The Green Dream vs Hard Reality: Financial Lessons from a paused recycling line

The last couple of weeks have been strenuous and this is mainly due to my new found role.

If you have been following me, you should know I run a recycling company in Nigeria amongst other things like coding, writing, and being a football fan.

Earlier this year, I was in contact with a bigger recycling plant in my state for a sort of partnership deal. They have a recycling line that processes PET bottles into flakes and even a pelletizing machine that turns it into pellets.

That is an investment running into hundreds of millions.

Unfortunately, the recycling line has been shut down and operations have ceased for sometime due to many factors. The partnership deal turned into an operational oversight one with the owners looking to not only resurrect the recycling line but make sure it is constantly operational and profitable. This is my forte and I was glad to be onboard.

Lessons Learnt

Some of the things I observed as the problem and main reason operation stopped and wasn't successful will be discussed so It can be applied across any business chain.

Procurement

In recycling, if you get bad raw materials, it will reflect and hurt your whole operations. The ideal PET bottles should be clean, neat and free from contents that might skew the weight. Imagine paying the local aggregator for PET bottles filled with water and sand. On processing, you capture just 60% of the weight which is already a loss for you because raw materials account for atleast 50% of cost of operations.

You can check my other posts on recycling for a picture of how the PET bottles should look like and compare to this.

Operations

Having the right feedstock isn't enough if you don't have the technical know-how. The right people trained to sort the PET bottles well, machine operators and standard operating procedures put in place.

Putting up a solid and flexible work culture is key. I noticed all these are missing and have been trying to put the right things in place if we want to achieve success.

Sales

What is a business without revenue? You have to make money somehow, you need to sell. To the best of my knowledge, they are yet to make a single sale and this is going to change. Sales have to made and the company have to be self sustaining. This is how you know we are making profit and not just doing what the past administration did.

---

I have been putting things in place for the last few weeks and at the same time running my own company. I also recently met with a group of investors who are eager to invest $10,000 in my company at 17% interest. That mean we still have $14,000 left of the $24,000 target as explained here

With my role in the new company, my business will be providing the feedstock needed for operations which is around 110 tons monthly.

Let me know if you are interested in this investment offer

Posted Using INLEO