Scotland’s first ‘one stop shop’ for plastic waste established

United Kingdom – The first of its kind in Scotland, a highly visible city center plastic recycling hub was built by designers from Robert Gordon University’s Gray’s School of Art.

The Origin Hub was established as a “one stop shop” to revolutionize how local plastic trash is recycled. Origin, an Aberdeen-based start-up, is a success story from RGU’s Startup Accelerator program.

The Origin Hub, which has a location in Aberdeen at 1-5 George Street, is a component of the recently created Culture Aberdeen project that Gray’s School of Art’s creative section, Look Again, is leading to assist creatives and experimental start-up enterprises revitalize vacant city center apartments.

To demonstrate the amount of plastic garbage in circulation—roughly 7 billion tonnes to date—that a person would walk through if it were all spread out over the UK and its islands, Origin Hub in the city center will create a highly visible shop front with knee-deep plastic.

The Origin team, which consists of Origin Director Daniel Sutherland and Ben Durack, both of whom teach 3D Design at Gray’s School of Art, intends to hold seminars at the city center hub to instruct students and members of the general public.

They will also introduce a range of new products that the public may vote on to be produced, as well as showcase their recycled plastic products and illustrate how they are formed.

Project support

A coalition of the city’s cultural institutions is supporting the Culture Aberdeen project with £150,000 from Aberdeen City Council’s Local Authority Covid Economic Recovery Fund (LACER).

To change 2 vacant retail spaces on Schoolhill in Aberdeen, the project team is collaborating with old and new business partners, independent artists, Culture Aberdeen members, and the city center populations.

The Gray’s School of Art team has so far helped with the opening of Look Again’s Project Space at 32 St. Andrew Street, a pop-up store called EDIT from Deemouth Artist Studios (DAS) located at 34 Upper Kirkgate, and a retail store called “Departmnt,” operated by the non-profit organization Second Home, on Gaelic Lane.