The year 2018 was a big one for us. There were challenges we have never endured before but also successes we haven’t even dreamed of back in 2008 when we started the business.
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- At the beginning of the year, we completed our move and set up a new bigger and better e-waste recycling warehouse in Kewdale at 26 Miles Road. Marking our sixth move in 10 years. Yes, you’ve heard us right, sixth!
- The War on Waste documentary launched a new episode examining the growing e-waste problem making the general public more aware of the importance of recycling e-waste properly.
- BAN Report put 35 trackers into random devices all over the country. Five of them ended up with us and all 5 were recycled properly. That makes us one of the top performing e-waste recyclers in Australia. (You can download the Illegal Export of e-Waste from Australia in PDF here.)
- Twenty-three (23) new people joined us on our mission lifting the total headcount by the end of the year to 41 staff. Including two differently abled workers.
- This amazing team of people recycled and recovered 2356 Tonnes of e-waste. This amount accounts for 500,000 electronic items. 54,000 items were recovered through our Asset Management services.
- Over 100 people toured our facility to learn about e-waste recycling including several mayors and councillors from WA. (And the minister is coming to visit soon!)
- We were highly commended in the category – Avoid Recover Protect – Community Waste Award in the Infinity Awards 2018 which you can read more about in our blog post.
- We have been successful in obtaining a meeting with the minister’s office and had the opportunity to express our concerns and potential actions they can take to improve E-waste recycling in WA and potentially ban it from the landfill.
- In December, we launched our Newsletter and created videos to show you all the amazing things we do.
- And last, but not least. Our contribution to various charities was the most significant yet:
Contributions to charities
- We donated 20 computers & 5 iPads to Nakor Tep Hospital in Cambodia.
- In September 2018 we established an official partnership with the International Schools Partnership in Uganda. As such Total Green have committed to the ongoing support of the ‘Keep a kid in school’ program. With your support, we will be donating $1 for every laptop that we refurbish through our office IT recycling service. In the last 4 months of 2018, we were very proud to donate $864 to ISP to support the great work they are doing in Uganda. This important donation represents wages for teachers, food and basic essentials for kids to attend remote village schools with the help of ISP outreach programs.
- We donated 20 iPads to Teach Learn Grow Foundation to improve their learning and e-mentoring programs, helping disadvantaged high school kids in regional WA.
- For Christmas, we donated 14 refurbished gaming consoles to kids from disadvantaged families to The Pantry WA.
- We are looking forward to seeing the faces and reactions of the three lucky ladies who will each be receiving a nice refurbished Dell laptop, courtesy of Total Green Recycling. These laptops have their tickets booked and will be travelling all the way up to Fitzroy Crossing in the Kimberly to be given to very lovely ladies in the Yiriman Project. Special thanks to Sven Stenvers from Impact Seed for coordinating our donation for this project.
What’s next you ask? We like to think BIG.
2019 & The Year Ahead
- With the significant growth ahead we expect plenty of new faces to join the team next year.
- We’re about to purchase a new truck to be able to keep up with your enquiries.
- The new bins and cages arrived! We have TGR-branded them and are about to install and trial them with selected businesses around Perth. Give us a shout if you’d like one!
- After many years of hard yakka and several thousands of hours on the clock, we are due to upgrade to some new forklifts for our team on the ground. This will help them move our mountains of e-waste through the factory much more efficiently.
- We scheduled exciting new software improvements for implementation in the first half of this year with improvements to both e-waste recycling and asset management platforms.
- New high-tech optical sorter has been a dream of ours for some time now. We hope to install this later in the year in order to further improve our recovery rates in target materials.
- Plenty of new partnerships are forming already with great teams such as the Curtin University for sustainable business development.
- We successfully applied for the Hancock Creative’s Gain & Retain grant which will help us to reach more people to share our mission with.
- We plan to officially launch a campaign and achieve a ban of e-waste from WA landfills by 2020.
And so very much more!
So watch this space. And subscribe to our newsletter so you don’t miss a thing!