The Totnes Pound

A local economy is like a leaky bucket - wealth comes in and as soon as it is spent at a shop or business that has more connections outside Totnes than inside Totnes, that money disappears. That's the nature of sterling.

However, local money doesn’t leak through the holes – it bounces around inside the local economy and keeps money in local pockets.

Local money helps us think about our local economy, enquiring where our money goes once we spend it and finding ways to keep it from leaking out.

If we use our money for production and consumption closer to home, we're going to pay more attention to how those products are made, and the waste streams that result from them. It's similar logic to the premise that the Bhopal disaster in India would not have happened if the battery factory had been in the back garden of the Chief Exec of Union Carbide.