At Scoop, the perfect circle goes until the vegetable garden

A sustainable company inside out. Specialised in technical textiles, Scoop has taken on circular economy and social responsibility as one of its flags. A philosophy that goes beyond the walls of the factory and extends to the biological vegetable garden that supplies the company’s 130 collaborators with vegetables, fruits and herbs.

“About two years ago, we realized that we had to do even more towards becoming a more responsible manufacturer,” explains Daniel Pinto, Scoop’s director of business development and strategy. And among the various measures taken, from the reduction of waste to the commitment on using more sustainable fabrics, the administration decided to create a biological garden, a symbol of communion with nature.

Today in this space, they grow all kinds of crops: onions, tomatoes, zucchini, potatoes and many other vegetables, side by side with fruit trees and various herbs and infusions. With a cultivated area increasing by the day, the vegetable garden allows the company to offer daily soup, juice and fruit to its collaborators, and always have a series of teas at hand. At times, harvests still serve as a complement to the workers’ family, for instance last Christmas, the company offered cabbages (a tradicional ingredient in the Portuguese diet) for the Christmas dinner.

Renato Silva, the man responsible for the vegetable garden (in the photo), said: “This was dead land, it had nothing, it had to be prepared and sown. Rescued from a situation of long unemployment, “Mr. Renato “is today responsible for agricultural issues and one of the most charismatic and cherished figures in Scoop, very much due to his way with nature. “I have a home garden and I learned from the family, by helping the elder as a kid I learned. Even today, my 85-year-old mother teaches me a lot, “she says.

Since the first harvests, more than a year ago, the garden has been growing and becoming more and more sustainable. One of the most recent achievement is a combustor built by Mr. Renato, where the remains of the canteen are transformed into humus, which then fertilizes the garden itself, in a perfect circuit where there is no space for waste.

For the future, in a project in constant evolution, a new enlargement is planned and the installation of a system of retention of rain waters, so that it is also reused to irrigate.2