Cat Fletcher, waste guru, is running a crowdfunding campaign to buy 8 shipping containers to form a creative reuse hub for Brighton and Hove. She is founder and Head of Media for Freegle – UK’s biggest online free reuse community with over 2 million members and runs the Brighton Freegle group which facilitates reuse between 22,000 locals. She’s worked on the multi-award winning Brighton Waste House since 2012 sourcing ‘waste’ materials for its construction – it is now Europe’s only permanent public building built with waste. She’s also worked for the city council redistributing over 100 tonnes of their unwanted goods back into the community. This saved the council money and carbon, while helping residents, charities, artists and businesses in the process.
For the past few years she has benefited from free space at Circus Street old Market via the City Council and Cathedral Developments – allowing her to gather, assess, store and redistribute intercepted ‘waste’ – hundreds of tonnes of reusable materials and goods. However, the Circus Street site is being demolished this summer for redevelopment. So, she’s crowd funding to buy shipping containers to establish a permanent (but potentially mobile!) creative reuse depot.
Having operated pop-up reuse depots in many unused spaces around the city for the past 3 years, she has stacks of evidence about the positive impact this can have. When goods cannot be reused for their intended purposes she’s been able to connect with hundreds of projects, artists and enterprises who can upcycle, reprocess, repair and refurbish all this so called ‘waste’ and keep it in circulation and out of the waste stream. 
Getting a new secure depot would not only allow her good work to continue but it would help accelerate and improve this waste intervention service. Hence the crowdfunder.
To find out more about the project, the rewards on offer see this very short film.
With just a week to go (the crowdfunder ends on 30th June) the project is already 75% funded, but it still needs that last push to help make it become a reality. Can you help make this happen? Pledges start from just £1 and you will be rewarded with cake. So what’s holding you back? Please back this great project.
Follow the project on Twitter @CityReuseDepot or like on Facebook
Brighton & Hove Friends of the Earth 
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