Highland Community Waste Partnership

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*November 2024

Highland Community Waste Partnership looks to the future

The HCWP team got together in Inverness last week, for our second to last quarterly in-person meeting. The focus for this session was to discuss legacy and next steps for the project after March 2024.

The HCWP has been funded for the last three years by The National Lottery Climate Action Fund, to reduce waste and promote more sustainable consumption in the Highlands. Bringing together eight community groups, coordinated by Keep Scotland Beautiful, we have worked together to share ideas and resources, try new things, and build an understanding around what works for Highland communities.

With under six months left to go, we are now focusing on how we can share the progress we’ve made with others looking to reduce waste and consumption and how we can continue building on this work going forward. Here’s a few things to look out for over the coming months:

Continuing work - There are a number of projects and activities that we are working on continuing post-March, including the Highland Repair Directory, sharing libraries and repair cafes, the In-vessel composter Common Interest Group and the Zero Waste Food Challenge, among others!We’ll be sharing more information about what each partner is working on over the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned!

Webinars and climate conference – We’re keen to share our experience of working in partnership to tackle waste and consumption, as well as specific insights around our work on food waste & composting, share & repair and single-use items & packaging. Keep an eye out for our webinar series in March as well as a number of in-person events, where people will have a chance to hear about what we’ve done, ask questions and connect. Dates will be announced as soon as possible!

Case studies, showcase report and legacy website – We want to ensure that our work is captured and signposted in support of future work. We’ll be producing a series of case studies that will be available through a public-facing report and through our legacy website, which will go live in the months following the formal end of the project in March.

Strengthening networks – we are keen to collaborate! If you’re interested in any of our work, please get in touch and we’ll point you in the right direction. And look out for local celebration events from each partner, geared at sharing HCWP progress and next steps with volunteers, collaborators and local communities.

In the meantime, you can learn more about the work of the Highland Community Waste Partnership on our website.

The HCWP team

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October 2023

HC Waste Partnership report for TBI AGM

Laura Donnelly, one of TBI's Project Officers for the Highland Community Waste Partnership, has prepared an annual report of HCWP's activities, as a Powerpoint presentation to coincide with TBI's AGM which took place last weekend.  For practical reasons the presentation was not shown at the AGM, but is available to view here .

Thanks are due to Laura for preparing an excellent prresentation, and to Laura and Lyn for their work for the waste project during the year.

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March 2023

Make Do and Mend

[This article appeared in the Skye Climate Action March 2023 newsletter].

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February 2023

HGFP appoints temporary Project Officer

Owing to Lyn's continuing illness TBI has recruited a temporary Project Officer to take forward our participation in the Highland Community Waste project.  Laura Donnelly started work at the beginning of the month and introduced herself in the February newsletter

Hi, I’m Laura, the temporary HCWP project officer for Transition Black Isle. My focus is to engage with Black Isle residents, community groups and businesses to provide information, practical waste reduction methods and activities which are relevant, engaging, and fun!

Working together with the Highland Community Waste Partnership, and partners such as Keep Scotland Beautiful and Zero Waste Scotland, we aim to reduce waste across the Black Isle and have a wider long-lasting positive impact on our behaviors and environment.  We will help residents and businesses try out new practices and support them to adopt these practices into everyday life.  Through sharing information and learning together as a community, we aim to help change engrained behaviors and show that there are sustainable, practical methods available to tackle waste and climate change.  My aim is to encourage residents and businesses across the Black Isle to be more mindful of waste, through learning and adopting new practical practices which will reduce unnecessary waste and save households and businesses money.

Before moving to the Highlands in winter 2021, I worked predominantly in the community development sector, working with disadvantaged communities in Edinburgh to make a community led plan to improve residents’ lives.  My roles within the third sector involved engaging hard to reach audiences to encourage and support residents who rarely had their voice heard to get involved in decision making around improvements to their lives and local community.  Working with tools such as NHS Place Standard and conducting Listening Surveys using a whole community approach, together we created a resident led community forum and identified local priorities and practical activity-based solutions the community could work towards.

My passion lies in supporting the formation of local community planning and action groups to emerge and thrive; for example supporting the formation of the Local Conversations Community Forum; supporting residents to form thematic activity-based groups such as sewing cafés, gardening and growing groups, youth groups, gala/events committee’s and supporting the development of Community Cafés and safe social spaces.  The work carried out by the Local Conversation Community Forum also contributed to shaping City of Edinburgh Council’s community place-based planning framework and brought together other community groups and third sector organisations operating in the community, forging better and more trusted relationships between residents, statutory services and third sector groups.

April 2022

Waste Partnership Project Officers introduced

April newsletters from TBI and Highland Community Waste Partnership introduced Lyn McLardy for TBI . . .

Hi, I'm Lyn and I'm the new project officer for TBI as part of the Highland Community Waste Partnership, a new lottery funded initiative looking at the impacts of waste and consumption on the climate.  I'm from Muir of Ord and most of my spare time at the moment is spent trying to get a straw bale house built (with lots of help!).  My previous work involved being part of the MOO Food team as a project officer where I worked on waste reduction, cooking and growing projects that also focused on building community and resilience.  I set up Let's Go Lentil which was a package free wholefoods business and although sadly the business had to stop due to covid, this new project will hopefully mean that we can work together to set up new and build on existing nitiatives for reducing food and single use waste across the Highlands.

I'm a firm believer in the power of community and supporting each other and would love to hear from you if you've got ideas or want to get involved in any way.  Just get in touch at  lyn@transitionblackisle.org .

. . . and Reina Edmiston for HGFP

Reina: Whilst working within Education, I set about starting a community growing project which will form part of a sustainability hub. Out with this I work on securing funding for community driven initiatives.  I previously worked in the tourism industry in the Far East and want to create a sustainable tourism environment that is built upon a sustainable food system.

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Visit the HCWP website

https://www.keepscotlandbeautiful.org/highland-community-waste-partnership/
 

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January 2022

Funding announcement and staff recruitment

TBI is one of eight community groups coming together across the Highlands as part of a new climate movement to help reduce consumption and waste and tackle our throwaway culture.  Coordinated by environmental charity Keep Scotland Beautiful, with funding from The National Lottery Community Fund, The Highland Community Waste Partnership will raise awareness of how the way that we consume contributes to climate change, working over three years to create solutions for addressing this.  It will do this through a programme of collaborative grassroots activity, working on key issues identified by partners, including reducing food waste; tackling single use items; and increasing the use of pre-loved, repaired and shared goods, instead of new purchases.  In addition to TBI, the Partnership comprises the following groups:

• The Lochaber Environment Group (Fort William)
• Broadford and Strath Community Company (Isle of Skye)
• Ullapool Community Trust
• Thurso Community Development Trust
• Lairg & District Learning Centre
• The Highland Good Food Partnership (Highland-wide)
• Velocity Café and Bicycle Workshop (Inverness)

By working together and sharing resources and learning, the Partnership will build a movement for more sustainable consumption, supporting communities to reduce their carbon footprints and contributing towards Scotland’s ambitions to create a more circular economy and become a Net Zero nation by 2045.

TBI is currently recruiting a project officer to start work in April, leading on food waste (building on work done by MOO Food in recent years and extending that throughout the Black Isle) and also to implement project streams being developed by other groups.

The project has been made possible by a £1,498,568 award, announced by The National Lottery Community Fund. It is one of 21 community-led waste and consumption focused projects across the UK to have received funding from the Climate Action Fund.

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