From the repurposed wood bedecking the office to its economical choice of name, Oxford Wood Recycling embodies the ethos of recycling and sustainability. Repurposing his past expertise in business and forestry, CEO and founding member Richard Snow has helped establish and grow an admirable “vehicle” that delivers both social change and gainful employment.
So, what is the vision and mission of Oxford Wood Recycling?
Essentially we are promoting the reuse of what would otherwise be timber waste with an attendant interest in sustainable forestry. As a social purpose we support people on a journey to employment by working with volunteers on work placements and also employing volunteers in the business.
The environmental vision is to educate our customers and the community on the benefits of reuse and also to educate more widely about the timber trade, forestry, land-use and its impact against climate change.
On the social side, the vision is to create a more level playing field for employment, so people who are disadvantaged or live with disabilities have access to employment.
What’s great about running a business in Oxfordshire?
There’s a ready market. We’re part of a community of wood recycling organisations across the UK, and some of them struggle to find a market. [Here] people are invested in our mission and buy into our mission objectives.
On the general public side, people in Oxfordshire are perhaps better informed and educated on environmental issues. That helps.
What services have eScalate provided and how has that helped Oxford Wood Recycling?
We’ve taken advantage of the eScalate grants. Otto my colleague here has been to some workshops. The grant covered fifty percent of a spend on kitting out a new-work area with machinery.
[Otto leans into the call]
Otto: I’ve done the ‘Peer-to-Peer Learning‘, the ‘Meet The Buyer‘ events and the ‘Power of Purpose‘ [week]. It gives us a sense of perspective as to what else is happening, it builds a network, and it’s empowering to go out there and reach out rather than be internally focused. The ‘Meet the Buyer’ event helps us reach out to external parties and to develop business opportunities. The ‘Peer-to-Peer’ was really helpful in group coaching one another.
Why is purposeful business important?
It’s rhetorical, isn’t it! If you are interested in a better society, there are different ways you can go about to achieve that. Having come from a background of commerce, I could see that there was something very dynamic about doing business. It’s a dynamic vehicle for creating value. If you can use that vehicle, it’s a really useful way of creating social value.
The triple bottom line of a social enterprise; the social, the environmental and the economic, can be very complimentary if you get the business model right. The economic bottom line is both a vehicle to deliver social value and feeds the mechanism that creates the social value. Otherwise, you are faced with a different model to create that value which is a purely charitable one.
And how is it important to you?
One works in a business to earn enough to live on. But that doesn’t necessarily always have enough meaning. Often in business it’s very difficult not to do harm, especially in an environmental sense. I noticed from my old trade, flooring, that there was embedded environmental damage in the business. So I began to get curious about that, and it was just a natural progression to do something more meaningful. That led me then to study an Msc at Oxford in Forestry. I was able to study the standards across the world and to understand how things might be improved. All this brought alot of meaning to me and I wanted to work on something that made a difference to that. I was lucky enough to be able to meld my interest in social enterprise and forestry into the wood recycling business.
How is community significant to Oxford Wood Recycling?
Well, very important, because the community we have here of twenty-something employees and maybe ten volunteers. The thirty of us [are] a community, drawn from the local community.
Our local business community and our local domestic community is very important to us as that is the fertile ground we like to work in.
We need to leverage the small amount of environmental and social benefit by having an educational angle [to the wider community], where we can spread the message about reuse and employment for people with disabilities and disadvantages. And to show employers that they could, by changing their employment practices slightly, get a real benefit by employing people they normally wouldn’t look at.
We’re not a campaigning organisation but we’re always working to be the best we can be. And, hopefully, one day we can be viewed as a beacon for this type of business which has lots of benefits.
What are your plans for 2021?
We’re growing our manufacturing as we’ve employed a lead-carpenter this year. We’re hoping to produce more finished goods. As a spin-off of the manufacturing and because we’ve increased some usable space through investment, we’re going to run some basic carpentry courses. First of all for our Beneficiary Volunteers who are disadvantaged in the workplace, we’re gonna be getting some funded carpentry courses for them. And then, running some more general public-facing carpentry courses on Saturdays.
We have a new space which we have created with the help of the investment which has the working title “Library of Inspiration”. It’s a multi-purpose room, a meeting room, educational space and also an exhibition space that sometimes doubles up as a repair-shop that we often host here.
The education will stem from possible school visits and also putting on exhibitions centered around wood-knowledge, tree-knowledge, forestry-knowledge and forestry in relation to climate.
Thanks to University of Oxford student, James Alexander for collecting and writing this case study for OSEP.