Are we any closer to a resource-efficient world?
Steve Read, former Chair of the Resource Recovery Forum (RRF), gave the inaugural Kit Strange Memorial Lecture at the Houses of Parliament on 15 January 2014. Here, he reflects on Kit’s legacy
This article was taken from Issue 76Kit Strange, one of the most highly regarded figures in the resource management world, died suddenly in 2011 at the tragically young age of 56. The idea of a memorial lecture was to recognise Kit’s huge contribution to the development of the waste-to-resources agenda.
The Resource Recovery Forum (RRF) began as a loose affiliation of visionary waste (and other) professionals who came together in the early 1990s to work out how to promote the ‘resources not waste’ agenda. Kit was at the time (and remained) Editor of the Warmer Bulletin, a respected journal on sustainable resource management. He was very well connected in the resource world and offered to provide secretariat support.
With a multi-sector global membership, perhaps RRF’s greatest strength was that it was independent and not dogmatic about solutions. RRF identified gaps in research and coordinated bids to the Landfill Tax Fund when this was still a source of grant funding. It was a unique platform for information sharing, networking and organising topical conferences.
