One man’s waste is another man’s business opportunity, as John McGuinness has demonstrated with Mulch. He co-founded the Coolock garden waste recycling centre in 2010, with the idea of charging people to deposit their lawn cuttings and hedge clippings and then composting it all down to sell on to gardeners.

McGuinness (32) is a landscape gardener who spotted an opening for green waste disposal when a facility in St Anne’s Park in Raheny was closed in 2007. “We wanted to do more than just dispose of green waste,” says McGuinness. “Our plan were based on taking this raw material, composting and recycling it to produce superior garden products which would go right back into the garden.”

The venture cost €60,000 to establish and McGuinness took great care about sourcing the right location. “We commissioned a survey with Red C Research to find out where people would want a depot to be located. We decided to locate in an industrial estate so we could carry out activities associated with the business without disrupting householders.”

Volume Pricing

Mulch operates from a 12,000 square foot facility and receives between 100 and 200 cubic metres of green waste per week. Once recycled, the material is sold by Mulch as composts, soil enrichers or bark. For added value, Mulch will also deliver eco-friendly coal fuel and de-icing salt.

In Association with

For the intake, Mulch charges €1.75 per black bag up to €16 if you’ve managed to cram an estate with bags of cut grass. There is also pricing for vans, trailers and tipper trucks, all of it linked to volume rather than weight.

On the output side, bags of soil enricher and bark are priced from €5.49 to €7.49, with volume discounts applying. Like any small business, Mulch’s main challenge is raising awareness of the service. “I knew that contract gardeners would get it, and they did, almost immediately. But the general public just assume that a business like ours doesn’t exist. So people don’t look for it and simply put up with whatever means of disposing of garden waste they are used to doing.”

The Mulch operating company booked a net profit of €2,000 in 2013, the company’s first surplus, and repaid director loans of €12,000. In March 2015, the company co-founder, Aengus Benson, quit the business, though McGuinness is not discouraged.

“Aengus had a more short-term view with regard to his involvement than I did. We had a shareholders agreement from the start and it proved to be an essential document for how we went about dividing things up when the time came.”

Motivator

Some of McGuinness’s family members bought Benson’s shares when he departed. “I guess I saw the departure as a motivator to step things up a gear or two,” says McGuinness. He sees scope for opening a second Mulch depot on the southside of Dublin and maybe expanding the operation to Cork, Galway and Belfast too.

McGuinness adds that the worst piece of business advice he has received was, ‘Don’t paint that green as well’.

“The best advice was, ‘Find something you love and you’ll never work a day in your life’. I was told this many times over the years but I never believed it until it happened.”