Will helps change lives through business

Recycling Lives MD Will Fletcher (left) with, from left to right, directors Neil Flanagan, Alasdair Jackson and Food Redistribution Centre Jeff Green.

Will Fletcher is managing director of Recycling Lives, a Lancashire-founded business which uses its commercial waste management and recycling operations to directly support and sustain its own charity.

A former head of finance at supermarket giant Morrisons, he was enthused to join Recycling Lives by its social impact model and its values and vision, that “prove you can make a profit while also putting something back into society”, he says.

The 37-year-old father-of-three has now led the business for three years, in that time seeing it create social value from its associated charity work worth £4.1m in one year alone. This impressive figure is on top of the environmental excellence, jobs created and training provided by the business, in the same year it achieved another leap in sales and profit.

Mr Fletcher said: “At Recycling Lives we are committed to creating real social impact and value to society through our commercial and charitable activities; to be more than just a business.

“We are immensely proud to be able to do the work we do, whether that is putting food on the table for families facing food poverty or offering opportunities to people with histories of offending. I’m proud that this work has an impact in my own hometown too.”

The organisation’s charitable activities include a food charity, the Food Redistribution Centre, which redistributes surplus goods from food suppliers to charitable organisations, and an offender rehabilitation programme, which significantly reduces reoffending by creating opportunities for individuals with histories of offenders.

Among the groups who have benefitted from the Food Redistribution Centre are the Coolkidz pre-school and after-school clubs at St Leonard’s CE School, Langho, and the Jigsaw Nursery at Brockholes CP School, Samlesbury.