The hour that we arose — shortly after 8 AM — was unfamiliar territory for me. 10 AM is more my norm when we are not on the road and travelling. The view from our hotel window in Yorkshire revealed very little but fog-shrouded landscape. Setting off slowly, we hoped that the white-out fog would burn off by 10 or 11 in the morning, but that was not to be. We spent a very slow and tedious day driving at a snail’s pace from Yorkshire to Edinburgh, frequently never surpassing 40 mph as we traversed one construction zone after another.
The TomTom satnav, now renamed Thomasina, served us well for two days as we drove north and never got lost once. And truthfully, getting through the streets of Edinburgh was a lot less stressful without the need to constantly look up and down and check the map.
Mark and Ola laying out timber cuts
Within a half an hour of arrival, Mark had changed into work clothing and was out in the workshop at GreenWorks in Edinburgh, Scotland while I received a quick tour of the office from Ellie, one of the directors of Edinburgh’s first green building store.
The concept is simple and very admirable although a bit labour intensive — re-claim and re-use instead of tossing perfectly good timber and other assorted building materials in the land-fill.
The material comes from a variety of sources — some mundane and some unexpected. The company has a van and they do pick-ups (for a fee) of surplus building supplies from construction sites, joinery shops (cabinet and furniture makers), private home or business owners who have completed a project, utility companies, and many other sites.
Interesting materials also have arrived from the remains of theatre sets and the dismantling of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. GreenWorks is not trying to compete with architectural salvage companies but instead are trying to educate the public about the value of re-using timber instead of buying new and often lesser quality timber from a home improvement superstore.
Norm and Jim building a deck in the side yard at GreenWorks in Edinburgh, Scotland
The current focus is building materials, but things are about to expand into the leafier kind of ‘green things’ as the side yard is being transformed with the construction of a floating deck to be used as a multipurpose space for demonstrations and a food production garden centre is on the way.
Keep watching for more posts from Edinburgh in the days ahead!
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