COMPANY PROFILE


“I thought if couldn’t make that work then I don’t deserve to have a business,” he recalls. “I found it bizarre that no- one in waste management sector had spotted this.


“I knew nothing about waste, I was just a teenager trying to scrape a living.”


Soon the business had grown across the north east, occupying a 10-acre site at his father’s farm. As it grew, his wife Claire – now the company’s Collections Director - kept the garden bark element afloat and his brother, Gregor, quit work in London to become operations director.


But Keenan was not done yet. The realisation that food waste was rotting in landfill sparked a new idea.


Funds from a Waste Resources Action Programme (WRAP) grant and a helpful £500,000 investment from his father, who ran a North Sea oil safety business, helped make his vision for a new £3.2 million ‘in vessel’ compost system a reality in 2009.


As Keenan Recycling grew, the Scottish Government announced ground- breaking legislation that would see local authorities follow the lead set down by his work in the north east.


Keenan, meanwhile, was already pushing ahead with plans to crack the commercial sector’s waste and expand.


Keenan Recycling now runs from its Bridge of Don headquarters and has processing sites at Linwood, Glasgow and Aberdeen, where domestic and commercial waste is processed, with packaging separated from food which is then liquified and taken by tankers to AD facilities to be turned into biofuel.


It started as a crazy


idea, we were told it would never work: ‘No-one will recycle food waste, chefs won’t do it, folk won’t do it...’"


“It started as a crazy idea, we were told it would never work: ‘No-one will recycle food waste, chefs won’t do it, folk won’t do it...’ Fast forward to now and it’s the law; if you don’t do it you can get fined,” he says.


“The business ramped up quickly – we’ve probably got about 80% of the market for food waste collections in Scotland.”


A £2.2 million private equity investment in 2015 from the Business Growth Fund help pay back his father, aided a string of helpful business acquisitions, and set Keenan’s sights south.


Within three years the firm was taking on food waste collections in Newcastle, then Manchester, Leeds and beyond to earlier this year, in Salisbury.


“The plan is that food waste legislation is coming to England, and by the end of next year we will have lorries and trucks and depots everywhere in UK,” he adds.


“Any load will be picked up in our own vehicles - it won’t be sub-contracted – and we are wholly accountable if something goes wrong. It’s me at the end of the phone.”


Operating as a collection service, waste picked up by Keenan Recycling in England is handled by partners like GAP Waste in Newcastle, where it is processed and used in its anaerobic digestion facility.


However, adds Keenan: “We are looking to set up processing plants as well.


“Realistically it will probably be through acquisitions and looking to buy food waste collection businesses and de- packaging operations.”


The business currently handles around 140,000 tonnes of food waste and 60,000 tonnes of organic waste every year across its nine depots. But growth is happening.


“We have just over 100 people at the moment, but we intend to double that within the next two years,” he adds. “We have a plan to hire 30 salespeople including account managers in England next year and, when our new trucks arrive, we will have over 100 of them in our collection fleet.”


Next year will also mark the business’s 20th anniversary. Looking back, he admits much is down to a heady cocktail of “luck, timing, vision and hard work.”


“We’re just trying to do things better than anyone else. We have got a real focus on customer service, quality of operation. All we do is organic - we do one thing really well - whereas for a lot of businesses that do food waste, it’s not their main thing.”


The pandemic has brought challenges, but that £4.5 million investment shows he’s nothing if not optimistic.


“We are gambling that the world will normalise, and we will be in a good position to take advantage,” he adds.


“While a lot of people have their foot on the brake, we have ours flat to the floor.”


www.keenanrecycling.co.uk 47

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