Building a Company from Trash: The Forma Playbook 2026

Companion paper: Retired Rope and Waste Plastic: The Forma Material Report 2026. All research: Forma Research.

Published 16 October 2026 · George Brown, Forma Designs Collective

The fundamentals of building a business that makes things from waste, learned the hard way over two years in Aberdeen. With the real numbers.

Summary

Free material is not free product. A business built on waste is a logistics business, a design business and a storytelling business, and the material is the cheapest part of all three. That is the one thing we wish someone had told us in October 2024, when Forma Designs Collective started with an £80 sewing machine and a pile of retired climbing rope from a wall in Aberdeen.

Two years on, Forma sells through five channels and has grown from 3 stockists to 12. It has collected about 8 km of rope and close to 100 kg of plastic. All of it was done on homemade kit with no outside funding. This paper sets out the twelve fundamentals we learned, with the numbers behind each one, so the next person can skip the expensive part.

Headline numbers (to October 2026)

The twelve fundamentals

1. Material first. Start with the waste and design around its limits.
2. Nobody buys "recycled". They buy good things.
3. Supply is the constraint, not demand.
4. The barrier is convenience, not caring.
5. The supplier is the customer.
6. Packaging is the product. Make it yourself.
7. Free material is not free product. Know the unit economics.
8. Sell where people can touch it, then everywhere else.
9. Cash flow is king. Run lean on purpose.
10. Ship, then improve. Prototype hard, then stop.
11. Build in public, and never say "sustainable".
12. Know the law on waste before you collect it.

None of these are theory. Each one cost us money or rope to learn.

What Forma is, and the two-year record

Forma Designs Collective is a one-person studio in Torry, Aberdeen, that turns retired climbing rope and waste HDPE plastic into belts, keychains, bracelets, earrings, dog leads, coasters, cup cosies, bowls and heat mats. It sells at markets, online, and through 12 independent Scottish shops. The tagline is Make Waste Useful. The founder, George Brown, has made things from other people's waste since he was 14, when he ran a scrap-wood furniture business. He studied product design at Robert Gordon University, where Forma began as a project.

The record so far

The stockist count is the clearest growth line in the business, and it came from cold emails and stall conversations alone, with no trade fair and no ad spend.

The money, in plain terms

• 2025 was a part-time year of learning.
• April and May 2026 alone brought in more than the whole of 2025.
• April to September 2026 was 5.7 times the same months of 2025.
• About two thirds of sales come through our own website and stall card reader, about a quarter through independent shops, and the rest through Etsy and direct orders.

The business has run at no profit on purpose. Every pound has gone back into stock, markets and kit, because the thing holding it back is machinery, not demand.

The Local Loop

Forma is not a product company that happens to use waste. It is a local loop. The same businesses that give us waste sell our products and buy them back, in one city, and the loop is the thing worth copying.

1. A business gives its waste. Climbing walls give rope. Cafes give lids.
2. Forma collects it. Weighed and logged.
3. It is made into products in Torry. Belts, coasters, keychains.
4. It is sold back locally. Independent shops, market stalls, online.
5. The partner buys it back. It stocks the products, or orders them with its own name on.

Then the loop starts again. The businesses give the waste for free. By the time it comes round again they are earning from it as stockists, or buying it back with their own name on. Step 5 is the one most waste businesses never build, and it is where the margin and the next supplier both come from.

What makes it a loop and not a supply chain

• Supply and demand come from the same relationship. A climbing wall gives rope and then stocks belts made from it. A cafe gives lids and then buys back branded coasters.
• Every partner is a sign. Drop-off points and partner cafes go on a public map with a backlink, and they recruit the next partner.
• The money stays local. Independent shops earn on every sale, cafes cut their bin volume, and the products are made and sold in the same city.
• It repeats. Rope proved the loop in 2025. Plastic runs the same loop at a bigger scale in 2026. Rugby balls, offshore rope and polypropylene tubs are in conversation for 2027.

Fundamental 1: Material first

Start with the waste. Study what it can and cannot do. Then design the product. Most makers do it the other way round, pick a product and hunt for a material to make it from, and end up fighting the material for the rest of the business.

What it looks like in practice

• A climbing rope arrives in one length, in one colour, with damaged sections that have to be cut out. So the product range is a set of lengths: long clean sections become belts and dog leads, medium sections become cup cosies and coasters, short sections become keychains and bracelets.
• The frayed ends nobody wants had no product. So earrings became a product, in 2026, purely to use offcuts. They sell well at markets and reach people who would never buy a belt. A product line that exists because of a material constraint, not in spite of it.
• Some rope will not strip. The sheath is glazed or stiff. So heat mats and bowls exist, coiled from whole rope, because the alternative was a bin.
• The nylon core left over from every belt is the same length again. Doorstops, draught excluders and dog tug toys are in development to use it. Toy and pillow filling was ruled out after checking UK toy safety and furniture fire rules.
• HDPE arrives as a random mix of lid colours. Every pressed sheet is a one-off marble. We sell that as the point. A customer who wants two identical coasters has come to the wrong shop, and we say so.

The rule

Every product should be sized to a piece of material that exists in quantity. If you find yourself cutting good material to waste to make the product you imagined, the product is wrong, not the material.

The payoff

Material-first design is why the method transfers. Rope, HDPE, polypropylene tubs, and now old rugby balls for a sports body, all go through the same five steps: find the waste, study the material, design what it can become, build the supply route, sell it. The method is the product. The objects are just this year's examples.

Fundamental 2: Nobody buys "recycled"

Recycled does not sell. Good product sells. The rope is the story, and the story is why people stop at the stall, but it is not the reason they hand over their money. The belt has to be a better belt.

What the evidence says

• About 80% of our customers bought face to face at a market stall, and stalls bring in about half of our revenue. People pick the belt up, pull on it, look at the stitching, and then ask where the rope came from. In that order.
• Every product goes through 15 to 20 rounds of prototyping before sale, including the packaging, and is then stress tested until something breaks. A climbing rope belt that fails is just a worse belt, and the story makes the failure worse, not better.
• On Etsy, the listings that sell are the ones with clear photos, clear sizes and a clear price. The rope bracelet had 578 views, 38 favourites and no sales because the colour options were vague and the sizing had no guide. The story was identical to the belt that sold. The product page was not.
• Our one-line brand statement, "every piece has already been trusted with a life", works because it is true and specific. We changed it from "already saved a life" when we realised most ropes retire from age, not from catching a fall. The honest line is just as strong, and nobody can catch us out on it.

The order of priorities

1. Does it work? Would you buy it with no story at all?
2. Does it look good in the hand and in a photo?
3. Is the price right for what it is, not for what it is made of?
4. Then, and only then, the story.

Why this matters more for waste businesses

A customer who buys something because it is "eco" and finds it is not very good feels cheated twice. They do not come back, and they tell people that recycled things are rubbish. A customer who buys a good belt and then finds out it was a rope tells everyone. The second customer is the whole business. About 8% of our online customers are repeat buyers so far. The target is 15% by June 2027, and the route to it is product quality and after-sale emails, not more talk about waste.

Fundamental 3: Supply is the constraint, not demand

In August 2026 we ran out of rope. Early Christmas production used every metre and we had to put out a public call. Demand had never been the problem. Nobody tells you that a business built on free material can starve.

Why it happens

• Waste arrives in lumps, not on order. A wall retires ropes when it retires them. A cafe fills a tub when it fills a tub.
• You cannot phone a supplier and buy more. You have to have built the relationship months before you need it.
• Good material is scarcer than waste. Of a 60 m rope, the damaged sections are lost. Of a box of plastic, the wrong polymer is useless.
• Every new product line eats supply faster. Belts use 2 to 3 m each. 500 belts is more than a kilometre.

What we built so it does not happen again

The maths that changed how we spend our time

Walls give about a sixth of the available rope volume from 0.2% of the contacts. So the founder's hours go on 17 Scottish walls, not 10,000 climbers. Private climbers are the better story and the better marketing. Walls are the supply chain. Seven walls contacted so far, ten to go.

The rule

Build supply ahead of demand, and treat every supplier as a partner you will need in six months. The moment you stop asking for material is the moment you run out.

Fundamental 4: The barrier is convenience, not caring

Almost every business we have asked to save its waste for us has said yes. Cafes, a climbing wall, an ice cream maker, offices, a cleaning company. The near-100% yes rate told us something we did not expect: people are not the problem. The system is. Recycling is too expensive or too much hassle for a small business to bother with, so they do not, and they feel bad about it. Remove the hassle and they say yes on the spot.

What the ask looks like

• Keep a tub behind the counter. Drop the lids in. Give them a quick rinse if you remember.
• We collect every 2 to 3 months. We text first. We bring free coasters made from your lids.
• You get listed as a Friend of Forma on our website, with a link to your business, and a story to tell your customers.

That is the whole pitch. It is about 40 words. The first cafe said yes in the same conversation. The second cafe messaged us after seeing the first cafe's post. The network recruits itself once the first partner is visible.

Why it works

The same rule, applied to rope

Climbers do not post ropes because posting a 4 kg coil is a job. So we cover postage or collect, take any condition, and send a photo of the finished product. 5 of our first 6 individual rope donors came by email after finding the website, and every one of them was promised something back. Make the right thing the easy thing, and most people do it.

The rule

Design the logistics and the incentives, not just the object. If a partner has to think, sort, pay or drive, the partnership dies quietly in month three. Every step on their side should be smaller than putting the thing in the bin.

Fundamental 5: The supplier is the customer

The businesses that give us waste are the same businesses that sell our products and buy them back. That is not a nice side effect. It is the model. Supply and demand come from the same relationship, so the cost of finding each one falls as the network grows.

The three ways it plays out

Why it is worth more than it looks

• A normal maker pays for material, then pays to find a customer, then pays to find a shop. We get the material free, and the business that gave it is already warm to stocking or buying.
• Branded buy-back is one of our strongest streams. The material is theirs, the design is a one-off job, and a branded coaster set for a cafe is a repeat order every time a set goes missing.
• Every partner is also a sign. A cafe that posts about its lids becoming coasters is advertising, and other cafes copy it.

The rule

When you ask a business for its waste, you are opening a sales conversation. Say so, gently, and never push it in the same breath. The order we use: first ask for the waste, then ask for the cafe's plastic too, then, once rope or lids are flowing, mention that products made from their own waste are available to stock. No pressure. Most say yes to the third ask without being asked twice.

Fundamental 6: Packaging is the product

Packaging, layout and the way you ship matter far more than anyone tells you. The packaging is not separate from the product. It is the product, for the first ten seconds, which is when a shop decides whether to stock it and a customer decides whether to pick it up.

What we learned the expensive way

• Packaging was one of the biggest hidden lines in year one. Bought-in packaging means a minimum order, a lead time, a supplier holding your cash, and a design you cannot change.
• A waste business with plastic-coated, printed packaging is a joke customers notice before you do.
• The packaging goes through the same 15 to 20 prototype rounds as the product, because a sleeve that tears or a hang card that flops is the product failing.

What we do instead

• One flat sheet of Kraft card, laser cut and laser engraved in the studio, folded round the product and glued. No ink, no paint, no laminate, no plastic coating on the card.
• A few pence of card per order, made from sheets we already buy.
• Curved folds, not creases. A band of score lines 1 mm apart, half the product's circumference wide, so the card bends smoothly round the edge instead of cracking.
• Every gap on the laser sheet is filled with something we need anyway, a QR card that joins the newsletter and gives £7 credit. They cost nothing because the sheet is already being cut.
• A new product gets its packaging the same afternoon. No supplier, no minimum, no waiting.

Vertical integration, in plain words

Own as much of your supply chain as you can. We make our own packaging, which gives control and room to improve that you never get from a supplier, and it takes one cash-flow worry off the table. The same thinking is behind building our own plastic kit rather than waiting for funding: a panini press and a bookbinding press got the first coasters to market. It is also why the next step is a laser-cut wooden display box for stockists that ships the stock and then becomes the shop display, so the shop does no setup and the products stay on-brand on the shelf.

What we never say

We never call the packaging "plastic-free". Orders go out in a mailing bag. The honest line is that the card carries nothing but card. A claim that can be checked and found wrong costs more than the claim was ever worth.

Fundamental 7: Free material is not free product

The material is free. The product is not. Hardware, cork, packaging, platform fees, ads, stall fees, postage and above all time are where the money goes, and a maker who does not track them is guessing at whether the business works. We guessed for most of year one.

Where the cost really sits

• On rope products the rope is free and the hardware is the cost: buckles, D-rings, rings and real carabiners.
• On plastic products the plastic is free and the cork back is the cost.
• On every order, packaging and postage are a real line, and on a marketplace so are listing fees, transaction fees and ads.
• The biggest cost of all is time. A belt takes 30 to 45 minutes. A coaster pressed by hand takes 12 to 18 minutes.

The coaster lesson

In 2026 we raised the price of single rope coasters on Etsy. Orders went up and revenue went down, so we pulled the real numbers: fees, postage, packaging and ads, attributed order by order. On paper the coaster looked like a very high margin product. Once every fee was charged to the order it belonged to, single coasters were about break-even, and in the month ad spend rose they lost money. The belt, which looked less exciting on paper, was the best earner.

The fixes were simple once the numbers existed: push the set of four over the single, price singles to clear their fees, and cap ad spend. The lesson was not about coasters. It was that a product can look like a 90% margin and be a loss, and you will not know unless you attribute every fee to every order.

The other costs people forget

The rule

If you cannot say what you make on each product after fees and your hours, you are guessing on pricing and on what to push. Track profit per product per month, by channel. We now do. We did not for a year, and it cost us.

Fundamental 8: Sell where people can touch it, then everywhere else

About 80% of our customers bought face to face at a stall, and stalls bring in about half of our revenue. Most wholesale and bulk leads started there too. Online, Etsy and the email list matter, but for a product whose whole point is in the hand, the stall is where the business is made and the other channels are where it is kept.

What each channel is for

The stockist maths (from real results)

• About every 100 outreach emails lands one new shop.
• A new shop is worth far more than the time it takes to write the emails.
• That makes cold outreach the best-paid hour in the business, as long as the emails are personal. Shops sign from a single email when the story is easy to retell.
• Five shops signed in September 2026 alone, from emails and stall conversations, with no trade fair and no ads.

Owned versus rented

Instagram and TikTok are rented. The algorithm owns that audience. The email list and search are ours. We leaned hard on the rented side for a year and the email list stayed small because stall buyers rarely leave an address. The fix is cheap and permanent: a QR card in every pack, a welcome flow that actually sends the discount, and product pages that win searches like "recycled climbing rope belt UK".

The rule

Start where the product can be held. Use what you learn there to write the online listings and the shop pitch. Then build the owned channels, because the rented ones can be switched off.

Fundamental 9: Cash flow is king

Not having cash in the bank when an opportunity shows up costs more than any bill ever will. Cash management is not boring admin. It is a core skill, and in a seasonal business built on free material it is the skill.

Why a waste business is cash-hungry even with free material

• Stock is made months before it sells. Christmas stock is built in August. The rope, the hardware, the packaging and the hours all go out before a pound comes in.
• Shops usually pay 30 days after invoice. Stock left with a shop on terms that are not written down is cash you cannot count on. We learned that one the hard way.
• Markets are paid up front. Christmas weekends are paid before a sale. Trade fairs are the same, bigger.
• January to March is slow. Every year.
• Kit costs more than a season's takings. The machines that would change the plastic economics cost thousands. A sole trader cannot save that and buy Christmas stock in the same autumn.

How we run it

The lesson from year one

We spent over £10,000 building the business in the first year. The biggest regret was buying too much prototype stock. When you are testing, you do not need a hundred units. You need enough to find out if it works. Cash sat in a box on a shelf for months, which is cash that could not jump on the next opportunity.

The rule

Know your cash position every week, not every quarter. Make what is ordered before you make what might sell. And never let a shop hold more of your stock than you could afford to lose.

Fundamental 10: Ship, then improve

Prototype hard, then stop. The two habits sound like opposites. They are the same discipline. Every product gets 15 to 20 rounds and a stress test before sale, and then it goes on sale, because a product on a shelf teaches you more in a week than a product on a bench teaches you in a month.

Where we got it wrong

• Year one was spent playing with different ways to build a website instead of making one exist and improving it. The tinkering felt like work. It was not shipping.
• The same pattern showed up in tools: a dashboard here, a side project there. All interesting. None of them sold a belt. The honest question for every build is: does this make money in the next 90 days?
• Confidence to put things out was the third regret. Products, videos, emails. We held back when we should have posted and learned from the response. Nothing we held back got better by waiting.

Where we got it right

• The first HDPE coasters went on sale in July 2026, made on a panini press and a bookbinding press, months before any machine was funded. They sold.
• Earrings, heat mats and bowls each started as a way to use material that was going to waste, were made in small numbers, and were kept because they sold at the stall.
• The rugby ball project started with a test batch, not a price list. Price per unit comes after the samples, not before.

The prototyping rule and the shipping rule, together

1. Prototype until it stops breaking. Product and packaging, 15 to 20 rounds, then load it until something gives.
2. Make a small run. Enough to find out if it sells, not enough to fill a shelf for a year.
3. Put it on the stall and the website in the same week.
4. Change the listing before you change the product. The rope bracelet did not fail on Etsy because of the bracelet. It failed because the colour names were vague and there was no sizing guide.
5. Kill what does not sell after two markets and two months online. Keep the rope.

The rule

Existing beats perfect. A product that is on sale and slightly wrong earns money and feedback. A product that is perfect and on the bench earns neither.

Fundamental 11: Build in public, and never say "sustainable"

We make things out of waste and we will not use the word. It has been used to death, most of it is marketing, people are tired of being lectured, and the product has to stand on its own. We would rather just show you. This rope held someone's life. Now it holds your keys. That is the pitch.

Why honesty is the brand

• The buyer we serve is tired. They cannot tell what is actually sustainable any more and it is exhausting. A product whose past life is visible, a rope you can see was a rope, is the answer to that tiredness. A green sticker is not.
• So the content rule is: open with the feeling, agree with them, show proof not claims, give it a receipt (this rope came from this wall), and end on who they are, not a discount.
• The test for every line we write: could a greenwashing brand say this too? If yes, cut it. Only keep the lines they could not say, because ours come with visible proof.

Build in public

Since July 2026 we have documented the business day by day, good months and bad, under "building a company out of literal trash". The failed batches go on screen. The 11pm packing goes on screen. It costs nothing, and it is the reason strangers stop at the stall and say they follow us.

The language rules we keep

• Never "sustainable", never "eco" without a number behind it, never "plastic-free".
• Never "no one else in Scotland does this". Others make things from waste. Say "no one does it our way", and be able to explain the way.
• "Already trusted with a life", not "already saved a life". The first is always true.
• Say "burned" about Aberdeen's waste, not "landfilled", because that is where it goes.
• Every claim gets a number and a date, or it does not go out.

The rule

Show, do not claim. Share the bad months. If the honest version of a line is weaker than the marketing version, the marketing version was a lie, and a waste business cannot afford a single one.

Fundamental 12: Know the law on waste before you collect it

The moment a business hands you something it was going to bin, the law may see you as carrying controlled waste, even if you call it material and even if you got it for free. Most makers never think about this. This section is our reading of the Scottish guidance, not legal advice, and the first thing we tell anyone copying the model is to ask their regulator before the first pickup.

What the Scottish guidance says (as we read it)

• Something is waste if the holder discards it, and "discard" has a special, broad legal meaning. The holder's own view does not decide it, and neither does the fact that the material has value or that someone else has a use for it.
• Donation does not change that. SEPA's guidance says used goods are likely to be waste and donating them does not affect their status, and that donated goods are generally waste until they are sorted, refurbished or treated and made available for resale.
• Transporting controlled waste as part of a business in Scotland needs a registration with SEPA. From 1 November 2025 waste carrier registrations moved under the Environmental Authorisations (Scotland) Regulations 2018 (EASR), and new standard conditions apply from 1 April 2026. Brokers, who arrange for other people's waste to be moved, and dealers, who buy waste to sell on, need their own authorisation.
• Every transfer of controlled waste between businesses carries a duty of care, which in practice means a record of what moved, from whom, to whom and when.

The by-product route, and its limits

Material that was never discarded is not waste. The clearest cases are a production by-product with a certain further use, used as it is, from a process rather than a clear-out. Clean offcuts set aside under an agreement for a specific use are the kind of thing that can qualify. Lids scraped out of a bin probably are not. The case law is complex, SEPA says to seek legal or policy advice on it, and the person claiming a material is not waste has to prove it. So do not rely on it. Assume the material is waste, log every transfer, and ask.

What this means for anyone copying the model

1. Ask SEPA (or your national regulator) about carrier registration before you collect from a business. The registration is cheap next to the fine.
2. Keep a transfer record for every pickup: date, business, what, roughly how much. You will want it for this kind of report anyway.
3. Never take hazardous, contaminated or food waste. Clean, sorted, single-material only. That is also what makes a good product.
4. If you ever match waste between two other parties and take a cut, you may be a broker. That is a licence, a fee and personal liability. An introduction platform that never touches the material or the money is a different thing from a collection service.
5. Write partners a one-line agreement that says what they set aside, that it is for your use, and that you collect it. Certainty of use is one of the tests.

The rule

Treat waste law as part of the supply chain, like postage. Learn it once, build the records into the pickup routine, and it costs almost nothing. Ignore it and the whole model sits on a technicality.

What we got wrong: £10,000 of lessons

We spent over £10,000 building the business in year one, all of it our own. These are the mistakes that cost the most, in the order they hurt.

The one that underlies all of them

We treated free material as the hard part solved. It is the easy part. The hard parts are logistics (getting the material and keeping it coming), design (making something people want from what arrives), and selling (shops, stalls, listings, emails). The material is a story and a margin. It is not a business until the other three are built, and each of them costs money and time that free material does not pay for.

How to copy this in your town

The model is not Aberdeen-specific and it is not rope-specific. Any town has a waste stream that is clean, single-material and binned, and businesses that would rather it was not. Here is the order we would do it in if we started again.

Month 1: pick the stream

• Find a waste that is clean, one material, arrives in useful lengths or weights, and has a story. Retired rope, milk lids, dead sports balls, shop offcuts. Not mixed bins, not food, not anything hazardous.
• Weigh a week of it from one source. Write the number down. That number is your first headline.
• Ask your regulator about carrying it (in Scotland, SEPA). Start a transfer log on day one.

Month 2: design around it

• Make one product sized to the piece of material that exists in quantity. Then one for the offcuts.
• Prototype until it stops breaking. Product and packaging together. Then stop.
• Cost it: hardware, packaging, platform fees, your time. Price it for what it is.

Month 3: build supply before you need it

• Go to the ten biggest sources in your area first, not the thousand smallest. Trade products for material.
• Make donating effortless: you collect, no minimum, any condition, a photo of what it became.
• Log every rope, box or bag. You cannot manage what you do not measure.

Month 4: sell where it can be held

• One regular market. Watch what people pick up and what they ask. Rewrite the listing from that.
• Then the website and a marketplace, with the sizes and colours spelled out.
• Email every independent shop that fits, personally. Expect about one yes per hundred.

Month 5 onwards: close the loop

• Offer every supplier the products made from their own material, to stock or buy back branded.
• Put partners on a map with a backlink. Give them a sticker. Let them recruit the next partner.
• Publish your numbers once a year: kilograms in, products out, what sold, what it took. Someone will cite it, and the next person will skip the expensive part.

What to budget

Reference figures

The numbers from this paper that we expect people to quote. Cite as: Forma Designs Collective, Building a Company from Trash: The Forma Playbook 2026, Aberdeen, October 2026. The material and process figures are in the companion report, Retired Rope and Waste Plastic: The Forma Material Report 2026.

Method, data sources and limits

This is a founder's account with the receipts attached, not an academic study. Every number is one we track in the business, and the ones that are estimates say so.

Where the figures come from

• Sales and orders: Shopify (website and stall card reader), Etsy and the bank, reconciled in a monthly tracker.
• Stockists: a stockist log with every drop-off, terms and payment.
• Profit by product: marketplace order data, statements and ad charges, attributed order by order.
• Outreach conversion: the ratio of personal outreach emails sent to shops signed, from the outreach log.
• Rope and plastic: a rope log, a donor tracker (from July 2026) and a partner tracker. Running tallies, not yet a unit-by-unit weighed log.
• Lessons and rules: the founder's own notes, scripts and posts from the build-in-public series, cleaned up but not changed in meaning.

Limits

1. One business, one city, two years. The patterns are real for us. They may not hold for a different waste stream or a bigger town.
2. Founder time is the cost most makers leave out, and we are no exception. The machinery case rests on taking time out of each product.
3. The 100-emails-per-shop figure is a planning rate. Several shops came from stall conversations, not email, so it will move.
4. The waste law section is our reading of SEPA guidance in October 2026. It is not legal advice and the rules change.
5. Prices are October 2026.

How to cite this paper

Forma Designs Collective (2026). Building a Company from Trash: The Forma Playbook 2026. Aberdeen, Scotland. Version 1.0, 16 October 2026. Available from formadesignscollective.com/pages/building-a-company-from-trash-2026.

Reuse the figures with that credit. We will publish an updated version each year with the new numbers, and keep old versions available. Corrections and challenges are welcome at george@formadesignscollective.com. If you copy the model somewhere else, tell us. We would like to put your town on the map.

Sources

Forma data (internal)

• Forma outreach log
• Forma rope log, rope donor tracker and recycling partners tracker
• Build-in-public series scripts and posts, July to October 2026
• Companion report: Forma Designs Collective (2026), Retired Rope and Waste Plastic: The Forma Material Report 2026

Waste law, Scotland

• NetRegs. Transporters of waste (waste carriers), brokers and dealers (EASR from 1 November 2025, new standard conditions from 1 April 2026)
• NetRegs. Waste brokers or dealers: who needs to register
• SEPA. Transporting your own waste
• SEPA. Is it waste? Guidance on the definition of waste
• Scottish Government. Duty of care code of practice for managing controlled waste

Comparable makers and benchmarks

• Precious Plastic. Impact survey (2020): 835 kg and €7,279 per workspace a year, 10% profitable
• Design Milk. Weez and Merl, Brighton, marbled LDPE homeware at about £10 a coaster
• BMC. Money for Old Rope, the UK rope take-back with George Fisher and Green Peak Gear
• Suston Magazine (2021). Mammut Close the Loop, about 750 kg of rope collected in three months

On what makes a report get cited

This paper's shape (headline figures up front, one finding per section, a method and limits section, a reference table, a citation line, a yearly update) follows what the most-cited industry reports have in common, from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's New Plastics Economy to annual original-research surveys. The short version: publish numbers nobody else has, say how you got them, and date them.

Companion paper: Retired Rope and Waste Plastic: The Forma Material Report 2026. All research: Forma Research.