Sustainability was once jargon only used by eco-activists or Tom and Barbara in the Good Life. Now it's a 21st century buzzword on the lips of everyone from politicians to teachers. It's not just because living more within our means is the right choice for the environment, it also makes good financial sense. Now entrepreneurs have jumped in to meet the demand of consumers and other businesses looking to do their bit for the planet by turning traditional waste into financial cash cows.
There has been a significant shift in how people view waste, largely steered by the government's decision to impose punitive taxes on businesses which send their rubbish to landfill. Inevitably, driven by a commercial challenge, businesses looked for other options and
SugaRich was one of the companies ready to fill the gap in the market. The SME has found huge success recycling unwanted produce from food manufacturers into farm animal feed.
"The business has been able to grow by being there when manufacturers have called out for help," explains Paul Featherstone, director at SugaRich. "We try and figure out the best ways of working with these companies to recover these nutrients and put them back into the food chain. We have benefited from the pressures within the business sector to waste less and recycle more."
Research from WRAP (Waste and Resources Action Programme) shows that in the UK we needlessly throw away mountains of perfectly good food - 4.2m tonnes of the stuff in 2012, the last year for which figures are available. Featherstone claims the opportunities for businesses in food waste recycling are therefore as plentiful as the misshapen carrots and bruised bananas dumped every year.
It's a competitive market, Featherstone warns, but it's clearly growing as we strive for lower amounts of landfill and begin to look for new innovative ways of using our waste.
Arthur Kay is one young entrepreneur who recognised the potential of food waste recycling after noticing the British public's caffeine addiction sky rocket over the past decade. The UK's coffee revolution has seen cafes sprout up on high street corners in every town and city. With that, however, comes plenty of unwanted byproducts.
One coffee shop's waste was Kay's treasure and he co-founded BioBean to turn waste coffee grounds into fuel products such as bio-diesel and bio-pellets.
Like many entrepreneurs working in this sector, Kay believes it is important to live by his company's green ethos and uses his own waste recycling technology to make efficiency savings for BioBean as well.
"The less you waste makes your business not just ecologically viable, but also economically viable," Kay explains.
He adds: "What we try and do is make the whole process and infrastructure behind the business as sustainable as possible. Essentially we use our own bio-diesel to power the vans that will in turn collect the waste coffee grounds. Within that whole process there are waste products which account for 0.2% of the total waste. Instead of throwing that away we are using it to generate electricity which in turn powers the process itself."
Kay calls it the circular economy. It's an idea shared by Kresse Wesling, the founder of Elvis & Kresse. The company create accessories out of unwanted items that would otherwise be destined for landfill. The raw material for their principal range of bags, belts and wallets is reclaimed from de-commissioned British fire brigade hoses, but they now also collect 15 different materials for design projects.
Wesling proudly boasts that their leather collection is one of the first truly circular economy products on the market. It's not only made from a waste material but designed to be taken apart and reused indefinitely.
"When I first saw the fire hose, it was genuinely love at first site and I took it home and thought, I can fix this, I can save it," she says. "It was a bitesize chunk of a really big problem. I am dealing with something so small in comparison.
"But we thought throughout the whole process that if we could turn it into something truly spectacular then we would start to change people's perceptions about what waste is and get them to look past the bin bag and into the value that lies within."
Waste reclamation is not without its challenges for small businesses, particularly when harvesting unwanted food. Rubies in the Rubble chutney maker, Jenny Dawson, reveals that fluctuations in supply due to seasons and weather means keeping up with retailers and consumers who demand a year round supply can be quite a challenge.
Dawson, whose company sources all their fruit and vegetables from surplus, fresh from the market before they're discarded, says: "There's also the challenge of cost pricing. It's a lot cheaper to buy something pre-chopped or frozen from abroad. We have a higher overhead as a result."
But, she adds, growth has been fun and after humble beginnings trading in Borough market, they are now selling to Fortnum and Mason, Selfridges and London branches of Waitrose. The success of her business, however, would mean nothing without the principles of sustainability and waste efficiency which the company was founded on.
"People have responded really well to the business concept," she says. "I was very passionate about making the brand, but I didn't want it to be thought of as a charity brand. The whole point of it was that it had to be top notch and compete with the best on the shelf. I wanted to make people a bit more aware and take responsibility for our waste."
Iain Walker from E.ON said: "One man's trash is another man's treasure, so the saying goes, and turning waste into something of value is one way that businesses can make money. But for those companies that can't take advantage in that way, the key to success is in reducing waste, whether that is energy or other business costs. At E.ON we want to help businesses reduce energy waste, so we offer a free set of tools and energy saving advice to our customers so that they can monitor and control their energy usage. Visit our business Energy Toolkit for more details."
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This content has been paid for and produced to a brief agreed with E.ON, whose brand it displays
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