Brùchd is a community-rooted biomaterial system situated on the Isle of Arran, cultivating a new industry from the same waters its products are made to protect. The project responds to two key insights: tons plastic fishing gear  and packaging is lost to the west coast seabed every year, and the communities most affected by that loss have no stake in the supply chain that pollutes it. Brùchd proposes a single locally-cultivated seaweed material with two distinct lives: as biodegradable fishing gear for independent shellfish fishers and as a textile for Arran’s makers and small producers. Cultivation is visible from the shore, processing happens within the community that uses the output and value retained on the island becomes employment, skills, and an evolving local economy, rather than supplier extraction. The system is designed to be replicable along the wider Scottish west coast where similar coastal communities navigate the same contradiction of dependence on a sea they don’t control.

How does a coastal industry become a holdfast for the communities that grew it? Through acts of cultivation, making, and use as a means of rebuilding connection to material and place.