WHAT ON EARTH SUMMER 2022
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How Scotland can change its polluting past into a green future By Kim Pratt, Circular Economy Campaigner Photo: istockphoto.com
When we think about overconsumption, images of individual consumers struggling with products designed to be thrown away often come to mind: filling our bins with the single-use plastic or buying a cheap new phone rather than get a current one repaired. But some of the industries that will make the biggest difference to reducing our consumption are less visible to us. Steel is a vital part of our economy today and it will continue to be in the future. The replacement of oil and gas with renewables is at the heart of plans for an energy revolution in Scotland. By 2030, one million tonnes of material, the vast majority of this high-quality scrap steel, will be available from oil and gas
decommissioning. This could be reused as the building blocks needed for new wind turbines. How can we ensure such materials are fed back into the economy as much as possible? Policy makers and industry are waking up to the idea that this change can be used to create not just the green energy we need for a sustainable future, but an integrated and circular system of material use as well. We could keep valuable scrap steel in Scotland, reusing the fossil fuel infrastructure of the past to create the renewable energy infrastructure needed for our new economy. The environmental and social benefits could be huge.
