Procuring goods and services responsibly

Substation33 is a social enterprise initiative of YFS. We have basically a team of support staff and technical staff that build products and services. The difference for me is creating value out of waste.
The waste product that we primarily deal in is electronic waste—and not only computers and keyboards and mice and monitors, but it’s everything that has a plug or a battery attached to it.
So, everything of a certain hardware value will be disbanded, wiped, sanitised, cleaned, refreshed, and then goes on to our community at a very discounted price, allowing people to have computers and internet access within their family homes.
Substation’s motto is ‘learn by your mistakes.’ Primarily we use electronic waste—somebody else’s trash—to build things out of. There’s no money changing hands, so therefore it doesn’t cost us money to make mistakes.
A lot of the stuff that we do here is around first form experiments to see whether it could work and whether we can get it into a viable product, and I think that’s where the flooded roads sign package started.
What we’re not doing is stopping on our development, because the more we develop it, the better the product becomes—the more easy it is and the better the information we get from that design.
And we use that as an experiential thing—learning process for people that come off the streets. That could be young people that are disengaged from school, people who are homeschooling and people with disability. We use the electronic waste as a medium to engage people out of their homes and back in the community.
I think our secret to our spice is getting people that are stuck at home out and into something of interest. Our interesting thing is electronic waste. At Substation, we’d like to think we are creating wages from waste.
We also have got a new initiative going now that’s a Containers for Change sorting facility that we operate. It’s a fantastic way to get people engaged in work for the very first time.
The social enterprise movement is growing for sure. I think we need to create more ‘wages from waste,’ so it would be great to look at ways that we could partner with larger corporates to be able to take percentages of 10% or 15% of a contract and get that spawned off into the government and that way, if a social enterprise can’t fulfil that contract, it can be pulled back into the big corporate.
I think the difference that we’re making in our community, and probably broader along, is on many levels, but primarily, is it’s changing conversations around what is the value in waste.