Reward4Waste is a reuse and recycling platform which uses unique coding to bring end-to-end traceability and transparency to every single item.

Their consumer-facing app educates, engages and incentivises people to be better and makes it easy for them to recycle better – in any context and in any situation. The rewards can be redeemed for cash, loyalty vouchers or benefits, or donated to charity.

Reward4Waste Director, Steve Clarke, explains: “Imagine a world where, at the tap of a button on your phone, you can see how much of your packaging is in the circular economy. And how many items have been recycled or re-used, bringing transparency and accountability to what you do. This is what our technology does – you can return and recycle items at any digital return point, including kerbside home recycling boxes. If you’re a business or individual looking to achieve your sustainability targets, we can help you become a force for good.”

Steve continues, “We’re passionate about the environment and like tackling big problems. That’s why we created Reward4Waste. We’re on a mission to keep items in the circular economy for longer. We have a great team of experts from different areas, including tech, operations, commercial, global standards and marketing. And we’re also collaborating with multinational global organisations who believe in our concept which is a great confidence boost to us.”

“We’ve attended some great webinars including one on becoming a B Corp and another on networking for environmental impact. They were really valuable for us.”

I was on the look out for local business support. Being an Oxfordshire based business, I discovered OxLEP and visited their website. I went through their online business tool triage system to see what support was on offer for a business like ours, and what we could benefit from. This is when we were signposted to the eScalate programme which was supporting businesses for social good and scale up businesses – the perfect programme for our business at the time.”

Over the following two years the Reward4Waste team took part in a raft of different business support from OxLEP.

“We’ve attended some great webinars including one on becoming a B Corp and another on networking for environmental impact. They were really valuable for us; we learnt a lot from the experts and other peers in the group too. The eScalate programme was a great fit for us as it provides support to social enterprises and it also supports scale-up businesses. As we are moving into that phase of our business we engaged in the scale-up support too.

This included some peer-to-peer group sessions and a useful webinar on investment readiness. We had a lot
to learn about that and took some excellent nuggets of information away from it. We’re definitely going to do more peer-to-peer groups in the future as well. It’s important to continue to build our network of
connections.”

Two years since launch, Reward4Waste has reached a stage where they are looking to gain external investment to take the business into the next phase. Steve explains: “We’re looking for investment to support our team in one way, shape or form. What we want to do is hire a team of developers to sort out some of the advanced technology we know needs to be finalised. We need people to focus on sales and marketing to develop the pipeline further and drive the market forward. And we also need people to deliver on prospects that we convert to revenue.”