Funders/Projects

April 2018/March 2020.

Funded by the ‘Climate Challenge Fund’, ReThink MESS was a 2 year project that aimed to reduce the carbon footprint of Mull and Iona.

We planned to trial options for reducing food waste going to landfill. This included a food waste collection & composting service, providing composters (and associated education, training and support) to schools and businesses out with the collection area, piloting a community fridge, and running events around upcycling and raising awareness of climate change.

We also planned recycling facilities where there weren’t any. This included “Recycling on the go” bins around the island and at events. This was a great success with us stopping 1500kg of cans and plastics going to landfill from May 2019. (10.5 tonnes of CO2e) to April 2020. This is a service that MICT kept going, past CCF funding as we see it as an essential service to stop our landfill filling up needlessly and will tie in with the Scottish governments Deposit Return Scheme that has been pushed back to July 2021.

Our other headline achievement is the Community Fridge, which we are very proud of. The benefit of it has had a wider impact than just the environmental savings. We saved just over 2 tonnes of food going to landfill with a saving of 9.4 tonnes of CO2e. However the bigger benefit may be the social benefit that it is a very good source of food for households that are struggling economically. Currently the Fridge is closed due to the halls being closed due to Covid19, but we are keen to restart this as soon as possible.

In the original bid for the project we planned to work with businesses to reduce the amount of take-away plastics. When we surveyed them once we were up and running most businesses we approached had already started to make the change, so we targeted the Mull Music Festival. Previously they had used plastic glasses and so we supplied the 2019 event with compostable disposable plastic, which opened up conversations over the environmental impact of events.

Our Food Waste Collection service was slow to start due to location and electricity supply issues. Thankfully Sgiob-ruabh farm came to our rescue and so we could then arrange for a polytunnel to house the composter. We engaged with nearly 100 households and split Tobermory into 2 collection days. At the end of funding we had a waiting list of 36 people wanting to join and had collected 5.8 tonnes of food waste with an average of 5kg per household each week. This was a great result and are looking at ways to continue the service.

Have a look at our Food waste Collection page HERE.

Another part of the project was to look at introducing beach clean stations around the island. We took advice from Argyll & Bute Council, who had experience of larger beach clean stations and there benefits and drawbacks and we eventually went for Beach clean benches with “2minute beach clean” boards asking people to pick up bag of rubbish and photograph it and tag the photograph to the 2minute beach clean site.

Have a look at our Beach Clean Page HERE.