Your friendly neighbourhood recycling company that helps divert waste from landfill and educates communities on recycling.
Initially started as a small, neighbourhood initiative and a revenue-generating opportunity to assist Clean C’s mandate to create employment and clean up the environment, Kerby (Pty) Ltd has grown to become a full-scale kerbside collection enterprise. Kerby offers a service to collect recyclable packaging waste from households, complexes and corporates who want to make a difference in their communities.
Kerby is owned by Clean C, a public benefit organisation (PBO) with a clear mandate to uplift communities, clean up the environment and provide employment opportunities wherever it can. This mandate has been fully embraced by Kerby as a for-profit enterprise.
Partnerships for the Goals
The Branson Centre identified the opportunity to scale up Kerby through its early relationship with Clean C around plastic waste collected along Cape Town’s beaches.
The Branson Centre and Kerby have entered into a scale up partnership where together they intend to take Kerby from around 1 000 existing customers to 10 000 customers over 5 years.
“Together, we hope to prevent around 18 kilograms of recyclable packaging per household per year from going to landfill. This equates to about 35 tons over our five-year target of 10 000 households.” says Wesley Noble, Executive Director of the Branson Centre. “Given the SDG opportunities coupled with community upliftment and job creation, this partnership made perfect sense.”
Ten times growth also means increased demand for people to collect, sort and bail the material. Kerby currently sources its workforce from the local community of Joe Slovo, of which well over 50 percent are female. Due to its current size, Kerby relies on a combination of food parcels and cash to support its workforce but with its expected growth, it intends to offer permanent employment and profit share opportunities, too.
SDGs Accelerated
Kerby offers opportunities to actively impact a number of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in particular SDG 8, SDG 12 and SDG 14, through their activities and ownership structure.