I think you’re more a social enterprise than anything aren’t you? It’s good to foreground that – that you’re a non-for-profit. You’re not trying to collect the plastic using child labour and then making bricks to build houses out of. So it’s an educational thing that is around leveraging off some of the stuff you’ve found in the regional growth fund. Make that really explicit.
What are you asking for? And are you thinking that these [funds/partners] are the people you would hope would contribute, that you would be pitching for? I can certainly see how you could use companies like MeadowFresh or Fonterra – that might tie into their kind of social responsibility aspect to their strategies. That might be something that you could attach.
It’s the highest level of funding from anyone that we’ve seen so far. Nearly half of that is for the truck. Finding ways to minimise that, like lease for example might be a good idea. Because the truck itself isn’t important, it’s the contents of the container that is the most important. And then you’ve got the salaries and insurance and things like that, so I would think that basically your salary is going to be the biggest expense, because you have teachers and assistants and technicians. So there are quite a lot of people involved in that so I would have thought that would have been your biggest expense. You’ve got $145,000 for graphic designers – that’s probably going to be a one-off cost, and then there’s $144,000 for the finance department – I’m not quite sure what they’re doing. So get that a bit more nailed down. It feels like it’s a bit all over the place. Do you need to spend $150,000 on renting an office? That’s pretty expensive, when this is the kind of thing that could be based out of a school or an agreement with one of the sponsoring companies, that you might be able to run this from an office or a desk – that’s all you need probably.
Be really explicit about the budget and that it is a social enterprise. And I think if you can quantify the good that is going to come out of it a bit more explicitly. So the schools get those bricks, which is really cool, but is then that just more shit basically? Is it a bit like when schools do a World of Wearable Arts thing and then the week after you see all this junk in the school rubbish. So I think really being able to quantify the value of the plastic, because I think that’s something that’s not happening which also makes me think: yes the school is a component to this, but maybe it’s about working with Fonterra or whatever, and actually showing them that they can close the loop on the cycle and they’ve actually got something that’s worth something with the plastic bottles. So can they build a house from plastic recycled from the HDPE. What can be done with it? More than just making bricks. So put it into a real world scenario so it has real value. Because at the moment yes, it’s an educational thing, but if there’s a demand, if as a company we paid 5 cents a bottle for our milk bottles when we got them back, then we would actually have an income from turning these into playground equipment or whatever that we can sell. Really showing the value of recycled plastic is really important, and in that respect it might be good to have a truck that visits companies as well.
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