Our Funky Junk: How Scots are turning their trash into beer, homes and food
SPECIAL REPORT
EARLIER this year, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Scotland was given a prestigious award for being the most forward-thinking country when it comes to the circular economy. In other words it is at the forefront of reusing waste, or rather, making one person’s rubbish into another person’s raw material.
As part of this circular economy, across Scotland people are starting to view waste in a different way. Scientists are taking demolition waste and turning it into new bricks. An amateur builder has made a home from McDonald’s rubbish. A brewer is making beer from morning rolls that would have otherwise gone in the bin. Material scientists are making paint additives out of sugar beet pulp.
Such a circular economy promises to reduce our carbon emissions drastically. Iain Gulland, chief executive of Zero Waste Scotland says: “By 2050, a more circular economy could reduce carbon emissions by 11 million tonnes a year … We’re one of the first countries in the world to have a circular economy strategy and, not only that, but things are actually happening.” Eco-house from McDonald’s cartons In 2014, Angus Carnie had an epiphany after he was diagnosed with a brain tumour. He says: “When you’re lying in a hospital bed and they tell you you’ve got a brain tumour and if it’s cancer you’ll be dead in weeks, it does rather take you on a different view of life, and you think ‘right, if I survive this I’m going to do something different’.”
While in hospital he started to ask the staff questions. As a person who had worked in the waste industry, sell-
ing shredder consoles for confidential papers, he was interested in what happened to the disposable gowns, masks, bedsheets, and other items that were discarded seemingly after one use.
From there, he began to explore what he could do with McDonald’s rubbish. Carnie now lives in the eco-house he has put together entirely out of recycled and reused products: blue bricks made from hospital waste, light fittings from glass jars, cabin-effect logs made from discarded plastics.
The house, he says, is partly designed to make people think. “Some of this plastic has a lifespan of a thousand years but people are only using it for 10 minutes and then throwing it away. Let’s make it into something else.”
A brick from demolition waste
Ten years ago, when Dr Gabriela Medero first began to toy with the idea of creating a brick made mostly from demolition waste, there wasn’t so much talk about the circular economy in Scotland.
A geotechnical engineer at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, she was bothered by the fact that the construction industry was not only using huge quantities of raw materials that are finite resources, but also producing extraordinary levels of waste.
Her current brick is made from 90 per cent demolition waste – plus some other “magic” materials that Medero keeps close to her chest. The brick has been patented and her team is at the beginning of a commercialisation project which will ultimately lead to a spin-off company from Heriot-Watt, Kenoteq, producing the bricks.
The brick may look ordinary but it is a game-changer in an industry whose environmental impact is huge. Almost no raw materials are used in its manufacture. Unlike clay-fired bricks, it is not heated to extraordinary temperatures. Unlike concrete blocks, it is not based around cement, whose production produces such high levels of carbon dioxide that it contributes to five per cent of global emissions. Medero says she is already seeing enthusiasm in the industry for it.
Beer from bread
When Aulds bakery first approached Mark Hazell of craft brewery Jaw Brew with a batch of unsold morning rolls, they said they understood beer was once made from bread although it hadn’t been made that way for millennia. As Hazell points out, although the earliest written recipe for beer, from 1800 BC, was based around bread, it was of a very different type from the modern morning roll – more like lumped together grains. What Hazell then became involved in was a highly-original experiment. When he began brewing with the rolls, what surprised him was that what came out was a beer with a strong taste, but which was low in alcohol.
Soup from farm waste
Every year in Scotland 1.35 million tonnes of food are wasted. This staggering figure, which covers household, retail and manufacturing waste, does not include what goes to waste at a farm level, which is incredibly difficult to estimate. Next Saturday, April 29, is World Disco Soup Day, when Slow Food groups across the world will collect food waste and make soup.
One such event is set to take place at the Leith Community Croft in Edinburgh. Gillian Rodger of the Slow Food Youth Network says: “It’s very much about using a day to draw attention to how much food waste there is all over the world at different seasons. It’s connecting Edinburgh into a global issue.”
Paint from sugar beet
When they tell you you’ve got a brain tumour, it does rather take you on a different view of life and you think ‘I’m going to do something different’
Ten years ago material scientists, Dr David Hepworth and Dr Eric Whale, came up with the idea of creating a material out of root vegetable waste or by-products. The resulting product is Curran, a powder named after the Gaelic word for carrot, currently used as a strengthener in paints and coatings but being developed for use in many other products.
Christian Kemp-Griffin, chief executive of CelluComp, the Scottish company set up to manufacture the material, says the two men were always driven by a desire to produce a sustainable product that would be desirable not just for its “feelgood factor, but for the qualities of the product itself”.
He describes the early experiments: “They started off with carrots but right now we’re focused on sugar beet, because the sugar industry is producing millions of tonnes of sugar beet pulp per year and it’s much easier for us to scale our business using that.”