The soup for soup event

  the soup for soup night

    Polmontsoup was a community wealth-building exercise aimed at demonstrating what our community can achieve when good people come together. The hub management wanted to showcase how the soup itself could embody our values. Our sustainability champion emphasised that the ingredients should align with our ethics of "soup with purpose," emphasising the importance of good ingredients for community wealth building, shopping local, and promoting circular economy ambitions.

    Shared Futures, based near Manchester but working nationally, granted us £250 to promote Polmont’s ethical participatory budgeting event, Polmontsoup. We decided to use this funding to provide soup for our community in an ethical manner that aligns with the concept of participatory budgeting, which aims to keep the community's wealth serving its members. 

    Instead of taking the easy route of purchasing mass-produced tins of soup from a local supermarket, which would not have benefited our community, we chose a different path. These tins are often made by people who may not receive a fair wage and who work in hazardous conditions. The tins are then distributed globally through carbon-intensive transportation, generating wealth for supermarket and factory owners rather than the communities they are supposed to serve. 

We aimed to create the soup as a demonstration of what can be achieved with ethical practices. 

    To accomplish this, we used sustainable emissions-free transportation. We were generously loaned a power-assisted cargo bike from FEL, which we cycled to Wilson's potato merchants on the main street. This potato merchant is a family-run business that has been operating on that street for over 100 years. The volunteer responsible for sourcing the soup ingredients thoroughly enjoyed the visit. He was fascinated by the large, old-fashioned scales, which had been rescued from Edinburgh’s fruit market when it closed down. A pre-digital heritage weighing masterpiece of engineering beauty 

 wilson do much more than just potatoes So we managed to obtain some fruit and plenty of veg for the soup, but there was other essential parts to this soup event as it was also about breaking bread with our neighbours and friends old and new over the soup to discuss the projects looking for bread while we broke bread chatted and blethered over soup and bread

     Polmont is fortunate to have another local fruit and vegetable outlet next to Klondike called Julian's Veg. They also sell locally made bread, and we have tried several of their loaves in the past; their breads are amazing. They kindly donated some loaves for our soup night, including a delicious beetroot bread. We cycled down and collected some other ingredients that Wilson's didn't have, which meant that all the ingredients for the soup were sourced locally, less than two miles from the hub.

 

    This effort also supports our goals of becoming plastic-free and zero waste, as the vast majority of fruit and vegetables were not wrapped in plastic, eliminating the need for filling our recycling and general waste bins. If we had bought items in tins, those would have had to go into the bins as well. Using a cargo bike cuts down on transport emissions, and cotton tote bags nearly eliminated any need for us as regards plastic packaging, except for the herbs! Unfortunately, this year we had to purchase some herbs that were packaged and transported from other countries. The plan is to grow our own herbs on the hub's land and in the windowsills of our rooms.

 

    All these efforts tie into what is known in waste and pollution monitoring as Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions in procurement. Scope 1 refers to direct emissions from owned sources, Scope 2 pertains to indirect emissions from purchased energy, and Scope 3 includes all other indirect emissions across the value chain.

     the soup was enjoyed by all, We would like to thank again julian's veg for the generous donation of bread and shared futures financial contribution towards giving the soup to our community, We also used some of that fund to purchase soup mugs, lovely ceramic ones that can be used again, Nothing disposable was used as we know this to be a marketing trick, we previously had a lot of trouble with people bringing in supposedly compostable products to the Hub, Thinking that somehow we should manage their waste ethically, the general public are being led to believe that when something says that it's - compostable! that somehow it magics itself into a compost pile, This is just not the case We previously struggled with our composting due to the volumes of things people purchased brought to the hub and dumped in our bins, we did to begin with try to compost some of it, but there was too much our composting area is hard work to police and manage as it is, and our wormery has only just been established its far too small to cope with groups of people having compostable bowls compostable forks and knives, at events and classes, so we chose to make sure that we had enough bowls and spoons that will be used time and time again, We aim to put these into our catering library for other hubs to use, to cut down on the districts waste and overconsuption of resources