Sustainability is at the heart of everything Camphill School Aberdeen does and their latest collaboration is no different.
Throughout the past two years of the CV19 pandemic, Camphill School Aberdeen have gone through 2000-2500 disposable PPE face masks every week. To tackle this waste, the charity entered into a collaboration with local start-up, Origin to make plant pots out of the single-use facemasks. The plant pots are then used for corporate gifts for Christmas or for use in the school.
The charity based across three campuses in the west of the city, which provides day and residential support to 95 children and young people with learning disabilities and complex additional support needs, teamed up with Origin an Aberdeen-based start-up that was set up by a collective of staff and students from Gray’s School of Art, with the aim of recycling local waste into new products.
Nicolas Nino-Ramirez, Sustainable Development and Social Enterprise lead said: “We wanted to find a way to recycle our disposable PPE throughout Camphill School Aberdeen as we didn’t want them going to landfill, when the opportunity with Origin came up we couldn’t wait to get started. It is an initiative we are very proud of. We hope that this is the start of a continued collaboration with Origin, which may even lead to skills opportunities for our students.”
Camphill School Aberdeen ensure that everything they do is in line with their sustainability and circular economy ethos, this includes strict recycling rules in all of the buildings on-site, using second hand furniture when furnishing buildings, upcycling unwanted bicycles, using wood from the estates in their wood workshop and wool from their Alpacas in their craft workshops.
Ben Durack, Designer/Director of Innovation at Origin said: “We have transformed over 8000 used facemasks from Camphill School Aberdeen into 200 mini planters, that’s 8000 face masks diverted from traditional recycling and 8000 face masks that no longer need to travel around the planet to get recycled - if recycled at all. We want to show the people of Aberdeen what is truly possible with circularity and we are grateful to be working with the incredible staff at Camphill School Aberdeen to help facilitate that.”