Waste management company Kiwi Skips is one of four New Zealand small businesses and non-profits to win a share of a $750,000 global prize pool as part of Xero’s inaugural Beautiful Business fund.
The company won $20,000 after submitting a 90-second video demonstrating how it was innovating for sustainability.
Kiwi Skips recycles waste materials from construction and demolition waste and in October alone the company recycled 56 tonnes of waste material at its depot in Bond St in Invercargill.
The company’s owners, husband and wife Dan and Kereana Butterfield, said they were fizzing with excitement after winning the award.
"It’s really validated it to us, like we believe in what we’re doing but other people actually believe in what we’re doing too and it means a lot," Mr Butterfield said.
Mrs Butterfield said they were a small, locally owned company competing with big corporates and they had spent nearly six years building the company from the ground up.
Kiwi Skips was the first company in Southland to handle waste in a sustainable way, Mrs Butterfield said.
The $20,000 from the funding would go towards building a housing facility for a conveyor line that would automate separating waste materials.
Mrs Butterfield said the conveyor belt itself had been recycled and it had previously been used for the gondolas in Queenstown.
She said there was a lot of opportunity to improve in the waste industry.
"When you’re in the waste industry you see what’s going on and you know that there has to be a better way.
"There’s got to be undiscovered ways of doing things that have to be game-changers and we want to figure those out and make them happen."
Along with winning the Xero Beautiful Business fund, Kiwi Skips recently won an excellence in trade industry award at the Southland Business Excellence Awards and was highly commended in the Manaakitanga award at the KUMA Māori Business Awards.
