“It has 200 participants in the beginning, from that amount, only 15 participants have the opportunity to participate in the Social Enterprise Boot Camp in Singapore. After several activities and assessments, DBS chose 2 included me,” Meydam Gusnisar told, Alumni of ITB MBA, the winner of Social Enterprise Boot Camp that succeed bringing 10.000 Singapore Dollar.
Meydam said he can win this award because of the social entrepreneurial activity in the field of waste management that he and his friends worked in recent years. Before being contested, Meydam made this business model as research material for his thesis and of course, he got much insight from his mentor also examiner. This thesis – which has been refined – then contested in Social Enterprise Bootcamp in Singapore.
The business he and his friends built is named Waste4Change and this social enterprise is built from their knowledge about the environment because Meydam and his friends are environmental engineering graduates. Waste4Change brings a tagline name “Responsible waste management” because all this time garbage has never been managed properly until in 2005 it causes landslide on the Leuwi Gajah landfill so as many as 150 people were buried in rubbish.
Depart from that incident and knowledge in environmental technology, Meydam and his team started to educate their customer to sort waste. The organic one is thrown into a green barrel, paper into blue barrel, and plastic to the orange barrel. The rubbish that has been sorted then of course transported by disaggregated. This trash then brought to the material recovery house for processing the trash. The recyclable one will brought recycling plants while unrecyclable trash will putted in landfills.
After successfully getting Pertamina to become their customer, Waste4Change now has several partners that are multinational companies such as Unilever, Ikea, Gojek, The Body Shop, etc. Not only a big company, but waste4Change also cooperates with housing developers to manage its trash.
In running this business, Meydam shared that one of the hardest things in this business is educating the public to sort out their garbage. In the past 4 years in Bekasi, only 80% of the population have willingness to sort out their trash. “Educating is the hardest part, we were ignored, kicked out, but we keep done it with enthusiasm,” he added.
Other than that, in the beginning, due to limited funds, this company unable to employ people to handle financial matters, all of the work is done by relying on friendships links. This problem, in the end, lead Meydan to continue his studies through LPDP scholarships at ITB MBA. In ITB MBA, he got much knowledge about finance, business strategy, marketing, and another similar lesson.
Now, 15 tons of garbage is transported per day and this company already has150 workers which of them are 75 transport operators and the rest of it is the staff and operational team. “We carry out responsible transportation of sustainable waste under SDG’s” he expressed.