Glasgow's 'Grounds for Recycling' project confronts coffee waste, seeking sustainable models like Mumbai's successful initiatives.

The emergence of a “throw-away society” has forged an economy that encourages manufacturers to create short-lived assets, often with built-in obsolescence, and constructed using techniques that prioritise cheap manufacturing processes rather than durability, to sustain a small margin high volume business model.

Finding novel solutions to wicked problems is not easy, but it is not impossible

Depending on who you ask Jugaad is a word that might be Hindi, Punjabi or Urdu and means variously "a clever or ingenious expedient" or “quick fix”. We might describe it as a “hack”.

In a heart-warming moment with my four-year-old, I was reminded of the significance of circularity, repair, and reuse. As he suggested taking his broken toy bus to his grandmother in India, fondly referring to her as a "fixer," it sparked a deeper contemplation about the value we can learn from other cultures – often from the global south – and how it contrasts with our own here in Scotland.