Back in the 1980s, a clean-shaven Jonathan Straight was looking after a call centre, learning the black art of direct marketing. It became apparent that he had aptitude for making companies perform efficiently, while being a “bit of an outsider”. And although he was lured further into sales and marketing by the promise of a mobile phone and an Austin MG Maestro, he came to realise that he wanted something more.

After trawling though ads for charity jobs paying a pittance, he turned to The Green Directory for inspiration. “I remember alighting on this page and there was a little paragraph titled ‘Recycling’, and there was this statement: ‘We pay to bury our waste in holes in the ground and yet the material be bury has a value, so we pay for it twice.’ And this was the light bulb moment, the opportunity, this was a problem to go and solve, but how, and in what direction, I really didn’t know. All I knew was that if I could address this even in a small way, not only would I be doing a great social good, but I also might make some money.”

He ended up talking to someone at the third-sector organisation SWAP, who was keen to get him on board (for no pay). He quickly became indispensable, and, as a paid employee, got involved in a project with plastics company Paxton, which had designed a ‘twin bin’ – half litter, half cans – and found that people in Leeds were receptive to splitting cans from the rest of their rubbish. Despite Paxton’s recruiter being puzzled by an ‘early attempt’ at Straight’s now signature wax moustache, he was taken on by Paxton when SWAP “ran out of money”.

By 1991, Paxton’s new kerbside box sales had stalled, and it was Straight’s job to turn it around. It didn’t happen. But when they called him in May 1993 to stop the project he instead persuaded them to allow him to get orders and pay him a commission, at the newly-formed Straight Recycling Systems.

After securing orders from Bath and ECT Recycling, he knew he was on to something. Gradually, Paxton started supplying Straight with more and more boxes, then it got to a point where they couldn’t meet the demand so allowed him to rent the box moulds off them for other companies to produce, thereby enabling him to go from an agent to a distributor to a manufacturer under licence. It was at this stage, working in a lonely, soulless building on his own, that Jonathan Straight had the idea of creating a caricature of himself to market along with an oval Straight logo: “It seemed to wake people up a little bit, some people liked it and some people really didn’t like it, but it was a point of difference.”

It’s something that has distinguished Straight from its competitors ever since. “Two things that were important were, firstly, to look like the business was a business of scale. And, secondly, it was this idea that the cartoon character could be in a lot more places at one time. When people eventually did meet me they felt that they knew me, they also felt I’d remember them in the same way, which unfortunately of course wasn’t quite so easy.”

In 2010, the iconic S shape logo was developed with an eye on enhancing the brand values of progress, insight and authority. “No matter what we might think or say about products, the brand was the thing that made it different and the brand doesn’t just sit in the ether, the brand has values, which are real.”

Of course, innovation could be on this list of values, though Straight doesn’t unduly claim credit for the ideas. “If you look very carefully you will probably see that none of these ideas were our ideas. We were capable of successfully bringing these things to market in a way that other people hadn’t.” He does admit, however, that he’s become an expert at recognising the good ideas, explaining he has to go to exhibitions to see what’s happening in other parts of the world because “it’s me that’s got the eye for it”.

Over the years, Straight has become synonymous with kerbside sort, and the founder is openly critical regarding the Waste Regulations: “The government is being very disingenuous as regards to this issue; Defra are being foolhardy and putting their heads in the sand. How the Environment Agency will enforce legislation – who knows? Whether there will be any private attempts at prosecuting councils, and I suspect there might be one or two… the truth is nobody knows how this is going to play out. I’m a big supporter of kerbside sort – I think that is how you get good materials, that is how you keep materials onshore, that is how you develop a circular economy.”

The latest offering from Straight should make separating materials more straightforward. “It’s three kerbside boxes on a trolley basically, and the key is it’s easy for the householder to use because it’s all in one place and they can wheel it to the kerb easily and it’s faster for the crews to deal with because everything is in one place and they can quickly dismantle and reassemble the unit and empty it much more quickly than moving three separate units.” (See p. 26 for more on the company’s wheeled bin system.)

But, of course, with the sale of Straight to One51 now completed, it’s time for Jonathan Straight to hand over the reins. Although he admits it’s “sad for me, hard for me”, he feels it is the right thing for the business: “The business got to a point where I didn’t feel that there was anywhere I could take it. I’ve always put the business first, always. So when One51 approached me, I felt that here was a good opportunity to give the business the future that it needs, which is investment in its infrastructure and ability for it to grow with a feed of working capital. It gave me an opportunity to exit with my head up and a reasonable amount of money.”

He laments that he didn’t achieve everything he wanted to, though: “What the deal didn’t do was allow me to see the project to where I wanted it to end up, which was with the shareholders making a fantastic return and selling on something.”

Armed with his diverse range of skills, however, and never having been “pigeonholed as a sort of grey-suited boring old fart, but different and interesting and having the ability to look at things in a slightly obtuse way”, he’s now ‘going plural’: “I quite like this term ‘going plural’, because it means you’re doing lots of things and lots of different things. A number of those things will actually be things that don’t generate money, so I can develop my work for other charities and my own trust. And I would really like to get on a big board, a household name where I could really challenge the conventional thinking.”

Asked whether he has plans to stay in the sector, Straight seems indifferent, but acknowledges that there are clear paths he would take: “The entire waste management industry is in this sort of state of flux and difficulty because everything that they have they’re either given or they are being paid to take and actually in a more aware world it could be completely the other way around. We could see householders consolidating their material, could we see communities buying their own baler… but just at the moment there are simple problems to solve, such as 60 per cent of our viable recyclable material is still being landfilled or burnt, and there’s no need for that. I wonder whether the bin is the right focus though. In the world of the internet, the packaging itself could be connected and could call out to alma mater to take it back.”

Whether or not he does stay around in the industry (he suggests he could “provide an education service for local authorities [helping them understand] what people throw away”), he has an eye on writing a book on the Straight story, and will be starting a vegan food distribution business with echoes of Straight Recycling Systems: “Rather like 25 years ago when I saw that we weren’t recycling and we needed to, I now see that we’re all eating too much meat. I’m not suggesting that everybody follows my example and pursues this sort of animal-free diet, which I have to say is very good for you, but people need to eat less of it and there are ways to do so.”

He adds: “I think the most important thing is that whatever I do there needs to be that sort of space, so that if that really great idea comes along, I’m able to jump at it rather than say I’m too busy. I suppose the other side of not having achieved my ambitions completely by selling at this juncture, is that those ambitions need to be realised somewhere else. So, essentially, I do need to do this again, I need to build something and exit it again, but I don’t intend to spend 21 years on the next one.”