Waste Reduction Semi Finalists

1. Bags of Goodies
2. Proper Oils
3. TimeMachineFun
4. Resource Futures
5. London Sustainability Exchange
6. WorkSpring
7. Quick Compost Ltd
8. The People's Kitchen
9. VillagePowerCIC
10. FareShare
11. Devon and Cornwall Food Association (DCFA)
12. Brixton People's Kitchen
13. EMERGE Food
14. Feeding the 5000/ Tristram Stuart
15. Zero Waste Alliance UK
16. The Restart Project
17. Newmarket Open Door
18. Cwm Harry Land Trust
19. Groundwork Leeds
20. Hackney City Farm

Organisation: Bags of Goodies

Project name: Bags of Goodies

Elevator pitch: "Hey you!  Don't Bin that. Use this...." one step before throwing it away. Bags of Goodies a waste rescue service."

 

Organisation: Proper Oils

Project name: Unblocking the Community

Elevator pitch: To collect domestic waste cooking oil by working with collection partners to educate them how to collect, store & recycle their oil.  In return, Proper Oils will pay the host of the collection point. Recovered oils will be processed to make biodiesel.

Organisation: TimeMachineFun

Project name: BigClearOut

Elevator pitch: The Way it is: You randomly take personal objects to the tip, why not turn this chaos into order, with specific BigClearOut Events? 'Today we will mostly be digesting fatal video recorders. This one's fatal, let's do a product autopsy and explore its planet toxicity.' its child's play, lets feedback a report to the producer. The BigClearOut Events challenge can change personal behaviour by showing consequences of what we are all doing. They empower the individual, community to have an informed 'planet voice' and are run by volunteers.

Organisation: Resource Futures

Project name: Bicester Reuse and Sustainability Centre

 

Elevator pitch: A community-led social enterprise delivering a 'one-stop shop', for all aspects of sustainable living and reuse in Bicester, offering dynamic support to other projects that share a similar aim.  In combination with a conventional Furniture Reuse Operation providing scale, we will extend its reach by actively addressing items that require preparation for re-use, with a strong element of training and skills. The main operation will handle all materials usually donated, such as clothes, furniture and household goods. The repair side will start with wooden furniture, bicycles and small electrical appliances, and grow to include any goods that can feasibly be repaired and prepared for re-use. The local group, Grassroots Bicester, produced a feasibility report, identifying both that many items are entering the waste stream that could be re-used, and that there is a gap in the market in Bicester for reasonably priced goods, while the local population includes a significant proportion dependent upon benefits.

Organisation: London Sustainability Exchange

Project name: Community Textile Reuse Project

Elevator pitch: A social enterprise where we will create the paradigm shift that gets people excited about refashioned clothes. We will encourage experienced, skilled people within the community to train young people to repair clothes which will then be sold on and diverted from landfill.

Organisation: WorkSpring

Project name: WorkSpring Pilot

Elevator pitch: WorkSpring turns retail waste surplus into self-employment opportunities one box at a time. This surplus is then reused by de-branding, rebranding and sometimes up-cycling to become stock that long term unemployed adults sell on, creating an income and self-employment.

Organisation: Quick Compost Ltd

Project name: Zero Refuse System

Elevator pitch: Our goal is to bring together innovative technologies in a unique way that solves the current waste to landfill issue. Focusing at a local level we aim to give communities the ability to solve the issue of waste whilst fostering a real sense of community spirit.

Organisation: The People's Kitchen

Project name: The People's Kitchen Expansion Project

Elevator pitch: The People's Kitchen is a chef-led initiative where volunteers prepare and cook surplus fruit and vegetables donated by local shopkeepers into weekly community banquets. We want to roll this successful model out across the country.

Organisation: VillagePowerCIC

Project name: Villages Re-energised - One Stop Shops

Elevator pitch: An information support package for Village and Community based renewable energy realisation utilising locally available waste biomass feedstock from farms, households and local commercial food based enterprises. This package pulls together state of the art information on the economic, legal, regulatory, technological and planning issues with the intention of cutting through the complexities for replicant communities by speeding the time frame of knowledge acquisition and accelerating projects to investor readiness .

Organisation: FareShare

Project name: Just in time Food Network 

Elevator pitch: FareShare & FoodCycle want to create a framework to empower local communities to collect surplus food in an effective, safe and efficient way that can be replicated.

Organisation: Devon and Cornwall Food Association (DCFA)

Project name: DCFA Expansion Project

Elevator pitch: The project, which involves buying a van, will transform DCFA. At present, all food is collected in volunteers' cars and this restricts the amounts of food that can be collected. The expansion project will mean that DCFA can collect and re-distribute more food, and therefore ensure that less food goes to landfill, and more vulnerable people will have access to healthy food.

Organisation: Brixton People's Kitchen/Mobile Kitchen

Project name: Brixton People's Kitchen - Mobile Kitchen

Elevator pitch: For the last year, the Brixton People's Kitchen has been turning food surplus from local businesses into free, healthy meals for local people. We now want to invite local people to design and build a Mobile Kitchen that will travel throughout the diverse communities in Brixton and beyond, to inspire positive action against food waste by acting as an open, convivial platform for food education, community building and skills-sharing.

Organisation: EMERGE Food

Project name: FareShare Harvest Champions

Elevator pitch: This project addresses food waste, food poverty and worklessness by capturing two types of food waste on local farms. Our volunteers will use 'graded out' food and food that would otherwise be ploughed back from local farmers and offers opportunities for volunteers to develop skills through working on our programmes providing food to people in food poverty regionally.

Organisation: Feeding the 5000/ Tristram Stuart

Project name: Gleaning Network UK

Elevator pitch: Gleaning Network UK will harness Feeding the 5000's national profile, large network of volunteers and close links with farmers around the country to provide an effective mechanism to divert 36,000kg of wasted fruit and vegetables from farms to charities providing food to the most vulnerable groups in society.  The project will provide giving opportunities for up to 360 people, who will be encouraged to volunteer on regular gleaning days in the countryside.

Organisation: Zero Waste Alliance UK

Project name: The Rubbish Diet

Elevator pitch: The Rubbish Diet is like WeightWatchers for your bin and makes a real difference to how much we spend and how much we throw away.  Dieters find it surprisingly motivating, even if they start with no particular interest in waste.

Organisation: The Restart Project

Project name: The Restart Project

Elevator pitch: The Restart Project convenes community repair events where those with technical skills share their skills, empowering owners of broken electrical items by showing them how to troubleshoot and fix them. We would like to scale up to create a national network, diverting more electrical waste, and more importantly, sparking a return to repair.

 

Organisation: Newmarket Open Door

Project name: Reclaim

Elevator pitch:  Reclaim metals, textiles, foam and plastics from mattresses that are not suitable for re-use and would otherwise be disposed in landfill. By using volunteers and creating employment in an area of high unemployment and relative social deprivation.

Organisation: Cwm Harry Land Trust

Project name: Museum of Bad Design

Elevator pitch: Imagine a design team of thousands - from all walks of life - coming together to tackle to issue of bad design and the production of waste: bad physical design, wrong-headed economics or wayward behaviours amongst consumers. Then imagine a place where industry's best brains come together with the collective intelligence of this community design team to generate solutions - we call it the Museum of Bad Design.

Organisation: Groundwork Leeds

Project name: Wood Doctor

Elevator pitch: Wood Doctor is a community wood recycling enterprise that turns waste wood into useable products and timber and gives disadvantaged groups training and employment opportunities.

Organisation: Hackney City Farm

Project name: Resourcer

Elevator pitch: A website and workshops that make local waste visible so organisations can harness the resource, preserving material value and adding social and environmental value. Keeping resources local, driving down waste.