Envirobank Recycling
Narelle Anderson, Winner of the Indigenous in Business Award 2019 with Joseph Assaf, the Founder of EBA Foundation.
The Ethnic Business Awards are Australia’s longest running national business awards program selects twelve finalists each year in three categories. The stories of these twelve finalists always inspire. These are never overnight success stories, they are stories of resilience, perseverance and spirit. This is not to say that people don’t “get lucky”but often when they do, they have enormous gratitude to this country that facilitates such a life.
The awards always celebrate diversity and multiculturism and this has been thus for more than three decades. Each year the Ethnic Business Awards shines a light on the stories of inspiration of our finalists. With 2020 being a year of challenges, it is a great idea to look back now at some of these stories of inspiration. Sometimes these moving stories provide us with hope for our own lives.
In 2019 the Ethnic Business Awards Foundation was honored to present Narelle Anderson as the winner of the “Indigenous in Business” category. Narelle is the founder and managing director of Envirobank Recycling. When she first learned that she was a finalist Narelle wrote:
“I feel very honoured to be acknowledged for our work. We see waste as a currency and that currency changes lives - we simply dream about cleaning up the country and providing opportunities wherever we go internally and externally.”
As a young girl, Narelle Anderson was paid $6 per week by the Australian government to attend school. It was this payment which first made her aware of her Indigenous heritage and inspired her journey into entrepreneurship. She got her first job at the age of 14 and left school two years later, and she never looked back.
In 2000, Narelle started her first waste management company, CBD Enviro Services. She built it up, expanded it and sold it through a trade sale to a large public company– paving the way for the launch of Envirobank Recycling, an innovative, automated, consumer recycling network of which Narelle is both founder and Managing Director. Her observation of a gap in the public recycling market and determination to provide solutions that would eliminate contamination and reward consumers for the good they do, was the beginning of Envirobank Recycling.
In the early days of Envirobank, after she had exhausted the $2M from the proceeds of the sale of her first company, she worked tirelessly without drawing a salary from the business until it turned a profit four years later.
Today, Narelle employs about 100 employees with Envirobank’s turnover doubling from $10 million in 2017 to $20 million in 2018. Envirobank offers an inclusive suite of innovative container refund solutions and services – so anyone and everyone can embrace and benefit from Container Recycling Schemes being rolled out across the country. Since their inception, Envirobank’s service has expanded to nine automated recycling depots in Queensland, New South Wales and the Northern Territory, a large fleet of Drop’n’Go SmartPods, reverse vending machines, and a soon-to-be-launched home collection services. They work with the ultimate vision to change the way Australians recycle and reward people for the good they do.
While her tenacity was unshakeable, she admits that many, many doors were closed on her in the beginning. Being a woman – and an Indigenous woman – in an industry so heavily dominated by men, led her to be the recipient of much unconscious and conscious gender bias and discrimination. However, that did not stop her, it only made her strong, resilient, resolute and thankful that she had the tenacity to fight the fight.
Narelle is proud of her Indigenous heritage and has worked hard to ensure that she shares Envirobank’s success with many not-for-profits and Indigenous communities in Australia. As such, she has partnered with regional councils to assist in establishing access to container refund services in extremely remote communities of East Arnhem in the Northern Territory. In her winner’s acceptance speech she said “My culture makes me a custodian of the land, so cleaning up the country seems a natural fit.” As a result of the success of those collections, and the partnership with East Arnhem Council in Galiwunku, Envirobank is continuing their work with the council to run a series of additional collections in other parts of East Arnhem – giving more regional communities’ access to the Scheme.
Even though she left school at 16 and never went to university, she has always dreamt of inspiring young girls all over the globe, in particular young Aboriginal girls in communities where they have limited access to university education and to show other Aboriginal women and kids that the world is truly your oyster and anything is possible if you get up every day, go to work, and try and try.
What an inspiration the amazing woman is and it was an honour that Envirobank nominated for the awards.
Every year we seek out similarly inspirational stories. Sometimes the business is in it’s infancy, so we recommend they track along for a few years before they begin the nomination process. There is zero cost involved in nominating and we are always happy when nominees try to be selected for consequetive years. We understand that the EBA is only able to bring twelve fantastic stories each year to the stage, so my advice to you is to never give up. We have many examples of finalists who were only successful after trying for a couple of years to be selected. The most important thing is that we hear these stories. And through our media partners we can beam them into the loungerooms of Australians everywhere. In fact, they go all over the world as last year we pioneered a Facebook live broadcast and it was seen by 70,000 + viewers. This just shows there is a huge appetite for true stories of excellence.