Having worked across nearly every department of Brighton’s Magpie Recycling, Robert Jones-Mantle is happy to talk about the organisation, so long as it’s clear he doesn’t speak for Magpie. “I’m a worker really. When I’m there I drive the van or have my nose in books and websites looking after the accounts.” As a cooperative, all staff members have an equal say in how the business is run and no one person speaks for everyone else. “Everybody’s in charge,” according to Jones-Mantle, “no one person has the power to hire, fire or spend money. That comes from a discussion, which is agreed though a consensus. It’s not an easy way to work, but I think you’ll find that any company on the stock exchange will say their shareholders are just as hard to work with. It can be a big help – when the democracy is working there aren’t any decisions that everyone hasn’t been involved in making.”

Established in 1989 by a handful of volunteers, Magpie registered as a cooperative limited company in 1992 and fast became a successful handler of business waste in Brighton and Hove. The business peaked in the late nineties following Brighton City Council’s decision to opt for a bring site recycling programme rather than a kerbside collection. Magpie seized the opportunity to expand upon its existing commercial collection service and establish its own kerbside round. “We had a kind of grumble with what the council was doing with household waste and the direction they were choosing to take their recycling scheme, so we set up our own. We had no direct help from the local authority,” Jones-Mantle explains, “our contracts are with private customers, homes, businesses.”

Magpie already had the facilities, equipment, skills and staff in place, so was well prepared to take on household waste. Charging one pound for its weekly collection it quickly expanded its round to cover 5,000 homes, serviced by electric vehicles.

By 2003, Magpie was contracted to maintain a number of local recycling bring banks and was involved in the planning stages of the council’s own kerbside collection. Looking upon the collaboration with the council as an opportunity to pass on its technical expertise and maintain the spirit of the enterprise that they had developed since 1996, Magpie was happy to help.

However, the relationship suddenly ground to a halt. “At the eleventh hour we weren’t involved any more. One minute we were having meetings with council officers about designs for the new vehicle and the next we were excluded from the service,” recalls Jones-Mantle. “The model we had was working – we had 5,000 customers and were still growing. Once it became clear that the council was going to launch a free kerbside collection without our involvement, it killed our planning for the future. It was a time when some people saw us as having hit a dead end; some people left, some people stayed, morale was low and the motivation wasn’t there any more.” The slump coincided with Magpie’s contract on its council premises expiring. To add salt to the wound, the council reallocated it to the city’s new recycling contractor, thus forcing Magpie to find an alternative site.

But it wasn’t over: “We thought, hang on a minute – we’ve still got customers who think that what we’re doing is the way it should be. There was a shift in perspective. It was our rethinking point; we had to gather strength from what support we had and move on.”

Three years after the setback and today Magpie is still running its kerbside collection for 1,500 residences in the area, as well as running the commercial round of 1,000 businesses that has always been its foundation.

Jones-Mantle is clear about how Magpie has made its come-back in the years since the council-run kerbside collections began: “It’s because we do so many different things. Diversity – we collect things that the council doesn’t: CDs, tapes, tetra packs, textiles, plastic bags and every type of paper, with no exception. What we do with the waste is very different too – we make sure our waste is processed in the UK rather than shipped to China, we try to find the best use for textiles and reuse as much stuff as we can.”

“We have 1,500 people who have stuck with us because they think that the way we do things is the way it should be done. We’re trying to create change through economic endeavour, and that’s not something that’s a government target. It’s about keeping things local. How many pipes are being laid in Brighton at the moment for new buildings, and how much is coming from recycled plastic? Why isn’t the city’s local plastic going to these people? Paper from Brighton could be providing urinal bottles for the hospital in Brighton, but again, it just doesn’t happen.”

The cooperative has now put the low morale of the days following the forced changes to its business behind it. Working from its ‘Shabitat’ site and shop in Brighton, where you can get everything from bikes and biodiesel to furniture, it employs 31 staff and has an annual turnover in excess of £500,000. While Magpie is still run from council-owned property, Jones-Mantle is positive about the future: “We wouldn’t be Magpie without that site because we need somewhere close to town to run electric vehicles. That said, if we lost the building again, we’d move forward and survive.”

Jones-Mantle hopes that future changes in policy might put work back in the hands of cooperatives and local recycling organisations like Magpie: “There could be significant changes coming. If ‘pay as you throw’ ever becomes the norm in the UK, you can either pay the council or pay us as a private contractor to have your waste handled. If it comes in, I hope people look at the money they’re spending on council contractors to recycle their waste and choose to do it themselves, putting that money into local causes. I hope it stimulates that kind of thinking. It could open up a lot of doors.”