COMPANY PROFILE
Food for thought
COMPANY PROFILE: KEENAN RECYCLING By SANDRA DICK
HEAD north from Salisbury towards Watford Gap services and carry on for a full eight hours past Birmingham, through Lancashire and across the border to Scotland.
After around 550 miles in the driving seat, you’ll arrive at the headquarters of Keenan Recycling Ltd., and Grant Keenan’s Aberdeen office.
It could barely be further from the Wiltshire cathedral city.
And yet it is from this base on the edge of the Granite City that Grant Keenan is co-ordinating a cross-border invasion, bringing his food waste collection fleet to English towns and cities – including Salisbury – in increasing numbers.
Keenan Recycling has just announced a £4.5 million investment with 39 new vehicles on the shopping list destined for expanding operations in Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle and Hull, and in addition to a recent £835,000 investment in depots in Gloucester and Salisbury.
It’s all part of his vision to grow from a standing start in England just two years ago, to full countrywide coverage in time for 2023 food waste legislation which will bring England’s food waste rules closer to those in Keenan’s native Scotland.
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Since 2014 every Scottish local authority has been required to offer a food waste collection service, while from 2016 all Scottish food waste businesses producing more than 5kg of food waste per week have been obliged to present it for separate collection.
Hugely successful, it has led to a 40% increase in food waste recycling between 2013 and 2017, and around 80% of Scottish homes now receive a regular food waste collection.
At the forefront of Scotland’s battle against food waste has been Keenan’s natural ability to spot an opportunity and solve a problem.
He was just 19 when he began importing Irish peat briquettes and selling them at Aberdeenshire filling stations. The business grew to include logs, kindling, bottles of gas and snow shovels during winter, barbecue charcoal and garden bark in summer.
Before long he spotted where the smart business lay. After sweating over chopping logs only to then be asked by unimpressed buyers to stack them too, he dumped the fuel business. Instead, he concentrated on striking deals with sawmills to take waste bark off their hands, using a 25-tonne mobile trommel screen to prepare it for garden use.
Grant Keenan, MD of Keenan Recycling
During a visit to an Aberdeenshire Council yard in 2001 to see if they might hire his kit, he spotted garden waste destined for landfill and realised its potential.
It laid the foundations for what is now claimed to be Scotland’s largest organic waste recycling company; last year Keenan Recycling announced a £10m turnover and is forecast to grow that to £30m in the next five years.
“I was always looking for opportunities. Everyone knows about composting now but in 2001 landfill was cheap, and that was just what happened to that kind of waste.”
A deal was done to take the garden waste for conversion to farm grade compost.
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