One of the most daunting prospects about the end of cheap and easy oil is how businesses can survive. Like the rest of us, and perhaps even more fundamentally, even local businesses tend to depend upon long supply chains, road and air freight. And really, isn't this anti-consumption lark working against their interests?
Well we'll always want and need to trade, but it is a challenge, and it will require a brave and imaginative leap for many local business people. As ever, it's good to have a model, and here's one not far from Westcombe.
Chris Carey's Collections provides textile recycling banks to councils, schools and companies (textiles now account for a large proporition of our landfill waste), sort the collections for re-use and selling-on and even sell on some of the clothes to local people in their Deptford boutique. Theatre, film and TV costume hunters are also customers. The company seems too to have a social aspect, with human clothing pickers employed instead of machines "as we believe in providing local employment" and they run schemes to get the long-term unemployed back to work.
Some good transition principles in action there: using others' waste as raw materials; recycling; re-use; supporting the community.
Greenwich Community College tells us that Chris Carey will be running a stall at the Frock Exchange on 21 March, where he (or she?) can explain the recycling process to anyone who might be interested.
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