BREWSTER BROTHERS, a trailblazing recycling company specialising in repurposing byproducts from the construction, demolition, and excavation industries, has been honoured with the esteemed VIBES Circular Scotland award. The award, a collaborative initiative between the Scottish Government, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, the Energy Saving Trust, NatureScot, and Zero Waste Scotland, celebrates outstanding achievements in sustainable business practices, emphasising the importance of reducing environmental impact.
The VIBES Scottish Environment Business Awards, held annually, are dedicated to recognizing businesses that demonstrate exemplary efforts in reducing their ecological footprint. The awards primarily focus on promoting efficient resource utilisation, enhancing business competitiveness, improving environmental performance, and contributing to broader sustainable development objectives.
Brewster Brothers received the coveted “Circular Scotland” award, a category highlighting businesses showcasing a steadfast commitment to implementing the principles of a circular economy. This involves ensuring materials are retained within productive use, maintaining a high value state for as long as possible. The recognition extends to businesses adopting explicit circular models, sustainable design, closed material loops within their own processes, or contributing to systemic change through partnerships, collaborations in high-value materials reprocessing, and the development of enabling technologies or services.
The company embarked on its recycling journey in 2017, focusing on waste from construction sites. The exceptional success of their initial site near Livingston has propelled them to expand further. Brewster Brothers is on the verge of inaugurating its second facility, located near Cumbernauld. This expansion will empower the company to process approximately 600,000 tonnes of construction, demolition, and excavation waste annually, making significant strides in sustainable waste management.
Scott Brewster, Managing Director of Brewster Brothers, said, “this award is recognition of the hard work that our employees have put in to help the firm, in its six years of operation, divert more than 1.3 million tonnes of construction waste from landfill. In the course of that work we’ve produced more than a million tonnes of gravels, sands and other aggregates to sell back to the construction sector, and before the end of the year we’ll have doubled our capacity when we open our second site. That expansion is testament to the fact that all sectors of the economy in Scotland increasingly recognise that they have a part to play in reducing the nation’s carbon emissions, and use of natural resources”
