History of Lochaber Environmental Group
The First 25 Years
Lochaber Environmental Group came into existence at the end of the last century and has seen many changes in views on the key issues facing us with regard to the environment. Throughout the whole period our focus has been the same – how to live in a sustainable way in our local area.
We live in a spectacular part of Scotland and there are many bodies, national and local focussed on aspects of the natural environment. LEG is different in that the focus is on the people who live here and what we can do to make sense of our environment. LEG was set up in 1998 to address the problems of waste and this was the main focus of our work for several years.
At this time awareness of global warming was in the background and the main concern was about the waste of resources and the need to act in a way that was fair in terms of access to resources across the globe. This was reflected in our initial slogan of moving towards “One planet living” reflecting the idea that if the whole world consumed as much as we do in the west, then we would need the resources of three planets.
At the national level the Scottish Government was in the process of defining a National Waste Strategy which was issued in draft in 1999 by SEPA. Like many environmental initiatives, this originated in the European Union. At this time there was virtually no recycling in Scotland but the National Waste Plan led to the allocation of resources for the separate collection of things that could be recycled and recovery rates started to rise.
In the first full year, 2000, we received grant funding from the Esmee Fairbairn Trust and Highland Council Landfill Tax Fund to run a Waste Information Project. We produced an outline Waste Strategy for Lochaber in the autumn which formed the basis for a meeting at Caol Community Centre with individuals, community councils and agencies. At the end of that year we managed to get funds from the Lottery and the original funders for a three year project called Community Action on Waste. In this first period we produced a A-Z of opportunities to recycle in Lochaber, started going in to schools to discuss waste and began promoting home composting buying a lorry-load of bins which we then sold on to people at cost price. We carried out a survey of local businesses and received responses from over 30 showing an interest in recycling. A company based in Dingwall, Ross-shire Recycling was collecting cardboard for recycling and with him we contacted hotels and other businesses who were prepared to pay for a collection. In 2002 we got funds from a new scheme called Fresh Futures which paid for a truck which we used to collect cardboard and cans across Lochaber. We were offered the use of a processing shed at Alcan which separated steel from aluminium cans. Many hours were spent getting distinctly sticky boxing up cans for onward despatch. We spoke to farmers and crofters who were keen to do something with the plastic bale wrap and managed to raise funds from RSABI (The Royal Scottish Agricultural Benevolent Institution) to pay for collection and transport to Solway Recycling in Dumfries. There were many other intriguing challenges such as the Forestry Commission who were looking for a use for the brash left on the hillside as a result of felling operations and Kurt Larsson from Yeoman Glensanda who was looking in to combining rock dust generated at the quarry with used glass to manufacture a sub-base material for road building.
In 2003 we got a grant from the Esmee Fairbairn Trust that allowed us to employ a full time Compost Officer for the first time, Bridget Thomas. As well as promoting home composting through sales, demonstrations and compost competitions, we were constantly experimenting. Bridget was interested to see whether cardboard layered with grass cuttings would give a decent result and carried out a trial at Lochybridge which showed promising results. We started a wormery at the LEG office and bought 25 wormeries for distribution to schools and businesses. We also persuaded the manager of the Council yard at Inverlochy to pull out garden material from the skips and from the Council grass cutting programme and to compost it on site. A random sample survey showed the rate of take up of composting by households in Lochaber in 2002 to be 27% which we intended to build on. Unfortunately, at this period the Council took over the distribution of compost bins from a central point which meant that we lost contact with those locally who were buying them.
We continued to develop work on composting with a conference at Strontian in 2004 and the launch of Spirit of the Soil, a booklet looking at traditional methods of soil improvement, based on interviews with local crofters and gardeners. We also introduced the idea of a prize for best compost at local produce shows and this proved an excellent way of demonstrating the finished product.
A major development in this early period was the integration of Refurnishings with LEG in 2001. This scheme had been started a few years earlier and operated a van that collected household furniture and other items which were then made available to others across Lochaber. The team consisted of one part time paid manager, Joe Robson, and a group of volunteers who put in more or less a full time week. Originally based at Onich, they moved to premises in Fort William at Lochybridge. This project had been developed through Voluntary Action Lochaber, as much based on social welfare principles as environmental ones and there was a proposal that the blending of the two elements would provide LEG with greater stability.
During this period the new Scottish Government, known then as the Scottish Executive, ran a couple of programmes, the Sustainable Action Fund and the Strategic Waste Fund which we were able to seek funding from and then in 2003 a major new fund was established Transforming Waste Scotland (TWS), to support community work, largely due to lobbying from RAGS which transformed itself into WRAP Scotland, the national branch of the Waste Resources and Action Programme, and then into Zero Waste Scotland.
In 2004 we secured a three year grant from TWS to finance a major expansion of the organisation. We moved from Council premises at Inverlochy to take on a much larger site at Torlundy. At this time we moved into working on contract to the Highland Council in a bid for financial stability, providing a service of clearing houses when tenants had left and providing essential furniture for new incoming tenants. We also developed and ran community compost sites for the Council who paid us for compost material that had been diverted from landfill. For both services we were paid a rate based on the tonnage of materials we were saving from landfill. Unfortunately this challenge proved too difficult and we were not able to raise the funds we needed to maintain this level of activity. Refurnishings was closed down in 2007 and the service was taken over by New Start Highland. This was a blow to morale and partly a result of a too rapid expansion of activities in the early years.
This was a difficult period for LEG but our task was so clearly not over that we wanted to do whatever we could to carry on. Over the next few years the focus was on community composting led by Alison Devey with skill and an eye for detail. We got four sites up and running in Kinlochleven, Glencoe, Strontian and Acharacle. Open bays were available for people to bring garden waste and it was shredded periodically, using a shredder shared across the sites. The Council paid for each tonne composted at the rate they would have had to pay to landfill it. In 2008-09 the four sites processed a total of 69t for which we received £11,954, approx. £170/tonne. This was all the money available to run the sites and it was used to pay a worker at each site for approximately one day per week, about £2,000 per year. This was a committed band who worked many hours over what we were able to pay them: Hamish Small, Liz Friel, Martin Cuthbertson, Nigel Wombell, Robert Oddy and Becky Dacre. This very restricted income was halted in 2014 after it was ruled by the Scottish Government that in order to be accounted as compost rather than waste, material needed to meet the standard known as PAS (Publicly Available Specification) 100. This required lab tests which put it beyond our reach financially and LEG was no longer able to support the sites. The aim of this ruling was to encourage local authorities and others who were collecting large quantities of green waste to process it more carefully, but it had an unfortunate knock on effect for small groups like ours.
We continued to explore the options for more ambitious schemes. It has always seemed like madness to be collecting organic waste and driving it miles across Scotland for processing. In 2008 we carried out a small study on the feasibility of food waste composting on a small scale in Lochaber villages, David Biggin and Robert Linton Food Waste Composting in Rural Lochaber. Unfortunately it was not possible to identify a way to do this that would work financially.
It was at this time that the issue of global warming became a stronger driver for government policy following the passing of the Climate Change Acts in the UK in 2008 and in Scotland in 2009. One of the proposals for changing behaviour was through community action and this led to the Scottish Government Climate Challenge Fund. Our initial involvement was to take forward work on renewable energy from 2010 with a project called RENEW (Lochaber Household Renewable Energy Network)and followed by LIFE (Lochaber Initiative on Fuel and Energy). The high level of interest in this topic at that time is shown by the fact that we developed a contact list of over 300 people in the first year which culminated with the very successful Renewable Energy and Heat Fair at the Nevis Centre in March 2011 attracting installers from across Highland and further and over 1,000 attendees. The work was a mixture of advice to individuals, visits and conversation with local residents who had made installations and the provision of early energy monitors to enable people to understand their consumption at home. During the first phase, the emphasis was on looking at possible installations for home renewable energy generation and the second phase looked more at reducing energy demand by finding ways to measure energy use and improving insulation at home. We distributed OWL monitors to people on loan to record their energy use and we carried out infra red surveys to give more information about cold spots within their houses.
In the last few years we have continued to address the wide range of issues that are concerned with living more sustainably. During this period the emphasis shifted from recycling to waste prevention and we made efforts to encourage re-use and to raise the topic of food waste. In 2018 the project Go, Grow, Glow brought together our interest in food production, energy and finally saw us meeting a long held ambition to tackle the issue of travel. It is famously difficult to get people out of their cars and rural transport services are inevitably more sparse than those in towns but the last few years has seen great success in promoting and facilitating cycling around the Fort William area. This has been achieved by a multifaceted approach. LEG was instrumental in seeing the introduction of electric hire bikes to Fort William (HI-BIKE) and we have accepted and refurbished bikes for re-use and provided cycling experience and bike maintenance workshops. To encourage local food production we have established Food Lochaber that provides an online sale outlet to meet the problems of retailing for small local producers. We have also been able to return to our early commitment to the importance of composting both for households and businesses and become a partner in the Highland Community Waste Partnership
The next phase
The whole issue of climate change has become both more immediate and more contested in the last few years as resistance has been shown to measures such as moving away from cars or the familiarity of old forms of heating. Scottish Government brought an end to the Climate Challenge Fund in 2022 and is pursuing action on climate change through a network of regional hubs with the aim of reaching out beyond the environmental audience to a wider one through engagement with place based community groups and projects thereby supporting grassroots community led work.