Reduce, reuse, recycle – our favourite community ideas to make the most of what you have

Our team is lucky enough to see amazing community projects daily, but every so often we see an idea that truly sets off a ‘lightbulb moment’! Have a look at some of our favourite schemes and let us know if they inspire you. Many of these ideas are beautifully simple, so there’s lots of ways to do something similar, donate items or start growing on a budget.

Borrow a bag scheme

Despite the plastic bag change significantly reducing usage in the past few years, over 400 million single use plastic bags were still being used in 2022-23 (Defra). The brilliant ‘borrow bag’ scheme from Final Straw Foundation allows shoppers to borrow a fabric bag and simply return (or keep using) to a participating shop. We recently saw our friends at The Rebuild Site CIC in Carlisle had joined the scheme – a great idea and even better when organisations can run ‘sew a bag’ craft sessions too – a true circular economy!

Sewing libraries

Keep Britain Tidy and North London Waste Association state 10,000 items of clothing are being sent to landfill every five minutes. While ‘fast fashion’ is a big part of the throwaway culture problem, how many of us have discarded clothing with tears, missing buttons and snags that could be fixed?

This sewing library (below) was spotted by one of our team in Lancaster and is brimming with buttons, threads and handy haberdashery that not everyone has in their home.

If you don’t know how to sew (this author included!), have a look for a Repair Café near you. As well as having tools and experts on hand, they’re often great places to catch up and share a cuppa in your community.

Don’t forget seed libraries too!

Community Camp participant and founder of Bristol Seed Library Emma Lewins came up with a fantastic solution to meet people in her local community and keep their local patch green. Housed in a ‘regular’ library, the seed library offers a wide of variety of flower, fruit, vegetable and herb seeds with the aim to keep the project self-sustaining by returning harvested seeds.

We’ve also seen great ideas for ‘plant swaps’ to increase local biodiversity. Often supermarket herbs are many plants packed together, so dividing into three and repotting in medium pots will give you two extra healthy plants – for free!

Crisp packets to the rescue

Crisp packets can be notoriously hard to recycle at home, so we were blown-away by the clever idea to turn them into survival bivvy-style bags, blankets and even sleeping bags.

Pen Huston is the clever lady behind CPP Survival Items and has featured on Channel 4 and the BBC with her Crisp Packet Project. As well as being highly useful as a heat-reflecting item, Pen’s survival items provide a waterproof element too. As Pen points out, the items aren’t a lifestyle choice, rather survival items for those experiencing homelessness or struggling to heat their homes.

Pen works out of The Art Shack, a community collective based in St Leonards and currently isn’t taking individual packet donations, but is happy to receive ‘grids’ and ‘strips’ (rows of 5 or squares of 15) to contribute towards a 300-crisp packet sleeping bag.

Cracking Good Food

Manchester-based Cracking Good Food has been offering sustainable, healthy and environmentally conscious cooking classes for over 10 years, but we especially love their Kitchen Kit Call Out Campaign (KKCO). The campaign aims to help people starting out by providing donated kitchen equipment from schools, businesses and individuals. Since running the campaign, 8.1 tonnes of kitchen kit has been redistributed to help families and avoid unwanted items contributing to landfill.

Easy community gardening using old materials

We’ve been lucky enough to work with some incredible community gardeners and they often tell us the same thing – great things can happen with just a little unused space.

Community gardener Kathryn explains how a single pot became their starting point and household items became their planters. Examples included growing potatoes in a bookcase laid on its back, growing herbs in old dressing table drawers, using old tyres and even a bag for life (anything that will hold compost!) Find out more about Kathryn’s community gardening top tips (including audio).

Our own Dr Jo Elworthy also shows you how to grow popular vegetables in toilet roll tubes, egg cartons and supermarket plastic trays. 

Surplus paint isn’t waste…

We recently came across a fantastic Leeds-based social enterprise that’s saved 345 tons of paint from landfill in just one year! Seagulls Paint sells recycled and reprocessed paint (i.e. rescued from landfill) and sells it on for a fraction of the original cost. There’s even the option to purchase new paint and bespoke mixed colours too! The profits they make are then invested in the local community.

We’ve also seen lots of brilliant examples of neighbours sharing an excess of home-grown fruit and vegetables. Few things go down better than a ‘thanks for the apples’ pie come autumn, and we have just the thing for a glut of summer courgettes – our Eden Project Thai green curry recipe! If you need to expand your reach – apps like Olio are brilliant for sharing or picking up surplus items too.

We’d love to hear about any bright ideas you’ve seen or developed in your community – who knows how many more projects it could spark? Joining our friendly Network on Facebook is a great place to meet like-minded people and share your successes – pop along and say hello!