The awards are a partnership between the Scottish Government, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, the Energy Saving Trust, NatureScot, Zero Waste Scotland as well as a number of other bodies. The VIBES Scottish Environment Business Awards are held each year to recognise and showcase best practice in the context of businesses reducing their impact on the environment.

The main aims of the awards are:

• To encourage the efficient use of resources
• To enhance the competitiveness of businesses
• To improve environmental performance
• To support the wider goals of sustainable development

Brewster Brothers has won the ‘Circular Scotland’ award.

The organisers describe the category as recognising “businesses that can demonstrate a strong commitment to implementing the principles of a circular economy. Ensuring materials are retained within productive use, in a high value state, for as long as possible.

“This could be either through adopting explicit circular models, such as sustainable design and closed material loops, for example, within their own business processes or via their contribution to wider systemic change, perhaps through partnerships or collaboration in high value materials reprocessing or through the development and implementation of enabling technologies or services.”

Brewster Brothers started recycling waste from construction sites in 2017, and such has been the success of their first site near Livingston that the firm will soon open a second premises, this one near Cumbernauld. Following that expansion, the company will be able to process around 600,000 tonnes of construction, demolition and excavation waste per year.

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”