COMPANY PROFILE
The green mile Company Profile: First Mile
AT a time when coronavirus is dominating the headlines, it might be hard to see much beyond where we’ll be next week never mind far into the future.
Yet Bruce Bratley, founder of London- based business recycling company First Mile, appears surprisingly upbeat, brimming with a positive - almost comforting - vision of better days ahead.
“This will make us stronger,” he insists, speaking as the nation braces itself for social isolation, closed pubs and offices bereft of people. “It might be a wake-up call for climate change and to stop the self-centred consumerism that we seem to focus on.”
Bratley suggests the current health crisis could jolt people into reassessing their relationship with the world around them. The result, he hopes, will be a realisation that their behaviour and wasteful habits will have to change.
“People won’t start dealing with climate change because the Earth gets warmer; it will happen when major social changes happen, such as when all the environmental refugees come from Africa to Southern Europe, and there will be a
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huge movement of people like nothing we’ve seen before.”
Bratley is a very unusual recycling business boss. He has no familial links with the sector – he was raised on a farm in Yorkshire – while his route into the world of waste came from academia and a PhD in Environmental Marxism.
By SANDRA DICK
A social scientist used to exploring human relationships and society, his ideas and business style are a little different from the norm. As a result, First Mile has become among the sector’s leading ‘disruptors’, constantly challenging and turning previously well-established processes on their heads.
He launched First Mile 16 years ago after seeing smaller commercial businesses stumped by the way waste services were operating at the time – large firms, high volume and little in the way of a ‘bespoke’ offering.
It might be a wake-up call for climate change and to stop the self-centred consumerism that we seem to focus on.”
In stepped First Mile with a daily, more tailored recycling service for a lower cost, with a strong emphasis on using the kind of technology that modern customers expect and disrupting the sector’s traditional ways of working.
From starting with a single truck, one driver and a lone customer, under his leadership First Mile has evolved into a £30 million per annum turnover business with more than 260 employers, over 25,000 customers and a vision to eventually take the business right across the UK.
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