[A] unique social business has moved into Cumbria, creating jobs and social impact across the county.
Recycling Lives, a recycling and waste management business, has opened a scrap buying and processing facility at Isabella Road on the Derwent Howe Industrial Estate in Workington.
The site, a dedicated scrap metal facility with its own weighbridge, has already created three new local jobs with additional jobs in the pipeline.
The social business, which uses its commercial operations to sustain a number of charitable programmes, is also expanding its food charity across Cumbria. The Food Redistribution Centre – which bridges the gap between food suppliers with surplus goods and charities working with vulnerable groups – is opening collection points across the county, already in Cleator Moor and Penrith, for community groups to access quality food and goods. Recycling Lives has already delivered well over One Million Meals to communities in its home county Lancashire, since opening the Centre in October 2015.
Recycling Lives’ Managing Director, William Fletcher, said: “We’re looking forward to working with businesses to deliver best value and service from our new Workington site.
“We’re already integrating within communities across Cumbria to ensure our charitable services make the most impact for people across the region.”
Recycling Lives, a double Queen’s Award-winning organisation, is committed to creating social impact through its contracts, as its commercial operations directly support and sustain its own charity programmes. As well as redistributing goods through the Food Redistribution Centre, these programmes are also reducing reoffending through offender rehabilitation and tackling homeless through its own residential facilities.
The new scrap metal site adds to Recycling Lives eight others across Lancashire, Greater Manchester, Merseyside, the Midlands and Kent. The facility, which has brought a previously empty site back into use, is now open to the public and other businesses.
Recycling Lives began expanding its operations into Cumbria after winning a contract with Sellafield Ltd in summer 2017, to carry and process waste metal from the fuel reprocessing and decommissioning facility.
The organisation enjoys unique working relationships with its clients as it offers tangible social value as well as total compliance, excellent service and competitive pricing, allowing clients to demonstrate the social impact created by their contract. It is committed to creating Social Value equal to or greater than 10% of its annual sales, creating a saving to society worth £4.1m through food redistribution and offender rehabilitation in 2015/16 alone.
