When we started the Woodland Burial Company we decided on a mantra we would operate by that was dictated by the philosophy of Granville. I won’t divulge the full thing but, as a result we have set up a few operational procedures that you may like to know about.
For the creation of our small car park within Granville’s wood, and thus the blue print for all our other sites, we used a recycled base called 6F2. 6F2 is a by-product of demolition projects and once upon a time it was nothing more than land fill. Thanks to some lateral thinking individuals, this once waste product is now turned into decent hardcore that can be effectively used as a sub base for many different projects. I’m not going to lie, it was a little more work than dealing with quarried aggregate but the knowledge we are saving so many tons of waste more than made up for it – a 6 car parking bay used up 25 tone of sub base. This limits the use of quarried stone by a massive 81% in order to achieve the same result.
Another result of our mantra is the way we deal with out unwanted timber. We have to fell certain none-native specimens, such as the vast amounts of pine we have at Granville’s wood, in order to reinstate the native species that should be growing in the area. Once these trees are felled we process them on site and use around 70% of the tree on projects within the wood it was felled. The remainder of 30% stays on the ground (admittedly re-positioned) in order to create habitat in the area it came from. We chip our timber from unwanted species and use it to surface our paths, we are constantly thinking of new ways to make more effective use of what we have at our disposal.
Up cycling is regularly talked about in the media as a way of re-inventing furniture and the like, this is all good but for me, up cycling is about finding a use for large scale by product or waste that involves minimal energy usage to produce a re-useable product.
I don’t know where the up-cycling movement will end up but I do know this, we need to take the re-purposing of our waste very seriously otherwise we will simply run out of places to put it on this lovely little planet we are fortunate enough to call our home.