Chris Powell is a relentlessly positive person, but if there’s one thing he can’t stand, it’s wasted potential. In fact, he’s dedicated most of his working life to stamping it out in Harrogate and the surrounding area. 

Chris is the creative powerhouse behind the Cone Exchange, a community venture funded by his employer, Bettys and Taylors Group, and he’s the reason that over 25 businesses channel their waste towards his workshop in Starbeck. He told the Stray Ferret: 

The Cone Exchange started 21 years ago, when a boy on a school trip to the Taylors Tea factory saw a cardboard cone being thrown away and asked if he could take it home to make a Christmas tree angel out of it. 

Chris saw the potential of the idea – the cone was actually the bobbin for the thread that tethers a tag to its teabag, and loads of them are thrown away every year – and soon all the cones were being turned into angels. The idea grew, and Chris was tasked with nurturing the new venture.  

He said: 

The Cone Exchange now consists of several operations. The most obvious part of it is the craft-themed charity shop, which sells fabric, braid, ribbon, buttons, zips, papercrafting, beading and books to the district’s craft aficionados. 

There’s a smaller scrap store, which sells waste and offcuts from donor companies, and is the only one in the UK owned and run by a private-sector company. 

Crucially, there is also a sizeable workshop, which provides work experience opportunities for young people from special schools and colleges around the district, including Horticap, Henshaws and Springwater School. Chris said: 

Many of the items they manufacture are made with reclaimed materials cut into shape by machines hand-operated by the students using metal cutting dies designed by Chris. These include handbag tags made with discarded lanyard clips and offcuts: Remembrance Day red poppies, white ones for peace, purple ones for the animals killed in war, and yellow sunflowers for Ukraine. 

Chris said: 

One particularly successful venture is the Cone Exchange’s stand at the annual Knitting & Stitching Show in Harrogate. It sells bag-making patterns along with material from fabric samples books donated by local upholsterers – all designed and packaged by a volunteer army of local ladies. The stand is routinely mobbed, and last year made £11,400 in just four days. 

The Cone Exchange also helps bereaved relatives clear homes, directing unwanted items to their own workshops or to other organisations that can use them, such as Essential Needs, Artizan, Harrogate Homeless Project, Harlow Hill Men’s Shed and Resurrection Bikes. Students at Horticap make garden furniture and composters out of the wooden pallet-toppers donated by Bettys & Taylors, and the organisation even took delivery of a stainless steel kitchen that had been donated. Recently, Starbeck charity Inspire Youth received a snooker table and a table tennis table that the charity shops didn’t have the space to accommodate. 

And because the Cone Exchange's small but highly dedicated team is funded from Bettys & Taylors’ profits (Chris says: “I have a rich Auntie Betty and Uncle Taylor”), every penny made by these commercial ventures can be used to invest in more opportunities for the students. Chris said: 

The Cone Exchange has won a number of awards over the last two decades, and Chris himself has even been to Buckingham Palace a couple of times, once in 2008 to collect an MBE. He said: 

Ten years later, he received the ultimate accolade after appearing on Britain’s longest-running children’s TV show: a green Blue Peter badge “to go on my BMX”. 

Chris’s journey to the Palace started “60-and-a-few" years ago, when he was born in Starbeck. After school at Wedderburn (now Willow Tree), Woodlands and then onto Granby High School (now Harrogate High School), he left without qualifications. He said: 

He took a job at Harrogate grocery institution Standings (“It had been there for 100 years – I was there for three and I managed to close it down”), before being hired by his current employer. Since then, he and his band of staff and volunteers have facilitated 70 work experience placements in the last five years, raised over £250,000 from sales in the shop and events in the last 10 years – with almost £60,000 in the last year alone – and planted 2,000 trees with the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust. 

He has become a community champion, at various times becoming a governor of Springwater School,  a business adviser for Young Enterprise, and a trustee for Jennyruth Workshops, the Ripon charity that works with adults with learning disabilities. 

He’s also in demand as a speaker for groups such the Women’s Institute, Probus and Rotary. He does about 50 talks a year and is booked till the end of 2026. 

Less conventionally, he’s spent some of his time in the job going to speak to schools dressed as “Captain Rummage”, a pirate on a mission to rethink rubbish and get kids to do the same. 

He said: 

Sadly, he had to retire the Captain a few years ago. He said: 

But Chris himself has no plans to retire anytime soon. For someone who doesn’t drink tea or coffee and can’t eat gluten – ruling out bread, cakes and pastries – he's remarkably keen on staying at a company that deals in little else. But that, he says, is all down to its ethos: 

As a guiding principle, it is remarkably attuned to his own life’s purpose. With a deep-seated aversion to wasted potential, Chris has spent decades seeing the potential in waste – and the potential in people – which is one reason why he’s so attached to the firm that gave him a career. He said: 

If you know of a business whose offcuts or waste materials the Cone Exchange could use, please contact Chris with the details.

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