“Winning the Sustainability Champion title in the Green Globe Awards would give us a real boost with our recycling via promoting us on a wider stage, encouraging more NSW businesses to get on board with our innovative recycling solutions in pallets, waste timber and metals. It would also further the increased use of our fully recycled innovative products. Helping the NSW environment, helping NSW businesses save money, and saving precious resources from landfill. Simply put, we put the able in sustainable !”
- The Sustainability Champion Award Category celebrates people who fly the sustainability flag by helping others to make changes.
- This award recognises people who’ve been instrumental in delivering environmental projects.
- They need to have demonstrated leadership in influencing and changing community or organisation views on sustainability and/or guiding change in sustainable practices.
Direct Group are honoured to be nominated and short-listed as a finalist in the Sustainability Champion Award Category
Rob James & Direct Group Industries – Awards Story & Achievements
Rob lives for recycling.
His father Mick was in metal recycling and the foundry business for 40 years – and Rob says he can’t remember a time when he wasn’t around recycling in one form or another. Long before the idea was trendy he was doing his bit.
Rob set up his own company 26 years ago at the age of 23, not long after leaving Uni with a Bachelor of Commerce to his name. Always hands on, Rob got himself a truck licence and a forklift and loader ticket, bought trucks, forklifts and excavators, bins and things and just got on with it.
His focus was firstly on metals and then on timber pallets, but there was no way back then that he envisioned being the owner of the only fully integrated and sustainable wood pallet re-use and timber recycling facility in Australia, Direct Group Industries.
Good pallets and wood are reused, and non-reusable wood is recycled by way of shredding. He is now a major supplier of not just pallets, handling 1 million pallets per year, but also of recycled timber products including poultry and horse bedding, along with renewable energy wood chip fuels, spray grass base, bio friendly spill absorbents, and freeway and estate garden mulches.
Rob is your classic Australian innovator come good. His ability to adapt, innovate and move into new industries using old materials is good old-fashioned Australian ingenuity at its best. He brings a pragmatic, commercial and collaborative approach to sustainability, and now employs 25 people directly and many more indirectly.
Rob continues to build his company and over the years he has recycled literally hundreds of thousands of tonnes of material including waste wood, pallets and metal, saving companies serious money, saving masses of landfill space, saving the environment, and saving many thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.
