Where there’s rubbish there’s a social business opportunity
One type of social business that I particularly like to work with are businesses which are meeting some sort of environmental need.
At the Danone Social Innovation Lab last month, I chatted with several Danoners (and their NGO partners) from around the world who were involved in setting up social businesses which had an environmental impact, including Gonzalo Roque and Martin de Ferrari from Buenos Aires, Argentina. They were planning to set up a business to improve the quality and quantity of plastic recycling in Argentina. You can see my interview with them here:
The main thing that interested me in what they were doing was that there were clear social, environmental and business benefits from the work they planned to do. The way plastics are currently recycled – by people working informally, and selling plastic on to middlemen – was largely unsatisfactory. The prices people got varied a lot – as the middlemen tended to exploit people – who were themselves reliant on the prices being paid by China for plastic. That meant they couldn’t always make a living out of it – and as a result children would often join their parents in the search for plastic bottles. The quality of the plastic that was processed was often poor – making it more difficult to re-use. And that made it more difficult for Danone to reach their ambitious targets for use of recycled plastics in their bottles.
It makes it easier to do the right thing environmentally if it also makes sense financially. This morning I’ve spent an inspiring few hours with SCRAP – a scrapstore in Leeds which takes business waste and sells it on for creative re-use. It’s a great way to divert a good few tonnes of waste from landfill – whilst also helping people to be creative.
What I like about them is that they are really committed to finding a way to make their social enterprise stand up as a social business. Traditionally they’ve had some funding – but not much – and my work with them is to help them to develop further so that they can generate more income and do more good.
Our affluence has made us a bit lazy and complacent when it comes to how we use the world’s resources. Maybe now, with the environment and our economy looking increasingly fragile, we’re rediscovering that thrift and respect for nature make financial sense as well as environmental sense.
One of the observation I made about the way things work in Eastern Europe is that although they use plastic bottles like us, they have retained something that we abandoned decades ago, the deposit system on bottles. The bottles are typically ‘gifted’ to pensioners who subsidise meagre pensions with the refunds.
For our own validation as a UK business with social environmental and ethical aims, we joined up as one of the founder members of SEE What You Are Buying Into, who avaluate social, environmental and ethical conformance.
http://www.seewhatyouarebuyinginto.com/
Part of that impact is in the stuff we do in education for sustainable economics at the Economics for Ecology conferences.
http://www.p-ced.com/1/projects/ukraine/sumy/
Jeff
I found an old Corona bottle top in my garden the other day. It clearly stated that there was a 3d prize for anyone returning the bottle for re-use. Took me back to my youth when almost all bottles were returnable and what’s more, were returned as 3d was worth the effort.
So what’s changed? Well I guess plastics are lighter and cheaper but in the long term . . . I’m not so sure. There’s shipping to China for recycling and then shipping back to the West as some lurid toy or gadget – progress eh?
Perhaps one aspect of Big Society will be to make local bigger. Buy beer from a micro-brewery in the next village and it would be rather fun to wobble your way back on your bike, having drink the beer, to reclaim the deposit on the bottles.
A thought . .