Going green in a small way to help both the community and keep her staff of 22 fully employed, is beginning to pay big dividends for a super-sharp Eastern Cape entrepreneur. Nomkita Mantile’s business is collecting and recycling glass – up to 280 000 individual bottles and 40 tons of broken glass a month!

In fact, business is so good that the 45-year-old mother of three children – becoming known in Port Elizabeth as “Mama Glass” – says she has no time for holidays over the Christmas peak – they have a double job to do. “Early in the morning, my staff and I go to the beaches to collect empty bottles lying around the area. We don’t charge the local council or any government department for this cleaning service of the beaches, the surrounding car parks and picnic areas,” she explains.

When the SABC ran an insert on television news of this sterling job that left beaches clean and safe from broken bottles that might injure holidaymakers, DaimlerChrysler’s Kobus van Zyl sat up and took notice. He immediately saw Nomkita’s need for a larger vehicle for her booming business. Soon a specially structured deal with Mercedes-Benz Finance, arranged through Trevor Kitson at the local dealer Maritime Motors, set Wandile Bottle Exchange on their way to include the Atego 1017 medium commercial vehicle in their small fleet.

Nomkita’s business partner is her 50-year-old husband, Wandile, for whom the business is named, who recently began working full time for the company after having worked for 20 years as a medium commercial vehicle driver for furniture group Morkels.

The other trucks were old and unreliable and limited them to a small area in Port Elizabeth. “But with the reliability of the Atego, we can now go much further,” says Nomkita. “This means we can go to towns like Addo and even Peddie (about 250 km away). These towns have no recycling and when we arrive we go ‘toot, toot’ on the Atego’s hooter and the people come to us and we exchange the bottles they have collected for cash. It’s a great feeling to be able to help these people earn a little money.”

But more often than not she is across the busy yard in a store-room, close to the action, keeping records and doing the book-keeping.

“This is one part of our business and some of the collectors make a good living; others make enough money for themselves and their families to have a roof over their heads and to eat, so, again, the community benefits. The other part of our business is collecting bottles ourselves as a service to businesses,” says Nomkita.

Once collected, sorted and checked to ensure they are 100 percent intact at the recycling yard, many of the bottles are returned to the original producers. Others that have been cracked or don’t fit into the regular mix are placed in a 10-ton skip and broken down for delivery to a glass company for recycling. The full skip is collected once a week, while about 70 000 bottles a week are sorted and recycled.

“We’ll keep on working hard, hopefully reducing the terrible unemployment that we see every day, and also keep the environment a little greener by recycling the bottles. Oh, and one other thing is that we want to get some more of the best trucks around – iBenz vehicles, of course,” says Nomkita.