The Reverse Garbage team was excited to welcome NSW Minister for Energy and Environment, The Honourable Matt Kean MP, and Member for Summer Hill, Jo Haylen MP on Monday, 18 November 2019.
“We were delighted the Minister made time to explore the warehouse. As a fully self-funded not for profit, every bit of support is extremely valuable to us. We’re always happy to welcome Jo Haylen, MP, back to the Reverse Garbage warehouse. Jo has been a fabulous supporter for our organisation,” said Naomi Brennan, CEO of Reverse Garbage.
On a short tour of our Education Hut and Warehouse, Minister Kean acknowledged the important contribution we make to our community, their education AND the environment.
Our social impact is often overlooked. In 2018/2019, Reverse Garbage benefitted from 9672 hours of volunteer labour. This contribution comes from:
- Community Service Orders via NSW Department of Justice
- Work Development Orders via NSW Department of Revenue
- Work for the Dole program via Australian Department of Human Services
- those with an interest in sustainability and creative reuse
- corporate volunteers
- Duke of Edinburgh students
- university students.
The opportunity to work as part of the team here at Reverse Garbage is valuable for these individuals. The training and support they receive here gives them purpose, builds confidence and skills that they often apply to access more long term employment opportunities.
Each year we serve around 60,000 customers, giving them an opportunity to source reuse resources for their creative and educational purposes.
Reverse Garbage was established in 1975 by a group of teachers and to this day, education is a major focus for our reuse resources. In 2018/2019, we took our reuse message to 15,694 participants through our education program which runs workshops for age 2- 92. We ran 257 incursions and excursions from early learning centres through to seniors’ groups, and visited community festivals around Sydney and regional areas.
In 2018/2019 we were able to start weighing all donations of commercial and industrial discards. We are proud to report that we saved 248,480 kilograms from landfill.
