History

The Reclaimer was established in the 1990's and taken over in 2001 by one of its fee-paying members as a private initiative to encourage more recycling mainly in the communities in and around Glasgow’s West End. With an approach based on the principles of Zero Waste and using a system employing source separation, it now collects daily from homes and businesses across the city.

By collecting clean, segregated materials we encourage respect for resources and ensure they have the best possible chance of being effectively recycled. We have fees for different levels of service, special rates for OAPs, charities and small businesses and offer standardised and tailor-made solutions. Customers include householders, a tennis club running a virtually “zero-waste” system, galleries, cafés, retailers and a renewable energy service provider.

Until now, our efforts have always concentrated on the household domain and despite co-mingled collections being rolled out city-wide, our belief in the source-separated approach is endorsed by most of our original membership and a growing number of others seeking more from recycling. Customers phone for advice on how best to deal with hard-to-recycle materials and our enthusiastic workforce is happy to help.  By offering the same services to business, we now have a growing number of small and medium size enterprises helping with our success.

Networking with other community organisations and companies and building on their expertise, enables us to collect an ever-increasing range of materials and feed them into the appropriate recycling or re-use channels, thus increasing our appeal as a one-stop shop for recycling solutions. Examples here would be re-usable IT equipment, office furniture, printer cartridges etc.We aim to develop services further to include food waste, composting and even vermiculture etc. - moving us ever-closer to zero-waste possibilities whilst creating closed loop systems.

On the lighter side - for the past 3 years we have provided red "Santa Sacks" at Christmas to help combat increased arisings at this time of year, asking our customers to make a charitable donation on using the bag - In 2006 we raised over £900 in financial donations for Oxfam, in 2007 it was £1200 for Shelter and the 2008 appeal has seen various charities sharing a total of well over £1400!

On top of this, over the years we have also diverted textiles, shoes and re-usable clothing from landfill, feeding these and other re-usable household items into project appeals and local charity shops.Work to establish sales contracts for materials collected means we can now financially underpin the service with a view to funding other activities.

Revolution Resource Recovery Ltd.  t/a The Reclaimer continues to grow after being converted to become the trading arm of  the Scottish charity "Glasgow Resource Recovery Park Limited".

Our attention is now turning to developing a Resource Recovery Park in Glasgow with strong hopes that a major waste diversion and re-use centre, operated and managed by the community sector, may soon come to fruition. Funding was not forthcoming for 2006/7 but projects such as Urban Ore and Eco-Cycle in the US continue to inspire. Anybody with an interest in the area and spare time to help is encouraged to volunteer and lend a hand....