Convincing companies to buy back their own rubbish sounds like an unlikely business model – yet the Melbourne social enterprise Green Collect has found a way to make it work. Companies in the city’s office towers pay Green Collect to take away hard-to-recycle waste. Green Collect then employs socially disadvantaged people to refashion it into something useful and then sells it back to the companies that threw it out. It’s a double whammy. As social enterprise expert Prof Jo Barraket says: “It doesn’t get much better than that.”
Social enterprises such as Green Collect exist to solve social, environmental, cultural or economic problems. They aim to be self-sustaining and at least 50% of their profits are ploughed back into their mission. “And that capacity of being able to find latent value is really a characteristic of all social enterprises,” says Barraket, director of the Centre for Social Impact Swinburne.
Sally Quinn started Green Collect with partner Darren Andrews as a not-for-profit business 11 years ago because she was looking for a way to get some of society’s most disadvantaged people into employment.
Green Collect now employs about 30 permanent staff, earns an annual revenue of $800,000 and is 85% self-funded, with the remainder being a combination of philanthropy and government funding.
Quinn says she hopes the business will be self-sustaining by 2019 and their goal is for 60% of the permanent jobs in the enterprise to be for people who have faced significant barriers to employment.
“We want to make sure that our social mission is always at the forefront of what we do,” she says, adding that it is also important that staff are paid “good wages”.
The idea for Green Collect emerged from Quinn’s social work in women’s crisis housing in St Kilda, Melbourne. She realised that employment was a key part of helping these women rebuild their lives.
“For a lot of these women, it was so hard to be able to get back in the workforce, mainly because when you don’t have a fixed address, it is hard to have a CV, it is hard to be contactable, hard to prepare yourself for work,” she says. “And if you can’t get work, you can’t get secure housing, you can’t access the private rental market. I saw these people had nowhere to move.”
For his part, Andrews has a background in environmental policy and planning and was inspired to do something when he saw how much waste was occurring in city businesses.
“He was doing some further study in the city at the time and he would come home and say, ‘You won’t believe what I saw in these skips today’,” Quinn says.
To read the full story, visit https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/nov/21/social-enterprises-transforming-recycling.