A recycling service for small to medium enterprises was the brain child of one man back in 2005. Together with a friend and both their wives, they tailored a business plan from summer 2006. Uberwald Environmental Ltd finally became a reality in September 2007. Between the 4 of them, they have a total of 55 years of experience in all sectors of the waste management industry, from the small family businesses to the market leaders, from local authorities to governing bodies and one man bands to global conglomerates. They’ve worked in them, all covering a host of specialities including nation wide oil spillage management; skip, roll-on and waste management; hazardous waste transfer station management; environmental auditing; risk assessments and international waste movement, to name but a few. The same expertises Uberwald Environmental Ltd staff have been used to manage the recycling and waste needs of leading pharmaceutical companies, energy providers and power companies, we now want to apply to SMEs.

Uberwald Environmental’s main thrust is ‘RECYCLE EVERYTHING’. Pure and simple. We will endeavour to take material that we believe can be recycled, thus avoiding landfill. We spotted a neglected market sector crying out for a dedicated recycling service and that was small to medium enterprises (SMEs). Until Uberwald Environmental Ltd existed, SMEs had to manage with either an oversized solution (e.g. big skips suited to big companies with lots of waste) or an undersized solution (more tailored to a domestic situation). We decided to start the business in south Essex due to the large number of SMEs without a local recycling solution in that area. We will not dispose of anything that can be recycled!

Both Directors are big fans of Terry Pratchetts’ work and came up with several working titles linked to his works. However, none seemed to fit, until the name Uberwald came up. It fitted perfectly! It became the working title for everything else that followed. So much so, that when it came to naming our business, there was no other choice to be made. So we politely wrote to Mr Pratchett and he quite rightly ignored the vague ramblings of two fans. In Mr Pratchetts’ Discworld books Uberwald is a fictional land inhabited by werewolves’ vampires, dwarves and the disc famous fat-of-the-land mines. Coincidentally Uberwald is a German word meaning high forest or beyond the forest, which conjures up the image of a place full of beautiful deep valleys - ideal for land filling unless we protect it through our reuse and recycling activities.