could be really good in terms of like there is a disincentive to use the single use and then it's nice and easy for you to choose a reusable option instead. That means you don't have to incur that charge. So that's something that I think is potentially really exciting. The other thing that I'd like to see I think there's been some sort of legislation in other parts of the world around kind of repairability and, you know, making it easy to repair products, and that's something that I'm really interested in. Like, electronics and electronic items have a huge impact in terms of, like their emissions and you know what it takes to produce them. But then there's like the sort of all the, the amount of kind of critical raw materials they use and how scarce those are becoming and stuff like that. So I feel like there's really something in electronics and kind of repairability, longevity that I'd like to see done there. I mean, it's complicated and I'm not quite sure how it would work, but there's something in that space I think would be really good to see, just to give consumers a bit more control over keeping stuff in use for longer, not just accepting that. Oh well, I've got five years out of that telly. I guess I shouldn't really expect it to keep going for any longer than that.
Speaker 2:You're like, come on, you know, like electrical goods used to last decades. I mean, I remember my parents had this freezer. I think it did like 35 years in the end before they sort of went. Do you know what it looks so old and so 70s? It hasn't actually stopped working, but we just feel like we've done a fair shift with this. We want a new fridge, so they put it out for bulky uplift. You know, like when the council comes to collect it, but before the council could even come, someone would take it. So it's just kind of it's probably like stuff used to last that long. Yeah, and now you just like you just accept it if something breaks after five years and you go. Well, that's just the way things are now. You know, we just became resigned to that so quickly though. You're like come on, surely we can do better than this. So something around that space that kind of says, yeah, repairability, longevity of kind of appliances, that kind of thing. I think we could do some more there yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:We used to rent our tv and our dhs recorder. So you know and and it would be reused again when we give it back.
Speaker 2:So that's so interesting as well, because that is a circular economy idea yeah but yeah, it's not new, it's not like some whiz bang crazy. I mean we used to do it like rumble and all that radio rentals.
Speaker 2:Yeah, bring back radio rentals still, some of this stuff is not. It's not new ideas, it's's just kind of the absolute tidal wave of consumerism and the kind of mix with a linear economy has led to us, over the space of like maybe 30 years, just to kind of abandoning these ideas of longevity or the idea that something should be made to that or whatever. They've just been swept away in this kind of oh, it doesn't matter, it's just cheaper to get a new one. So that's kind of what I'd like to see an end to really.
Speaker 3:Brilliant. Thank you so much for coming on, andrew, and that's been really nice having you with us.
Speaker 2:It's been my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 3:And thank you also. I think you've re-emphasized some of the things we often say in our Make Space for Nature campaign that climate change and biodiversity and this kind of chat about things to do with waste. It can be very big and overwhelming, but if you're doing what you can, as often as you can, without turning yourself into a martyr or living with unbearable guilt, you're all heading in the right direction and that's all we can ask of anyone is just all making our own small difference towards a common good and looking towards that circular economy or, as in African philosophy, we'd probably call that Ubuntu, which is the interconnectedness and community sharing of things and using things like tool libraries. Ubuntu, roughly translated, means I am because we are.
Speaker 2:Oh, I love that yeah.
Speaker 3:Or, failing that, you know, reduce, reuse, recycle, if we all just remember that. Thank you so much Thanks so much.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening. For more ways to connect with and help protect Scotland's natural world, go to naturescot.