From Waste to Renewal: How Social Enterprises Are Rebuilding UK Communities

Across the UK, a quiet form of regeneration is taking place. It is happening not only through major government schemes, new housing developments or large infrastructure projects, but through social enterprises that are finding practical ways to improve the places around them.

Social enterprises are businesses that exist primarily to achieve a social or environmental purpose, with profits and surpluses generally reinvested into the business or the community rather than being used primarily to reward shareholders. They can take many forms, including community interest companies, co-operatives, charities with trading arms and conventional companies operating with a strong social mission.

The scale of the sector is considerable. Social Enterprise UK estimates that there are around 100,000 social enterprises across the UK, with a collective turnover of £78 billion and a workforce of approximately 2.3 million people. Its 2025 State of Social Enterprise research found that these organisations are active in tackling issues ranging from unemployment and inequality to climate change and the decline of local communities.

What makes many of these organisations particularly interesting from a placemaking perspective is that their social purpose is often tied to a specific place. They are not simply delivering a service to a community. They can own buildings, restore neglected properties, operate shops, reuse waste, create employment and bring people together.

Turning waste into community value

Recycling is one of the clearest examples of this model in action.

Traditional waste management is largely concerned with collecting, sorting and processing materials. Social enterprises can add another dimension by asking what else can be achieved with the same activity.

Furniture that would otherwise be thrown away can become affordable furniture for local families. An unwanted electrical appliance can become an opportunity to develop repair skills. Waste materials can become products that generate income. Recycling facilities can become places for education, training and employment.

Wastesavers in Newport provides a particularly strong example. The organisation is both a charity and social enterprise operating across South East Wales. Its activities include recycling, reuse shops, repair cafés, a nappy library, a Library of Things and educational programmes. It also operates kerbside recycling for Newport.

According to Climate Action Wales, Wastesavers prevents more than 1,000 tonnes of household items from going to landfill each year. Its reuse operation also saves families money by putting usable goods back into circulation rather than treating them simply as waste.

The important point is that the environmental benefit is only one part of the story. Repair cafés create opportunities for people to learn practical skills. Reuse shops provide affordable goods. Education programmes introduce children to recycling. The organisation creates employment and activity in the community.

Waste therefore becomes an economic and social resource.

Recycling as a route into employment

Another powerful feature of social enterprises is their ability to combine environmental work with employment opportunities.

Recycling Lives, based in Preston, is a prominent example. Its social enterprise model has historically combined recycling activity with support for people who face significant barriers to employment, including people leaving prison and people experiencing homelessness.

The model illustrates an important principle. A social enterprise does not necessarily need to create an entirely new industry to generate social value. It can take an existing commercial activity and structure it so that more of the economic value stays within the community.

The same principle can be seen in smaller enterprises across the country. The social enterprise sector as a whole is particularly active in creating employment opportunities for people who can struggle to access the conventional labour market. Social Enterprise UK’s research suggests that 83% of social enterprises pay the Real Living Wage.

This matters to places because employment is one of the foundations of successful communities. A recycling business that employs local people, trains them and gives them a route into further employment is doing considerably more than simply reducing the amount of waste going to landfill.

Green Glass Mountain in Wales

One of the more unusual examples comes from rural Wales.

Green Glass Mountain was associated with Ten Green Bottles, a social enterprise based in New Radnor, Powys, established by Lorraine Powers in 2007. The organisation took discarded glass and turned it into products including jewellery, tableware, plaques and other decorative objects. Contemporary material about the enterprise describes it as a CIC and social enterprise using recycled glass in the heart of New Radnor while working with people who were marginalised from the workplace.

The organisation’s approach was particularly interesting because it treated waste glass not simply as a material to be processed, but as a raw material for a local manufacturing business.

A UK Government case study described Ten Green Bottles as a social enterprise that combined environmental objectives with employment and volunteering opportunities for people who could otherwise find it difficult to enter the workplace, including people with mental health issues, learning difficulties and people who had been unemployed for a long period.

There was also an unexpected link with academic research. Research at Aberystwyth University into the properties of coloured glass helped Ten Green Bottles develop new commercial applications and products. The collaboration was reported to have benefited both the enterprise’s workforce and the wider community through interaction with university research.

Green Glass Mountain therefore provides a useful illustration of what a genuinely place-based social enterprise can look like. Waste from the community becomes a product. A product becomes a business. The business creates opportunities for people who may otherwise be excluded from work. And the whole operation becomes part of the identity and economy of a rural community.

It is a much more interesting proposition than simply putting a bottle in a recycling bin.

Regeneration from the ground up

The influence of social enterprises extends well beyond recycling.

Some are directly involved in changing the physical appearance and use of neighbourhoods. They take on empty buildings, protect community assets and create new uses for places that have been neglected.

Homebaked in Anfield, Liverpool, is an excellent example.

The organisation emerged from a community campaign around the former Mitchell’s Bakery. The surrounding area had experienced population decline, unemployment and boarded-up housing. The area was subsequently caught up in plans for demolition and redevelopment under the Housing Market Renewal Initiative. When those plans were abandoned, residents were left with the consequences of a regeneration programme that had effectively stalled.

Rather than waiting for another regeneration programme, local people began working on their own alternative.

The former bakery became the focus of a community-led project. In 2012, the Homebaked Bakery Co-operative was established, followed by a community land trust to take responsibility for the building and future community assets.

The bakery eventually reopened as a social enterprise. It created employment, training and a place for people to meet, while becoming part of the wider effort to improve the neighbourhood.

The significance of Homebaked is not really the bakery itself. It is the principle behind it.

A building that might otherwise have remained empty became an economic asset. A commercial operation became a community facility. Residents moved from being people affected by regeneration decisions to people actively shaping what happened in their neighbourhood.

Taking ownership of neglected places

A similar idea can be seen at Devonport Guildhall in Plymouth.

Real Ideas, a social enterprise working across the South West, took ownership of the historic building through a community asset transfer from Plymouth City Council in 2007. Devonport had suffered decades of deindustrialisation and the Guildhall itself had fallen into disrepair.

Real Ideas secured £1.8 million from the Community Assets Fund to refurbish the building. It subsequently became a hub for social enterprise, community activity, culture, employment and skills.

This is an important alternative to conventional regeneration.

Instead of demolishing an old building and replacing it with something new, a social enterprise can sometimes unlock value that is already present. The building has historical value, architectural value and community value. The challenge is finding a viable economic model that allows those assets to survive.

Social enterprises can provide that model.

The community shop as a regeneration tool

The same principle applies to smaller community assets.

In villages and smaller towns, the loss of a shop, post office, pub or community centre can have consequences that go far beyond the loss of a business. It can remove one of the few places where people encounter each other.

Great Ryburgh in Norfolk provides an early example. When the village’s long-established shop was threatened with closure, residents came together to find a solution. The resulting community enterprise helped preserve the shop as an important local service and meeting point.

The lesson is particularly relevant as many smaller communities face declining high streets and the loss of everyday services.

A community-owned shop may not transform a town in the way a £50 million redevelopment project does. But it can prevent decline from accelerating.

That can be just as important.

Making reuse part of the local economy

There is also a growing recognition that reuse can be more valuable than recycling.

SUEZ’s Renew Hub in Greater Manchester demonstrates what can happen when reuse is incorporated into waste infrastructure at scale. Developed with Greater Manchester Combined Authority and nine local authorities, the Renew Hub opened in 2021 alongside three Renew shops.

At more than 5,000 square metres, it was described by SUEZ as the UK’s largest reuse operation. Residents can donate furniture, toys, bikes, white goods and electrical goods at recycling centres, allowing suitable items to be repaired, reused and sold rather than disposed of.

SUEZ has also reported that its wider network of reuse activities diverted 2,400 tonnes of items from disposal in 2019, with estimated environmental, economic and social benefits of £33 million.

Although SUEZ is a major commercial organisation rather than a conventional small community social enterprise, the model demonstrates an important direction of travel. Waste infrastructure can become part of the local circular economy.

Instead of a linear system of buying, using and throwing away, materials can circulate through local businesses, repairers, shops and community organisations.

That creates opportunities for social enterprises.

Why this matters for towns and cities

The strength of the social enterprise model is that it connects several problems that are often treated separately.

A neglected building is not simply a property problem. It may also represent lost employment, reduced footfall, declining community confidence and the loss of a meeting place.

Waste is not simply an environmental problem. It can also represent lost economic value, missed employment opportunities and unnecessary household expenditure.

Unemployment is not simply an employment problem. It affects household income, confidence, health, local spending and community cohesion.

Social enterprises can work across these boundaries.

That is why their contribution to regeneration can sometimes be greater than their size suggests.

A small workshop employing ten people may appear insignificant compared with a large construction project. But if it occupies an empty building, trains people, buys locally, reuses waste and provides an affordable service, its impact can spread well beyond its payroll.

A different model of regeneration

The traditional model of regeneration has often been driven by large developments, external investment and major infrastructure.

Social enterprises offer another model: regeneration from within.

They can start with an asset that already exists, whether that is a building, a waste stream, a high street shop or a pool of unused skills. They then find a commercial way to turn that asset into something useful.

This does not mean social enterprises can replace councils, developers or major investment programmes. They cannot solve every structural problem facing a town or city.

What they can do is make regeneration more locally rooted.

That distinction matters. A successful regeneration project should not only change what a place looks like. It should change who benefits from it.

The growing social enterprise movement suggests that the people who live in a place can also be its entrepreneurs, employers, investors, landlords, recyclers and regenerators.

And sometimes, the most effective way to transform a community is not to start again from scratch, but to look at what has been discarded and ask what it could become.

Find out more or get involved:

Social Enterprise UK, The State of Social Enterprise 2025: Backbone of Britain. https://www.socialenterprise.org.uk/seuk-report/backbone-of-britain-state-of-social-enterprise-2025/

Social Enterprise UK, Facts and Figures. https://www.socialenterprise.org.uk/all-about-social-enterprise/facts-and-figures/

UK Government, Setting up a social enterprise. https://www.gov.uk/set-up-a-social-enterprise

UK Government, Ten Green Bottles Powys: A Welsh social enterprise working with the local community to recycle glass. https://www.gov.uk/government/case-studies/ten-green-bottles-works-with-the-local-community-to-recycle-glass-in-powys

Green Glass Bottles https://www.theguardian.com/social-enterprise-network/2012/jun/08/ten-green-bottles-powys-cic

Aberystwyth University, Impact of research on coloured glass on the social enterprise Ten Green Bottles. https://impact.ref.ac.uk/casestudies/CaseStudy.aspx?Id=42092

Climate Action Wales, Wastesavers Repair & Reuse Centre. https://www.climateaction.gov.wales/green-daily-choices/recycling/wastesavers-recycling-enterprise/

Social Enterprise UK, Homebaked Bakery: The power of communities to level up for themselves. https://www.socialenterprise.org.uk/case-studies/homebaked-bakery-the-power-of-communities-to-level-up-for-themselves/

Social Enterprise UK, Real Ideas Organisation: Growing the social economy in the Southwest. https://www.socialenterprise.org.uk/case-studies/real-ideas-organisation-growing-the-social-economy-in-the-southwest/

Social Enterprise UK, From surplus to social impact: building the Community Shop. https://www.socialenterprise.org.uk/from-surplus-to-social-impact-building-the-community-shop/

SUEZ Recycling and Recovery UK, The Renew Hub: Delivering re-use on an industrial scale. https://www.suez.co.uk/en-gb/our-offering/success-stories/our-references/the-renew-hub-delivering-re-use-on-an-industrial-scale

SUEZ Recycling and Recovery UK, A central role for re-use. https://www.suez.co.uk/en-gb/our-offering/success-stories/our-references/a-central-role-for-re-use

Welsh Government, Workplace recycling. https://www.gov.wales/workplace-recycling