About to flunk a university course on entrepreneurship, Oscar Muñoz wagered the year 2009 on cutting bottles and converting them into drinking glasses, thus laying the foundation for what would later become an enterprise called Greenglass, where he now attempts to save more and more bottles every day from ending up in the trash.
"When I started at the University, a friend asked me to cut a bottle for a present, and that's how I got the idea for Greenglass, but I wasn't able to convince my friends", says Oscar about his early steps. It would be later–once he changed universities and formed a partnership with David, a worker from Peru he met at the family's craft workshop–that he would bring his enterprise together. He would gather bottles from restaurants, bars and small pubs where bottles had no destination other than the trash. By reevaluating the usefulness of glass, the student and his partner were able to overcome their lack of experience in the business world, and thrive.
"I wasn't a good salesman", he remembers, "We were on our own and had no money. We knew nothing about marketing, accounting and such, that's how David and I started Greenglass. I needed to earn money and said, 'I'm going to take my chances on this'. The first stage was difficult and hard work, selling an unsightly, scratched product, poorly finished, without a box or a clear concept".
The first major step was taken in 2013 when they won a $1.5 million grant in Chilean Pesos awarded by Sercotec–a government institution that promotes small business development–and purchased a new machine that allowed them to cut more glass. Then in 2013, they won at Jump Chile, a competition for entrepreneurs, and added yet another piece of equipment to their workshop. Their business continued to expand and soon they were making deliveries outside the country's borders, a segment that today represents 30% of total sales.
They focused their exports on supplying only fair trade companies–those meeting rigorous labor and environmental standards–in seven countries, among them the United States, Germany, Sweden, Italy and Holland. Nowadays it is not just drinking glasses they produce, but new products, and as they state it, with the goal of "proving that you can make more than drinking glasses and prolong the useful life of glass". They now create chandelier lamps, rings, trays and ashtrays.
Supporting small recyclers
With a higher rate of production and sales that double every year, Grenglass's purchasing model is now based on using their company to promote recycling. About their growth, Oscar says they expect to finish 2015 with total sales of nearly $100,000 dollars; his ambition is to grow their current production of between 2,500 to 3,000 glasses to 10,000. An ambitious goal that aims to significantly expand the amount of bottles saved so far, about 60,000 units.
"We have a presence at major hotels, in the form of a collaboration to promote our products and use the bottles they discard, but our main mission is really to maximize the bottles we obtain through a recycling center in Santiago's Cisterna neighborhood; the center works with a base of 50 recyclers, people that do their collection using karts or tricycles and are our providers."
The company buys the bottles collected by the center workers at a price of about $100 to $200 Chilean pesos, or about $.29 dollars, an amount 10 times higher that they usually pay.
"We target our work towards the recyclers because they are the ones that help solve the problem we have with household trash. Glass takes more than four thousand years to biodegrade; yet it can be recycled 100%, but in Chile we just throw it into the trash. Today, about 2 million bottles are produced every day, yet the recycling rates barely reach 15% of that figure", says the entrepreneur on the environmental impact of working to extend the useful life of glass.
Business continues to develop with what they refer as the perfect supplier, the recyclers that collect the bottles, wash and deliver them. Muñoz says the standard bottlerecycling channel is Cristal Chile, the country's leading company in the commercialization and sales of glass, but the price they pay for glass has become an issue and is no longer advantageous.
Besides, it chose to recycle other products to the detriment of glass.
In the face of these facts, and after a meeting with Cristal Chile, where the Asociación de Recicladores de Bases also took part, they proposed to go ahead with a pilot program aiming to raise the price per bottle between 60 and 80%. This allows Cristal Chile to collect more glass and improves market prices. To strengthen the work of glass collectors, the company, along with the Fondo de Solidaridad e Innovación Social (FOSIS), will conduct workers' training sessions, provide support for the purchase of karts and improve the workers' performance.
The creative force behind Greenglass states that, "They may be invisible now, perhaps if you go to Sweden or Norway, but there are thousands of them throughout the world".
For more information, visit http://www.greenglass.cl/