Your Dead Rope Is My Raw Material. Bring It To Town.

Got a retired climbing rope taking up space? Bring it to me and take home something free.

I am at Curated Aberdeen in the Bon Accord Centre this weekend. Friday, 11 till 4. Saturday, 10 till 5. Bring me your dead rope and I will swap you for Forma gear.

No catch. No form to fill in. You walk up to the stall with a rope you cannot trust anymore, and you walk away with a keyring or a bracelet.

Why I want the rope you are scared to climb on

A rope retires after 5 to 10 years even if it still looks perfect. The core wears where you cannot see it. Most climbers already know this.

So the rope comes off the wall. It goes in a bag. The bag goes in a cupboard. And then it sits there for years, because nobody wants to bin something that expensive and nobody knows what else to do with it.

That is the bit I am trying to fix. Nylon takes hundreds of years to break down. One rope costs about 46.6 kg of CO2 to make, roughly half of that the nylon itself. Chucking it in a skip wastes it twice over.

Where to donate old climbing rope in Aberdeen

This is not only for climbers, by the way.

If you climb at an Aberdeen wall, work as an arborist or a tree surgeon, or you are doing rope access offshore or onshore, your dead rope is my raw material. Anything too worn or too old to trust is exactly what I want.

Cannot make it into town this weekend? Message me. I am happy to arrange a pickup anywhere in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire. I have driven a fair distance for a bin bag of rope before and I would do it again.

What happens to it after you hand it over

It comes back to the workshop in Torry. It gets washed, cut, checked, and matched up by colour, which takes far longer than anyone expects.

Then it becomes a recycled climbing rope belt made to your exact waist size, 22 to 50 inches. Or a dog lead. Or a coaster. Or a pair of earrings. Or one of the rope keychains I will be handing over at the stall, alongside the rope bracelets made to wrist size.

None of it goes to landfill. That is the whole point.

And I am not being noble here, to be fair. It is my material. Every rope somebody hands me is a rope I do not have to go chasing. So the trade is honest on both sides. You get your cupboard back and a bit of free gear. I get the stuff I build the whole business out of.

That is a good deal for a thing that has been sat in a bag since 2019.

Stay classy and remember,
Make Waste Useful.

George