Forma, FDC, The Belt Guy… we go by many names.
A dude who lives in Aberdeen in a tiny flat making things from trash. This process started while working at Transition Extreme and studying product design at RGU. I had to design and make a product for a uni submission to a local makers shop called Edit, and as part of that process, I kept seeing rope being binned and speaking to climbers almost daily about what to do with rope once it was retired.
It dawned on me that all that rope from climbers in one place, compounded by the thousands of climbers across Scotland, was likely a massive amount of waste. So I got digging and I was confused and annoyed by what I found. There were some companies trying to solve it, but nobody doing it in a way that really scratched that itch and definitely nobody doing it in Scotland at scale. I don't like unsolved problems, so I bought an £80 sewing machine and got to work.
A year and a bit later, I was running the company full time, stocked in stores and expanding into other waste materials.
But more important than the name and origin story is what we do and why we do it.
Our slogan is "Make Waste Useful", and that's our fundamental philosophy. We take trash and give it use and value again. A certified waste man, if you will…
But jokes aside, at Forma, recycling isn't just something we do on the side. It's the whole point. We're not interested in just chopping materials up and passing them on. The goal is to take waste and turn it into something people actually want to use. Something that makes sense, looks good and lasts.
We try to get the most out of every material we work with. Not forcing it into something it's not, but working with what's already there, keeping the character, the strengths, and the story, and building something new from it.
It started with climbing rope. There's loads of rope being retired every year across the UK. Most of it still has plenty of life left in it, but it gets thrown out anyway. Forma started by collecting that rope and turning it into belts, accessories, and everyday products, not as a novelty, but as proper retail-ready products that just happen to come from waste.
But rope was never the end goal. A scalable system making retail-ready products from waste is. Now we're starting to work with other materials as well, especially plastics like HDPE and PP. Think bottle caps and yogurt tubs. Same idea, just applied wider: take something that's being overlooked and turn it into something useful again.
Over time, that builds into something bigger. A system where materials stay in use for longer and don't just get thrown away after one life.
Forma sits somewhere between design, making, and material reuse. It's about building things properly and showing that waste can still be valuable if you treat it right.
At the end of the day, it's not about recycling for the sake of it. It's about proving that waste can actually be turned into something worth keeping.
Keep waste useful, you beautiful trash goblins!
