Recycle South marks 50 years
A popular Southland business celebrated 50 years last week.
Recycle South, which was formerly known as Southland disAbility Services, celebrated all the hard work of staff with a dinner and awards ceremony at the Ascot Park Hotel on March 22.
Josh Johnson was named employee of the year, while Sandra Wilson was given a long service award for her 30 years at the company.
In 1974, it was established as an industrial work training unit for people with disabilities, under the name Southland Enterprises Incorporated, later becoming Southland disAbility Enterprises (SdE), one of a few name changes.
The business began on Gala St as a sheltered workshop, and the company did a lot of work with cane and macrame. It has since taken on different roles over the years at various venues.
Recycle South chief executive Hamish McMurdo said there had been plenty of awesome people who have worked at the business for a number of years.
“It’s a great group of people we have here. It’s like one big family. There is 80 disabled folk and 121 here in total.”
In 1990, work started with Tiwai, then in 1991, the company looked into the early stages of recycling and began repairing second-hand wool sacks to resell. This closed in 1996.
In 1995, it was asked to look at demolishing houses and decided to do so to obtain timber that they could then sell for kindling or firewood.
This experience taught them that there was a demand for dry firewood and also for kindling that was cut to length and uniform in size. They removed and collected all of the nails and sold them as scrap metal.
They dabbled with aluminium cans in the 1990s, McMurdo said, before hiring a shed on Bond St in the early 2000s and won the recycling contract. They had spoken about going into recycling in the 1990s.
There was a limited amount of recycling in town at the time and McMurdo said they opted to increase it a bit more with the green bins in the early 2000s with the likes of, glass, coke bottles, paper and milk.
Around the same period, cane work and wood work started fading and it was hard to compete with places such as The Warehouse, which sourced cheap products
“Now, we only have one cane worker left and he makes coffins. It became phased out with attrition over the years.”
McMurdo said this is when the emphasis turned to recycling. “Recycling was becoming fashionable and it was a well suited area of work for our people. They could sort things easily and the tasks were well suited to them.”
“While we are grateful to have made 50 years, our world remains tight, we are always fighting for funding and struggling to make ends meet and it hasn’t gotten easier over time.”
The recycling facility is now based on Ettrick St and a processing plant is in Makarewa.
Recycle South is a not-for-profit, environmentally aware business founded on the belief that everybody deserves to have equal opportunity. It enriches the lives of people with disabilities by providing meaningful employment and personal development opportunities through operating a successful and environmentally aware business.
As an environmentally aware business in a large agricultural area, which strives for innovation, it has developed a way to recycle farm plastics into a plastic resin product that could exported, McMurdo said. Recycle South is also leading the way in recycling farm plastics with it bale-wrap and agricultural plastic recycling., and is leading innovation with New Zealand’s first further processing plant for recycling farm waste plastics (LDPE and HDPE).
“We turn them into reusable plastic resin pellets right here in Southland,” McMurdo said.
Ian Beckett joined the business in about 1990 and he was general manager for 25 years and the motivator behind the recycling. He also saw Waste Net formed in 2011, the same year SdE became Southland disAbility Services and a charitable trust instead of an incorporated society.
“While we are still owned by Southland disAbilities Charitable Trust, we began trading as Recycle South in 2022 to ensure we got full value for our recycling.”
In 2009, it won the Sustainable Business Award and in 2020 began a partnership with SIT to provide study for our people in the form of a Certificate in Supported Living.