Thousands of women across rural communities in South and Southeast Asia pick and sort waste for recycling for a living. However women in this region face persistent cultural and institutional barriers when looking to access finance, including those running small collection and recycling businesses with the informal economy.
This lack of accessible finance limits the expansion of such businesses, who can’t buy additional machinery to process more plastic and grow their businesses.
Small collection and recycling business and want to buy additional machinery to process more plastic to grow your business. You go into a local bank requesting a loan and walk out without securing the capital you needed.
To help the region’s recycling processors expand their capacity, “impact and innovation company” SecondMuse has launched an US$8 million Revolving Fund, backed by the VISA Foundation.
The fund will support gender-smart Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in waste management and recycling, working to reduce plastic pollution. It will offer flexible, zero-interest loans from US$150,000 to US$500,000 to purchase machinery to more efficiently process waste or increase scalability through additional working capital, plus technical assistance. The capital is both accessible and affordable — two huge barriers faced by MSMEs in the sector today.
The fund engages in continuous capital recycling, where repaid loans are reinvested into new projects. This ensures that each dollar invested is utilised multiple times, significantly amplifying the impact beyond a single-use grant.
The Fund will also make use of plastic credits to provide an additional revenue stream for recyclers and help cover the program’s costs. These credits, similar to those for carbon, are tied to plastic diverted from landfills or incineration. Second Muse will train recyclers on how to register and sell plastic credits and navigate the marketplace.
The Fund’s goal is to deploy around US$18 million and support up to 75 companies over the next decade, and aims to build additional processing capacity for over 365,000 metric tonnes of plastic waste.
SecondMuse says the Fund will help companies like Mumbai-based ReCircle, which processes plastic waste into granules and pellets that can be upcycled into new plastic products. The company’s network of more than 2,500 waste collectors gather around 11 tons of discarded plastic an hour.
The SecondMuse Foundation
The SecondMuse Foundation is a US-based nonprofit advocating for a relational approach to addressing complex problems at scale; called “relational wealth” that recognises the interconnectedness of our world by prioritising relationships. The Foundation’s goal is to inspire ways of thinking and actions to drive societal change at scale rather than unconsciously replicating the status quo.
SeconMuse Capital manage investments to finance economies of the future.
Get in touch with SecondMuse at asiapacific@secondmuse.com if you are interested in the Revolving Fund or would like to co-design innovative financial mechanisms to make a lasting impact on climate.