Riches from oily rags

If recycling your domestic rubbish is a pain, imagine what it’s like running a car-repair workshop: batteries, bolts, bulbs, bumpers, plastics, oily rags, scrap metal and toxic liquids are just a few of the nasties. Understandably, most of Britain’s 25,000 garage owners either don’t bother — nearby rivers are handy — or they take the rubbish to landfill sites or incinerators where they pay a packet to get rid of it. Either way they are likely to be breaking the law, or to be about to break it: a new EU directive comes into force at the end of this month stipulating that all waste must be pre-treated before it even goes to the landfill.

But their waste is someone else’s profit; or at least that’s what Angus Macdonald is banking on as he recycles himself from media mogul to modern-day Steptoe of the motor industry. The 44-year-old Scottish entrepreneur, who recently made around £20 million from selling the eFinancialGroup to Dow Jones, is so certain of the potential that he is investing in SWR, Britain’s only waste-management business for garages and motor dealerships. ‘There are at least 19 different sorts of waste in any garage. Most garage owners don’t give a toss about recycling. It’s one of the least green industries,’ Macdonald tells me excitedly. ‘But most waste can be salvaged. New car bumpers can be made out of old ones. Traffic cones, children’s toys, you name it, can be made out of plastic waste. Fuel briquettes can be made from the dirty rags that have been used to clean your oil pump.’

Macdonald reckons only about a quarter of garage waste is recycled at the moment but that SWR could re-use at least three quarters. Instead of a rag-and-bone cart, the company has 11 monster DAF trucks, some of them double-decker, which tear around the countryside picking up waste from the 220 garage sites they already service.