Recycling Vending Machine - Ipoh Echo

1 Nov 2015

Business students from the Business and Marketing programme at Sunway College Ipoh took part in a competition by the National Association of Women Entrepreneurs of Malaysia (NAWEM) to come up with a business idea that would improve their local community in Ipoh. 

The Sunway College Ipoh team QUATRRO came up with a prototype in the form of a “Recycling Vending Machine”, named FAST (Funding As Social Trending), a non-profit social enterprise project.

This entry was selected as the recipient of NAWEM’s award. The competition was held for tertiary students in conjunction with The National Association of Women Entrepreneurs of Malaysia conference on Saturday, October 3 at the Eastin Hotel, Penang. The award consisted of a cash prize of RM500 and a certificate.

The competition to turn great ideas into great business invited ‘early-stage’ idea entries that were not generating revenue or receiving financing of any form and to complete a “One-Page Business Pitch.” The pitch was to describe the business formation based on problem solving, proposed solution, the identified target market, key competitors, sales channels, marketing activities, revenue, expenses, milestones, team and key roles and partners and resources.

The FAST recycling vending machine features a trendy vending machine, to showcase recycling as a fun and creative activity rather than a chore. “We believe in giving this authentic choice to young people as a fresh start towards building a better community. Our area of business will be to collect and recycle plastic bottles and aluminium cans, and this idea was developed after conducting demographic analysis in Ipoh. The findings include the fact that landfills are filling up. The Bercham landfill consists mainly of plastic bottles and aluminium cans which can be recycled instead of dumped.”

“We believe that FAST will meet the critical need of the local municipality by providing a feasible and cost effective alternative to landfilling the waste, as we are also seeing municipalities as our potential stakeholder.

We are in the process to have our recycling vending machine in the Sunway commercial area, which is maintained by one of our partners, Amalexcia Enterprise, (Vending machine Manufacturers). Other than that, Malaysian Nature Society and also a few schools and colleges have expressed their interest in supporting our project.

Our primary objective is to create behaviour and change the mindset of young people by building a positive feeling about recycling. We aim to embrace recycling as a very cool and trendy concept and provide municipalities with an alternative waste disposal system. The Quattro business model presents an opportunity to recycle landfill-bound waste, save the landfill space, and create creative shared value partnership with the community.

We have collaborated with Malaysian Nature Society (Perak) and are looking forward to creating SEO-optimised website to provide incentive to our customers in future, to encourage their participation, by establishing shared value partnership with corporations, for example, AEON Kinta City, who has already embraced the 3R’s programme as a part of their Corporate Social Responsibility. We are looking at the possibilities of partnering with Starbucks and Lost World of Tambun. We are planning to advertise in Ipoh Echo, a community newspaper in publishing news and articles related to environmental issues.

We hope to reduce pollution by two per cent and set a new benchmark for recycling within the first two to five years. Last but not least, our product is a value added, recycling choice that appeals to the growing environmental conscientiousness among consumers to promise a better future for everyone.” said the Quattro team.