Aberdeen Has the Rope. It Just Has No Route Back.

Sat down with Jack Middleton this week. A proper chat about waste and what to do with it. We had it right beside Curated & Edit in the Bon Accord Centre, which felt about right, because that is one of the places my stuff actually sits on a shelf.

It started as a wee blether. It got big very fast.

Every rope I use is already dead

Everything I make starts life as a retired climbing rope. Once a rope is done, it is done. You cannot climb on it again, no matter how good it looks hanging on the hook.

Manufacturers say retire it after five to ten years even if it seems perfect. The core degrades where you cannot see it. That is the bit that catches folk out. The rope looks grand. The rope is not grand.

Here is the annoying part. That rope is nylon. Petroleum based. It takes hundreds of years to break down and it is genuinely awkward to recycle. One study put a single climbing rope at 46.6 kg of CO2, and about half of that is just making the nylon in the first place.

So the material is still brilliant. It is just not allowed to do its old job any more.

Why recycled climbing rope barely exists

When Mammut ran a proper collection scheme in Switzerland, they got 748 kg of rope back in three months across fifty drop-off points.

Read that again. A whole country having a real go at it. Fifty places to hand your rope in. And it came to less than a tonne.

Everywhere else, it is a skip. That is the whole system. There is no clever bit I am leaving out.

Now scale that up to the North Sea

This is where Jack comes in, and this is the bit I have not stopped thinking about since.

Oil and gas out in the North Sea gets through enormous amounts of rope and sling. Nobody is really counting it. Nobody is asking for it back. It goes out, it does its job, it goes away.

And Aberdeen already has every piece you would need. It has the waste. It has the workshops. It has the folk who can actually make things with their hands.

What is missing is the route. There is no path from the platform to the bench.

I am one bloke with a sewing machine and a lot of coffee, and I have kept over 5 km of rope out of landfill this year on my own. That is a drop in the ocean and I know it. But it proves the small version works. Imagine what it looks like with a proper pipeline behind it.

I do not have the answer. Jack does not have the answer either. But it starts with the conversation, and we have finally started having it.

In the meantime I keep doing the version I can control. Rope comes off climbing walls around the UK, lands on my bench in Aberdeen, and leaves as a recycled climbing rope belt made to your exact waist, a rope keychain that used to hold somebody up, or one of the pieces I have ready to post today. Every one of them is a wee bit of rope that did not go in the bin.

If you work offshore, or in a yard, or anywhere that quietly bins good rope every week, come and talk to me. I would rather have that conversation than not.

Stay classy and remember,
Make Waste Useful.

George