The Green Group of City Councillors and Brighton Pavilion MP Caroline Lucas have joined in applauding an initiative to create a central ‘re-use depot’ using shipping containers to receive, sort, repair and redistribute unwanted goods and materials for reuse. The Brighton Freegle project has just launched a crowdfunding appeal to purchase eight shipping containers to provide secure storage on disused sites and enable their relatively easy relocation from one ‘pop-up’ site to another as and when required.
Project director Cat Fletcher has been running the Freegle Brighton online reuse community for seven years, which now has 22,000 local members. In 2013 she set up a large storage base at the Circus Street Market in central Brighton courtesy of Cathedral Developments. She has intercepted and redistributed about 250 tonnes of goods in the past year but says this is only possible with sufficient storage space.
She said: “The project expansion will enable us to intercept more reusable goods and provide a more effective reuse service for the whole city. The containers will enable us to move the depot every few years from one development site to another with the minimum of fuss. We have 8 shipping containers, earmarked for the project. We just need to raise the £10k to purchase and deliver them!”
The Convenor of the Green Group of Councillors, Councillor Phélim Mac Cafferty has given his encouragement:
“One person’s trash is another person’s treasure and this project will help to match these up, IF the funding for this more permanent arrangement can be achieved. We wish this visionary project every success and urge supporters to make a contribution to crowd funding this important campaign for our city. Cleaning up litter costs the taxpayer about £1bn a year and simply far too much of this is perfectly usable. This follows in the path of Freegle and the Brighton Wastehouse and we salute the vision of this latest campaign. ”
Caroline Lucas MP said:
“I sincerely hope that this fantastic project gets the funding required to expand. This scheme would help promote the further re-use of unwanted goods and materials, and build upon the great work of Cat Fletcher and others.”
The crowdfunding campaign runs for 5 weeks. Details can be found at: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/city-reuse-depot