Reduce, reuse, and recycle: we’ve all heard these phrases before. While recycling can sometimes seem like a mundane task, it is actually one of the most exciting things happening in business today. Social entrepreneurs and enterprises are capitalizing on their capacity to reduce, reuse, and recycle in order to have great impact on communities close to home and throughout the world.
As recycling has developed, so have many social undertakings that seek to follow the “reduce, reuse, and recycle” model to have a positive impact on society. This is called social entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurs identify issues in their communities and those around the world, and work to find solutions and spread change. Much like the early recyclers of the pre-industrial days, social entrepreneurs often use what is available to them, or what already exists in communities, and make new and exciting products out of old, or reused materials.
Alternatively, some social enterprises re-think the traditional ways of doing things to open opportunities for more people. For example, the company littleBits is a company that wants to make hardware and hardware education available to everyone regardless of “age, gender, technical ability, or discipline.” By taking established educational methods for teaching electronics and circuits, and re-imagining them to be geared towards young children, their goal is to take electronics out of the “hands of experts” and put it into the “hands of everyone.”
littleBits founder Ayah Bdeir in
Inc. magazine.
