Urban Impact

A university project undertaken in 1989 has 27 years later turned into a successful family-owned and operated recycling company that is helping clients in metro Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada reach zero waste goals.

While a student at the University of British Columbia, Nicole Stefenelli traveled to Europe to study how Europeans handled recycling, concluding that little was happening back at home in the metro Vancouver area by comparison, especially in the commercial sector.

Stefenelli returned to Canada “all fired up and wanted to do a demonstration project to show that commercial recycling was viable,” says her husband Rod Nicholls. “It was a passion for trying to change the world and prove environmental outcomes that got her into it. She focused on commercial because she felt it could be most effective and started helping businesses divert material from the landfill.”

Using donated bins and borrowed trucks, Stefenelli signed up four customers for a demonstration project. Upon graduation from college, one of her project’s clients suggested she transform the demonstration project into a business.

“She took a leap into it and started building it from there,” says Nicholls. “I joined up with her about a year and a half later, starting Urban Impact in 1992.” It was the area’s first multi-material recycling company.

From its humble beginnings, Urban Impact today has grown to provide a variety of recycling services to 6,500 industrial, commercial and government clients from Whistler to Chilliwack and in Calgary and employs more than 100 people. The company was named one of the Top Employers in British Columbia by BC Business magazine.

The company has a fleet of custom-designed and built trucks that include front loaders, roll-off trucks, rear loaders for specialized collections, and compost collection vehicles.

The company was the first in Canada to introduce a hybrid diesel electric collection vehicle and has added more in an effort to be innovative and have the best environmental equipment, says Nicholls.

Urban Impact endeavors to meet its clients’ needs through a variety of services, including recycling, shredding and waste audits. Helping clients get to zero waste is a primary focus, which starts with providing a waste audit.

“We’ll characterize the material in the waste stream and suggest ways they can most cost-effectively divert materials from landfills,” says Nichols. “There’s the easy, low-hanging fruit such as cardboard and office waste. There are other needs, such as confidential document destruction, which we also do.”

Given that one-third of the landfills is comprised of organics, Metro Vancouver instituted an organics disposal ban to support food scraps recycling, which can then be transformed into compost. Urban Impact helps its clients comply through organics collection.  

Recycled products collected by Urban Impact fleets include electronic waste, batteries, fluorescent tubes, mixed containers, soft plastics, and Styrofoam.

“Anything that can be recycled, we will help to facilitate through various lines of collection,” notes Nicholls.

Service is a differentiating factor at Urban Impact, Nicholls points out.

“It’s really being very transparent in what you’re doing and making sure you’re actually diverting the material from the landfill that you say you are and doing it at a reasonable price,” he says.

When the company first started, clients were separating office waste in several different bin sorts.

We noticed our clients were not that interested in sorting material,” says Nichols. “They were more interested in doing their business, so we started collecting in compacting trucks and invested in automated sorting systems which allowed us to still recover the materials and add value. We were able to lower our cost to our clients.

“Through technological investment and improved processes, we try to keep our costs under control,” he adds. “It costs less to recycle with us now than it did 20 years ago. In real dollar terms and even in nominal dollars, a lot of our services are going at the same prices they were in 1990. I don’t know too many other areas where that’s true.”

Urban Impact has two large material processing plants with balers, one in Richmond, British Columbia that specializes in paper recycling and one in New Westminster that specializes in advanced recycling of plastics, paper, and mixed containers.  

Urban Impact sends the processed materials to markets worldwide, “but we try to always ensure we’re supporting domestic markets in North America,” says Nicholls. “There is not a lot of re-processing in Canada, but there is some. We feel it’s really important from a continuity perspective to sell a percentage of our material into the North American market – that way, we’re not subjected to problems if there is a port strike or freight problems.”

Growth has focused on ensuring customer needs are met and providing leadership in the drive toward zero waste, says Nicholls. 

Regarding changing regulations, Nicholls notes that Urban Impact has tended to lead the landfill bans rather than chase them.

“There hasn’t been a ban that’s come on where we weren’t already recycling that material,” he says. “We’ve been encouraging our clients to be ahead of that curve. We’ve had very supportive customers who are challenging us to do better and we’re challenging them to do better, so it results in impressive diversion rates.” 

Urban Impact has expanded “opportunistically,’ notes Nicholls, adding the company has grown both organically and through acquisitions.

“Our philosophy has been to grow our business by looking for ways to innovatively reduce and drive costs out,” he says. “We’ve invested heavily in automation and in controls. I’ve toured about 150 Material Recovery Facilities (MRF) across the world and have focused on best practices from what I see that works.”

One challenge lies in adapting to a rapidly-changing waste stream, says Nicholls.

“If the waste stream was static, it would be all very easy, but it’s not static,” he says. “We’ve had to alter our methodologies. Fortunately, from the equipment we’ve purchased, it’s quite flexible. We’ve got optical sortation in our MRF is New Westminster, so it’s proven to be very adaptable.”

Human resources remains the biggest challenge.

“It’s making sure you’re supporting your people to create the best outcomes and to make sure you’ve got employees you can pay well and count on to deliver the services your customers require.

“Our trucking operations run 365 days a year and you have to create an environment where your staff is interested in doing that. It goes right through the accounting department, the customer service department, the trucking operations department and the warehouses – you all have to be pulling on the same rope in the same direction. It’s the biggest challenge, but it’s also the most rewarding part of it when it goes right.” 

Looking ahead, Nicholls sees more opportunities for Urban Impact to make a positive impact.

“It’s a bit of a sexy business because recycling, waste management, going green and clean tech is all stuff that is of interest to governments and to all of our stakeholders, of which there are many,” he says.

“The key for us is remaining nimble, staying passionately focused on material diversion from landfill, and if we can keep that energy alive, we will adapt to market changes.”

Case in point: the rise of the use of flexible packaging is “making life super challenging in the MRF environment,” Nicholls points out. “I understand there are benefits on one side, but I wonder if the end of life of those products is really giving us the kind of benefit people anticipate.”

Still, “the characterization of packaging changes, the generation of office waste changes – all of those things are going to change and we can’t control that,” says Nicholls. “Our industry is a byproduct industry, so we have to be adaptable.”