Folktales, Landscapes, and What I'm Learning About Story
The recycling itself is only half of it — that's what I've learned building Delve Recycled. The other half is telling the story. Being able to articulate what's happening when someone brings in a bag of otherwise unrecyclable materials and leaves holding something made from it.
That storytelling capacity has not come naturally to me. I'm an environmental scientist, trained as a technical writer to be detailed, comprehensive, and still direct. But as I've gotten deeper into operations, something has crystallized: the value of what Delve does lives in the story as much as the product.
I've been experimenting lately, through articles, social media, and conversations with customers. Trying to find the language for what Delve actually is and why it matters. Recently, a few things converged and sharpened my thinking.
Two authors I follow — whose every book I've read — recorded a podcast together. Sharon Blackie and Sarah Wilson, talking about fairytales and collapse. These scholars of story taught me about the distinction between myth and folktale. Myth can feel distant — gods, goddesses, lone heroes transformed through individual conquest. Folktales belong to everyone. They are rooted in place, necessitate teamwork and collaboration, they celebrate and admire values like courage, kindness, patience, observation, and confidence. Sometimes a glimpse about the meaning of life but always, a moral about integrity.
This week, Dave Snowden, a Welsh systems thinker and founder of the Cynefin Company, published a piece working through Welsh mythology to ask a question I spend alot of time thinking about: what would it actually take for change to be maintained? He introduces a distinction between containers and landscapes. Containers are the experiences we create — a workshop that shifts something in the room, a conversation that opens a door. Valuable and hard hitting, but containers rarely ripple out. Two weeks later, not much beyond has changed.
The landscape — the underlying conditions, the substrate of how people think and what they value — remains unchanged. He uses the image of Blodeuwedd from the Mabinogi, a woman made from flowers who keeps returning to being an owl, because the conditions that make her an owl haven't changed. The shift required in the landscape, he suggests, is cultural and generational.
Delve is a Canadian faction of a global movement — small-scale recyclers around the world finding ways to keep material local, useful, and visible. In this community it's accepted that this practice makes impacts beyond the kilograms of waste diverted, and into changing minds and systems. Small-scale recycling can be told as a story aligned with folktale.
The transformation doesn't belong to one person, it belongs to the community. The journey happens at first individually, then connects in with a network of others. In Delve’s LoopLAB workshops, participants observe their community for problems, design solutions, and use small-scale recycling processes to make them. Courage is required to dream something up and put it out into the world.
Delve works at both levels intentionally — containers and landscape. We design experiences that shift something in the moment, and we work toward the slower, harder project of changing the underlying conditions. Joanna Macy's Work That Reconnects offers a framework I return to often: that we live in three realities simultaneously. Piloting an economic model that can exist in the world as it is. Dreaming and building systems for the world we hope for. And grieving the instability and loss of the world that is unravelling around us. Delve operates in all three at once — and so does the story we're trying to tell.
The signals are encouraging. Businesses reaching out unprompted, setting up bins. Messages asking if we can accept more materials. Growing demand for what we make. A community deciding that plastic is worth paying attention to differently.
I know I am idealistic about all this. Idealism is what makes courage possible, an important part of a compelling folktale. The willingness to act as if the transformation is possible before the evidence is in.
Making sense of the various threads — the excitement, the feedback, the anecdotes and early evidence — and reflecting it back out into the world. The story gathers it all together, gives it coherence, and sends it back out into the landscape. That's what I'm learning to do. I think it matters as much as anything else Delve does.
A deep thank you to the writers whose work shapes how I think: Sharon Blackie, Sarah Wilson (LinkedIn), and Dave Snowden and the Cynefin C
A deep thank you to the writers whose work shapes how I think: Sharon Blackie, Sarah Wilson (LinkedIn), and Dave Snowden and the Cynefin Company (LinkedIn). If you haven't found them yet, I'd start there.
Delve Recycled is a micro-recycling sustainability studio based in Williams Lake, BC. We turn locally collected plastic into products, workshops, and community programming. You can explore our work at delverecycled.ca or follow along @delverecycled.
LoopLab is Delve's sponsored in-school workshop program — bringing hands-on small-scale recycling directly into classrooms. We're actively looking for corporate sponsors to help bring LoopLab to more schools. If your organization is looking for meaningful, place-based community investment, I'd love to talk.
If you're interested in a workshop for your school, organization, or community — reach out at emma@delverecycled.ca.