Collaborators

Beccy Whittle

is a freelance writer and editor who spent almost 20 years working as a sustainability researcher and lecturer before quitting academia to focus on more hands-on creative projects. She likes the creativity and ingenuity that comes from creating things with scrap materials and her most recent repair triumph has been fixing her TV after her rabbits chewed through the cable 😬.

Victoria Frausin

is an independent researcher for the Closing Loops project and Ref/Use Lab. She is a postgraduate student at Lancaster University, one of the coordinators of Sewing Cafe Lancaster and a member of the Union of Concerned Researchers in Fashion.
 
Victoria has spent over two decades exploring clothing and food production and their waste. She began with a social enterprise producing handmade clothes in Colombia, lived with communities in West Africa and the Amazon to learn about soil fertilised with waste, and now works as a community artist, designer, and ethnographic researcher in the Lancaster district. She loves the challenge of reducing waste in her daily life and collaborating with others to drive systemic change through research, workshops, and interviews.
 

Rachel Marshall

is the coordinator of the Closing Loops project and FoodFutures Healthy Food and Environment working group. She is also an Eggcup trustee and member of Claver Hill community project. 
 
Before getting hands on working on community food projects Rachel was a soil scientist looking at the impacts of agriculture on our soils. A research project examining the use of waste materials as fertilisers made her totally rethink wastes and the systems that create them. Now her work focuses around community action to increase composting, reduce food waste and to support the emergence of a more regenerative economy locally. Her most recent zero-waste project was a homemade compost loo – it’s certainly more time consuming than just flushing but far more rewarding to save litres of fresh water and give a little back to the soil.

Kiki Callihan

has been working with waste for over 20 years as a starting point for creative and practical application. She’s always been a skip diver and hoarder of ‘potentially useful materials’ that has an interest in why people throw things away and creative reuse of materials. She provides comms, research, community engagement and SME consultation with Ref/use Lab. Until recently she was co-director of Relic Plastic, working with locally collected plastic to make beautiful, longlasting products for clients and community engagement. She worked on various projects connected to local sustainability and resilience such as starting a repair cafe, event coordination with Sewing Cafe Lancaster and comms for FoodFutures. With over 15 years experience in marketing, communications, graphic design and entrepreneurship she is changing tack and pursuing a Masters degree in Green Building at the Centre for Alternative Technology.

Julie Tomlin

 
is working towards a PhD at Lancaster University. Julie provides invaluable direction and support that enables Ref/use Lab to work towards its goals.
Ref/use Lab is a collaborative project formed between Sewing Cafe Lancaster and FoodFutures with a focus on the systems that perpetuate waste and wastefulness. We enjoy working within these organisations, with lecturers and researchers at Lancaster University, and other organisations, schools, individuals, artists and individuals in North Lancashire and beyond.