Recycling Lives now saving taxpayer £8m a year

That is how much Recycling Lives’ three charitable programmes have saved the taxpayer by reducing reoffending and homelessness and redistributing food to charities.

The company does more than recycling – it is rehabilitating offenders, reuniting families and redistributing food .

That creates social value, as well as financial and environmental value from its work.

Recycling Lives’ model combines a commercial offering for recycling, waste management, consultancy and compliance with three social programmes.

The social value is broken down as follows:

*Offender rehabilitation : Delivering a less than five per cent reoffending rate to create £4,482,024 savings to society.

*Residential support: Supporting six men into independent living, to create£167,345 savings to society

*Food redistribution: Providing 945,000 meals for communities, creating £3,390,252 savings to society

A spokesman for the award-winning company said: “Delivering these programmes, we created social value worth more than £8m in 2017/18 – creating £8,039,621 savings to the taxpayer and communities by reducing reoffending, reducing welfare dependency and reducing costs for charities and community groups.

“In doing so, we once again exceeded our commitment to creating social value that is equal to or greater than 10 per cent of annual sales, delivering this against sales of more than £70m in 2017/18.

“Now in our third year of Social Value reporting, wehave created more than £17m savings to society to date.”

The firm says its £8m this year shows impressive growth from £5.2m in 2016-17 and £4.1m in 2015-16.