Two Raccoons work to reduce soft fruit waste (a significant amount of the total UK food waste) and re-purpose it by making fruit wine. We want to provide an alternative to the highly polluting and globalised wine industry by creating a locally produced eco-friendly wine to the people of Aberdeen and Scotland.

I spent the summer of 2018 working at Mushroom Mountain as an intern. This gave me the skills needed to manage a food growing business and taught me how to grow fungi from waste materials and use them for cleaning oil spills, toxic pollutants and pesticides with mycoremediation principles.

BUSINESS IN A BOXDuring 2018, I worked with the Global Ecovillage Network and participated in their Sustainable Entreprenurship Course to find solutions to the issue of mass youth unemployment in Sub-Saharan Africa. I worked with 9 other participants from Ghana, Cameroon, Denmark, and Scotland to create ideas and provide feedback for each other. We did this in two sessions, one in Betterworld Cameroon Ecovillage in Bamenda, where we learnt about permaculture and eco-building, and one session in Copenhagen, where we looked into sustainable agricultural practices. These two 2-week sessions provided us with many ideas for young people with little to no start-up capital to start a business and create a sustainable income source for themselves. We called these "business in a box" ideas that would become easily accessible to anyone with an internet connection. These ideas were compiled on the Global Ecovillage Network website, and it also created a long-lasting bond and community spirit between the participants!The world needs more business ideas that can be easily replicated and doesn't cost a fortune to start up, which will create decentralised industries that can function in a sustainable way to diminish our impact and create local employment.Here are two of the low-capital business ideas that I proposed during these sessions:https://ecovillage.org/solution/fra-grums-til-gourmet-from-grounds-to-gourmet/https://ecovillage.org/solution/algae-production-lasse-melgaard/