Gregory Anderson

From our collaborative project Creating Future Worlds, exhibited at the Advanced Research Centre in Glasgow, our group employed an iterative, research-led approach to develop this design proposal in response to the theme of Planetary Health: Civic. To contextualise the project, we developed a future narrative grounded in current trajectories and plausible environmental and socio-political shifts.

In 2035, the climate crisis reached a critical tipping point, triggering widespread global restructuring and the strict enforcement of the Polluter Pays Principle. This shift led to a dramatic reduction in material extraction, petrochemical manufacturing, and exploitative labour practices, compelling industries to account for the environmental and social costs embedded within global production systems.

As these systemic changes unfolded, society began to confront the toxic material cultures that had long underpinned consumerism and industrial growth. Efforts toward ecological repair became inseparable from broader attempts to restore relationships with land, reconfigure material circulation, and reshape collective attitudes toward consumption and responsibility.

However, despite these transformations, harmful substances remain embedded in everyday life, from synthetic fibres shedding microplastics to toxic dyes and chemical residues persisting within products and environments. This raises a central question: how can society address the long-term legacy of contamination already woven into modern material culture?

In response, the team behind MatterLabs™ emerged to confront the consequences of historic manufacturing practices through a series of remediation technologies and treatment processes. Their work enables society to continue using existing materials and products while actively reducing their environmental and biological harm.

A systems-led design proposal that reimagines household waste as a valuable community resource. In this example, food waste from Glasgow tenements is redirected away from landfill and reintegrated into local ecological cycles. Rather than being lost through ineffective municipal waste systems, organic waste becomes compost that can support community allotments, urban food growing, and environmental restoration projects. The proposal demonstrates how systems thinking can transform waste from a neglected by-product into a shared resource that strengthens both community resilience and ecological relationships.

A. Glasgow Tenements
Glasgow’s tenements emerged rapidly during the 1860s, expanding dramatically over a period of around 40 years. Many quickly deteriorated into overcrowded slums due to poor maintenance and inadequate services. Following the Second World War, large numbers were demolished to make way for high-rise housing, though some remained and were later restored, revealing the distinctive pink and honey-coloured sandstone façades that characterise the city today.

“Glasgow: The Tenement City”  Peter Reed, Forming of a City
Despite restoration efforts, many tenements still do not fully serve the needs of their residents. In particular, systems for managing organic waste remain fragmented and ineffective. Food waste is largely disconnected from cycles of reuse and regeneration, contributing instead to landfills. This reflects a broader disconnection between people, their waste, and the natural systems that sustain them.

Earth Return aims to address this gap by introducing a community-led composting system that reconnects residents with the material and ecological value of their waste, while strengthening local relationships.

B. Community Champion
Each participating tenement would appoint a Community Champion responsible for supporting the day-to-day coordination of the composting system. This role acts as a bridge between residents, the wider network, and supporting organisations.

Champions would receive training, tools, and ongoing support to effectively manage the system and encourage participation within their building. They would also have access to a network of other champions, as well as links to local allotments and ecological restoration projects.

This role is designed to distribute responsibility, build local capacity, and embed the system within the social fabric of each tenement.

C. Earth Return
Earth Return is an alternative food waste management system designed for Glasgow’s tenement housing. It aims to transform discarded organic material into a valuable local resource through composting and community exchange.

The system responds to the limitations of current municipal waste strategies, which have struggled to effectively manage organic waste within dense urban housing typologies. As a result, most food waste is still sent to landfill, reinforcing a linear and extractive system.

Earth Return proposes a decentralised alternative. With support from Glasgow City Council and potential funding through GALLANT, tenements can apply for the installation of a shared composting system in their communal backcourt. A Community Champion would coordinate its use and maintenance.

The resulting compost would be redistributed through partnerships with local allotments and community growing projects, supporting food production and ecological restoration within the city. In this way, waste is repositioned as a shared resource, creating circular relationships between households, land, and food systems.

D. Glasgow City Council
In response to the 2018 IPCC report, Glasgow City Council declared a climate and ecological emergency in 2019. This led to the formation of two working groups, which produced a combined set of 86 recommendations (61 from the Climate Emergency Working Group and 25 from the Ecological Emergency Working Group).

The Glasgow Climate Plan builds on these recommendations, setting out a city-wide vision for coordinated climate action. It brings together public bodies, businesses, and communities through initiatives such as the Sustainable Glasgow partnership.

The plan updates progress to date and outlines future actions aimed at achieving a net zero carbon city by 2030. It acknowledges the need for faster, more radical intervention to reduce emissions, restore biodiversity, and build long-term resilience across the city.

E. GALLANT
GALLANT (Glasgow as a Living Lab Accelerating Novel Transformation) is a five-year research initiative (2022–2027) led by the University of Glasgow and funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

The project explores experimental, place-based approaches to climate adaptation in collaboration with local communities. It positions Glasgow as a “living lab,” testing new systems and interventions that respond directly to environmental and social challenges.

Earth Return aligns with this framework by proposing a participatory, infrastructural experiment that can be tested, iterated, and scaled within existing urban conditions.

F. Local Allotments
Several local allotments and community growing spaces in Glasgow could play a key role in this system by receiving and utilising compost generated through Earth Return. These sites already demonstrate strong community engagement and environmental stewardship.

Potential partners include:

Urban Roots – Polmadie
The Croft – Playing Fields
Queens Park Allotments
Agnew Lane Community Allotment
These sites would form part of a wider circular network, linking urban waste production to local food growing and ecological regeneration.

Industrial development often leaves behind contaminated soil, creating derelict brownfield sites that can remain abandoned for decades. These landscapes pose risks to both communities and the environment, while the high cost of conventional remediation often makes redevelopment uneconomic for local authorities, regeneration companies, and landowners.

Turn Systems is a speculative nature-based remediation service that uses phytoremediation and bioremediation to restore contaminated land through ecological processes. Carefully selected plants, fungi, and microbes are deployed across sites to absorb, stabilise, and break down pollutants commonly found in post-industrial landscapes, including heavy metals and hydrocarbons.

The project combines living systems with emerging monitoring technologies. A distributed network of soil probes and underground electrodes interfaces with plant root systems and mycelial networks, translating biological and electrochemical activity within the soil into real-time environmental data. This allows remediation progress and soil conditions to be monitored in real time, enabling adaptive management of moisture, pH, nutrients, and microbial activity to optimise the remediation process.

Rather than leaving brownfield sites inactive while awaiting redevelopment, Turn Systems reimagines them as active landscapes of ecological recovery. The system positions phytoremediation as an interim land-use strategy that can improve biodiversity, reconnect communities with nature, and contribute towards Net Zero and biodiversity gain targets while preparing land for future development.

Rooted in systems thinking, sustainability, and stewardship, Turn Systems explores how design can work with natural processes to restore damaged landscapes and create new relationships between people, ecology, and the post-industrial city.