Recycling Partner of Recycle My Salon Bruce Bratley Expresses his Support for the Scheme
[Bruce Bratley]
Hi I'm Bruce Bratley, founder of First Mile, we are the collection recycling partner for the Recycle My Salon scheme.
[Marc Carey]
Welcome Bruce, thank you very much for joining us today.
[BB]
Great to be here.
[MC]
So tell me a little bit about First Mile.
[BB]
So I set First Mile up because city centre businesses were not getting good, if any, recycling services because the waste industry tends to focus on big businesses like shopping centres. We're very much focused on city centres and high streets. We cover the whole of the UK, we either do the services ourselves in London, Birmingham and the West Midlands or we use a network of subcontractors or the carrier network to ensure that we have a full national coverage of our services. We're very much customer and recycling led and we focus on the sort of day to day recycling that you'd come across like glass bottles, metal cans, paper and cardboard, but we're also working on several exciting projects to recycle ‘the hard to recycle’ materials. We're called First Mile because we're very much focused on the first part of the recycling journey from the customer to where we then start to bulk up the material and do work on it to get it recycled back into new products.
[MC]
For the layperson, from the perspective of recycling, do you think attitudes are changing now? Are people realizing they have to separate out their waste and maybe clean up some of the waste before they put it in for recycling?
[BB]
Yeah, I think we're getting there. I mean, there's a lot more focus on climate change at the moment. The UK's recycling rate is stuck at about 50% and we need to get it to 75% if we're going to beat the UK targets. Frankly, recycling has been around for a long time, it's really easy and simple, and if we can't get recycling right then I don't think we've got a huge amount of hope for making some of these other changes we need to do. I'm totally confident we are going to get the targets and I'm super positive about the future and I think people are really engaged with doing more recycling.
[MC]
In terms of this current scheme that we're talking about, Recycle My Salon, did they come to you or had you already been thinking about this? Tell me a little bit about that process.
[BB]
So Recycle My Salon came to us because one of the partners involved in the process manufactures a lot of the hair foil, which is the main material that we're collecting, and they said "is there any way that we can make it into a more circular product by recycling it back into foils?". So this whole concept is moving away from a linear system, which is make, use, dispose, into a circular system which means materials will get recycled back into resources to be used again.
[MC]
It's interesting because we've seen the language around environmental matters evolve over the years. Sustainability seemed to be the buzzword for a period of time but we are hearing more about circular economies which is all about reusing, putting back into market and upcycling. I wonder, do you think the salon owners in the past have been trying to recycle materials not really realising that they don't end up being recycled?
[BB]
I think there's a huge amount of confusion around recycling generally and it's not helped by the fact that wherever you live there's a different recycling system in place. Depending on where you are with your salon and which company you're using, you get very different information. The good news is that the government are bringing in a new law next year which puts consistency across the types of materials that can and can't be collected. There'll be a core set of five or six materials that can be recycled everywhere but there'll also be exceptions, which will be very specialist items like hair foils, and that's why it's really important to have schemes like Recycle My Salon which are then picking up these specialist items. The key thing here is that anything can be recycled, the issue is about money and the environmental impact of recycling. Can it be recycled in a general recycling stream or does it need to go down a specialist waste stream? What we're doing at First Mile with these hard to recycle materials is only collecting materials that we can actually recycle, but we have to collect them separately because if they go into the general recycling stream they're not going to get recycled. So we need clear communication to say that a material can be recycled if it goes down a separate segregated stream.
[MC]
Looking at the Recycle My Salon scheme, it's great that companies, businesses and organizations have come together to develop this because often we see businesses working competitively in silos. Is this something you're seeing across industries now, as a business that offers these services?
[BB]
Yeah, we are starting to see that and we're very much leading on that because we're a purpose led organization. People say to me, "well, why are you talking to people so much about reducing the amount of waste?" or "why are you talking to businesses about reuse schemes when it'll mean there's less waste for you to charge to collect and recycle?". My view on this is because we're an environmental organization we need to work towards zero waste, and there's so much damn waster out there at the moment we're not going to run out of things to do anytime soon. We're very keen to work on reducing waste and we're very keen for people to work together collaboratively because there's so much waste out there. Also, it's really important to make these schemes more efficient by people working together. What we're trying to do here is help the environment, we're not trying to grow the market share or be competitive with each other. We need to be able to cooperate and work together for the benefit of the environment around these projects.
[MC]
Yeah, I think collaboration is the only way out of this issue. So, the scheme is ready for launch, hoping that it's going to be taken up across the board, how does that feel to be sitting at the top table with a lot of the leaders in the hair and beauty industry taking this out to the market? Is that an interesting space to be in or do you prefer to be at the other end, at grassroots?
[BB]
We're always at the top table. This is why I set First Mile up, I did two degrees in environmentalism and I felt that I could have more of an impact in business because I felt like businesses could do more and change more. So you know we're very comfortable talking to these big brands and helping them to grow their environmental credentials and make an impact on supply chains, moving from a linear economy to a circular economy. So we're ready to take it on and get going.
[MC]
Yeah, I think there's no other way of taking these schemes to the market, you have to get everybody behind it. I think that's the beauty of these schemes. What's the unique value proposition do you think of this particular scheme?
[BB]
The key thing here is aluminium because if you recycle it, you're saving 90% of the energy. The thing that people don't understand yet is that the resource concentration in a material that is recycled is way higher than getting it from virgin materials. Aluminium is a brilliant example because if you take bauxite, which is all that aluminium is made out of, you have to dig a bloody great big hole where they get lots of ore then take it to a smelter where lots of energy is used to extract the ore to make aluminium into a product. The entire supply chain can be shortened if we take used aluminium and the concentrations is near 100% of the resource. So why are we going back to getting virgin aluminium when we're sitting on top of a huge resource of high concentration aluminium that can be recycled?
[MC]
So we talked about this brilliant scheme Recycle My Salon and the work that you're doing as well. There's a lot more to do isn't there? This is probably the tip of the iceberg. So what are your predictions, what are the things you can see on the horizon?
[BB]
Well, we knew climate change was happening 20/30 years ago and unfortunately companies have spent a huge amount of money and effort to stop us taking action sooner, but we're finally getting there. There is loads more science to be done to understand things like tipping points and how climate change impacts the weather, but the fundamentals we know about climate change were actually discovered 100s of years ago, ironically by somebody who worked for an oil company. Now it's become a human problem because the planet is going to be fine, humans need to change if we want to continue to occupy this planet and I think the penny is finally dropping with people. Recycle My Salon is really interesting from that perspective because there's something like 33,000 hairdressers and beauty salons at least in the UK, and if they've all got a minimum of five people working in them, that's 150,000 people who we can turn into climate activists through schemes like this. And what happens when you go to a hair salon, or hairdressers or a beautician, you talk to people and we need to talk to people in a nice, friendly and preachy way about climate change. We need to talk about it as much as we've been talking about COVID in the last two years, quite often you talk about everything apart from the climate emergency. I think if we get people in the hair and beauty profession to talk about climate change while cutting your hair or painting your toenails, it would be amazing.
[MC]
I love the idea of the transition of the discussions from the stereotypical discussions to dealing with some of these real issues that are affecting the planet and us as individuals. So, Bruce it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you today, thank you for your time. I mean you've just given us a brilliant closer there to be honest but are there any final thoughts that you want to share with our listeners today?
[BB]
Talk about the environment, pick up something, look at it, see if it can be recycled and take action. The great thing about recycling is you can do it now, you can do it after this call, you don't need to spend any money on it and you don't need to wait.
[MC]
Brilliant, wise words my friend. Well look Bruce it's been a pleasure as I said, thank you very much for joining us and best of luck with the launch of the Recycle My Salon scheme, I know it's going to be hugely successful. On behalf of the community, thank you for being part of it.
[BB]
It's a pleasure and great to talk to you Marc, thanks a million.
