Tech and Textiles: Inside Scotland's Leading Social ITAD

Walk through the door of The Edinburgh Remakery in Leith and you don't quite know where to look first. To one side, a sea of textiles and an event space, all colour and clutter and purpose. To the other, a floor of laptops and phones being opened up, stripped down and brought back to life. Tech and textiles, side by side, under one roof.

It's an odd pairing on paper. In practice, as Elaine Brown, Chief Executive of The Edinburgh Remakery, explains on this episode of HappyPorch Radio, it makes perfect sense. "It's a perfect complement of everything around introducing people to repair and reuse," she tells host Barry O'Kane. Season 10 of the podcast has been about where technology meets the messy reality of how people and organisations actually work, and few guests illustrate that messiness, and that humanity, quite like Elaine.

The Remakery describes itself as Scotland's leading social ITAD. ITAD stands for IT Asset Disposition, the unglamorous business of taking laptops and phones that businesses no longer want, wiping them securely and giving them a second life. It's usually a quiet, back office function. The Remakery has turned it into something else entirely.

Bricks and mortar, on purpose

The first thing Elaine wants people to understand is that visibility is the point, not an afterthought. "The amount of times I've been told, 'Oh, just go away into a wee warehouse on an industrial estate somewhere,'" she says. "No, that's not what we're about. We're about being visible, about being mainstream."

That decision to stay on the high street, rather than tuck the operation away where nobody has to think about it, shapes everything else The Remakery does. It means the person donating a broken toaster and the business offloading three hundred old laptops walk past the same door. It means school groups, community clubs and business breakfasts all happen a few feet from where the hardware technicians are working. Repair stops being something that happens somewhere else, to someone else.

A community with no single shape

Ask Elaine who The Remakery serves and the answer refuses to narrow. "Our community is broad, wide," she says, "and really anyone who's interested in the circular economy and repair and reuse is welcome." That might mean a community group tackling loneliness, someone on a low income who needs a laptop fixed, a business sending its old fleet of devices for secure disposal, or a school class donating old tech into a tech collection box.

The repair cafes run on a pay-what-you-can basis, deliberately, so that fixing a coat or a laptop never carries the stigma of charity. "It's cross-generational," Elaine says of a typical Friday. People turn up, have a cup of tea, watch something get repaired, get stuck in themselves, and leave having learned a skill and kept something out of landfill. Elsewhere in the same building, business breakfasts bring public, private and third sector organisations together to hear a guest speaker and, more often than not, start conversations that go somewhere unexpected.

None of this is incidental to the ITAD work. It's the reason the ITAD work exists.

Repairing and reusing, not recycling

Language matters to Elaine, and one distinction comes up again and again. "We don't use the word 'recycling' very often in The Remakery," she says. "We're all about repairing and reusing and giving that tech a life. And then we tell the stories, and we share those stories with businesses."

That's not a branding preference. Recycling implies an ending. Repair and reuse imply a continuation, and continuation is what gives a business's old laptop fleet a second chapter, rather than a line in a compliance report. The businesses that donate tech to The Remakery get their environmental paperwork sorted and their data wiped, but what keeps them coming back, Elaine says, is the story that comes with it: proof that the kit went somewhere and did something.

For the people on the receiving end, that something can be substantial. "That piece of tech is valued," Elaine says, "and the stories about people who just, you know, it transforms their life, that they've got a piece of kit now that they can engage with friends, they can make sure that they're applying for jobs, they can go to college, all through the power of a piece of refurbished kit." With around 800,000 people in Scotland facing digital exclusion, by Elaine's account, that's not a small thing to fix with a refurbished laptop and a bit of training.

Never do it alone

For anyone running, or trying to start, a similar social enterprise, Elaine's advice is blunt and specific: don't work in a silo, and don't underestimate small conversations. "You've got to go out there and learn from people," she says. "You've got to go out there and see who can collaborate with you, who can share ideas and things like that. I say never underestimate a cup of tea and a scone with someone."

It's a modest sounding strategy that has brought some unlikely partners through The Remakery's door, including a team of consultants from 3M who spent a month working alongside the team. Elaine's argument to other social enterprises too busy "doing the do" to build those relationships is straightforward: you don't have time not to.

When funding falls off a cliff

The conversation doesn't shy away from the harder economics. COVID, Elaine says, was oddly generous to The Remakery in one respect: funders trusted organisations to get on with things, and that freedom let her test and fine-tune the trading model that now keeps the charity running. The years since have been tougher. "Funders are not interested in that," she says of the tried and tested model that has clearly worked. "They want you to do something new."

There's a particular frustration in being penalised for growing. "Our turnover is over what some funders will mark," Elaine explains, "but turnover does not mean profit." When funding dips, a social enterprise can't simply pivot its income generation fast enough to cover the gap, and a cash flow that looked healthy can turn precarious quickly, even with a model that works. It's a challenge Elaine is candid about, and one she suspects a lot of listeners running similar organisations will recognise immediately.

The story people didn't expect to be part of

What comes through most, across the whole conversation, is how little Elaine minds why someone walks through the door. A school pupil donating an old phone, a business worried about its ESG reporting, someone who just needs a jacket mended: all of them end up, whether they set out to or not, taking part in something bigger. "Whatever way they come to me," she says, "they will learn something about circular economy and it will create a little bit of a behavioural shift."

That shift often shows up as pride. Watching someone sew a button back on, or get a laptop working again, Elaine describes a satisfaction that buying something new simply doesn't offer. "It's a fleeting buzz," she says of the alternative, "but it's not the same as something that you have repaired and you've reused it." She sees it every Friday at the repair cafe: people leaving having fixed something themselves, and caring about it more because of that.

The Remakery has already been recognised twice for the model, with the Queen's Award for Enterprise for Sustainable Development in 2022 and, this year, the King's Award for Enterprise, the only social enterprise in Scotland to receive one. Elaine is characteristically unbothered about scale for its own sake. Her ambition isn't to build a national ITAD chain; it's to prove what a social ITAD can do for the community around it, wherever that community happens to be.

—------

You can hear (and read!) the full conversation, including the partnership with the Royal Mint that turns old motherboards into gold, at HappyPorch Radio.