EPA Waste Prevention and Reduction Finalist - Green Collect - Tidy Towns 2026
When Maryam arrived in Melbourne with her four children, having fled the war in Syria via Lebanon, she found a job at Green Collect within three months. "I am learning how to talk with customers, and about job contracts, wages and taking leave," she says. "This will help me for any job in the future."
That's the other half of what Green Collect does. Alongside sorting and reselling office furniture, stationery and electronics that would otherwise go to landfill, the 21-year-old Braybrook social enterprise runs an Economic Pathways to Refugee Integration program, giving newly arrived refugees genuine warehouse and retail work experience. In 2025 alone, Green Collect created supportive jobs for 33 people who'd faced barriers to the general labour market, 18 for people with mental health conditions, 15 for people from refugee backgrounds, while processing 245 tonnes of donated goods and finding a circular outcome for 91% of it.
The organisation's own account of its growth is refreshingly honest: they've learned to say yes to messy, complicated jobs (a recent full office defit brought in 250 unique items weighing almost 29 tonnes) rather than stay within a tidy scope, because turning down the hard jobs would mean turning down the employment hours that come with them.
The X-factor, in Green Collect's own words, is simple: their people. Every item that gets a second life passes through someone who was also looking for one.
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