The term “circular economy”, where one person’s waste is another’s raw material, was coined in 1988. By that stage Finline Furniture in Co Laois had been practising it for a decade.
The company is run by the brothers Killian and Ciaran Finane and was set up by their parents, Kieran and Bridget, in 1979.
There are an estimated 500,000 Finline sofas in circulation and, from the beginning, the business offered a service that would allow customers to bring back their old Finline suite to have it re-covered, rather than throw it out and buy a new one.
• Irish firms soak up circular economy profits
In recent years it has expanded its offering, launching a range called Revive, which buys the sofa back for a modest price, strips it down and re-covers it, typically using recycled polyester — which itself comes from recycled plastic water bottles.
Advertisement
Its Revive range then sells at a discount, “typically 20 per cent lower than the lowest price point in store”, Killian says. “It’s very attractive to someone who wants to buy something green and long-lasting.”
The business, which employs 75 people, has seen its turnover grow by 10 per cent in the past 12 months. It is moving to new showrooms, across the road from its existing one on the Long Mile Road, trebling its size.
While upcycling suites is only a small part of what Finline does — the company produces 50 suites in a week, and only two or three are re-covered — it appeals to a growing number of customers. “In the last three or four years everything sustainable has come on to the radar,” Killian says.
“There isn’t as much margin so we don’t make much money on them, but we are holding on to customers and offering a service people want.”
The idea of sending a sofa to landfill makes customers uncomfortable, “because it’s just so big and bulky”, Killian says.
Advertisement
It doesn’t sit well with him either. “We consider it a waste to put something into landfill that so much work and expertise went into,” he adds.
The brothers recently participated in a Sustainability Leaders programme, developed by Skillnet and Enterprise Ireland, and have just applied to join a venture programme run by Circuleire, the industry network for accelerating Ireland’s circular economy. “We’re knee-deep in this at the moment,” Killian says.
Last year’s cohort of the Circuleire Circular Venture included Well Spent Grain, a company set up by Sunkyung Choi and Patrick Nagle. Its first product, Born Again Bites, is a range of snacks upcycled from brewers’ spent grain, the largest by-product of the beer-brewing industry.
Traditionally the bulk of brewers’ spent grain went to landfill, despite being high in fibre and protein.
• Bold innovators see the big picture
Advertisement
The couple had the idea for it while walking the King’s Trail, a 460km trek in remote northern Sweden. “You bring food and get your water from freshwater streams. But in many cases there were no streams because the glaciers had already melted,” Nagle says.
“We thought, this is climate change in action. So we came back to Dublin determined to see what we could do and Sun’s idea was to collect brewers’ spent grains.”
Rascals, a local brewery, was delighted to have its spent grains given a second life. “They said yes immediately,” Nagle says.
He and Choi worked with Teagasc to develop their products, using a €2,500 innovation voucher from their local enterprise office. At present they make the product at home and sell through shops and cafés.
• Food producers cook up a plan to combat restaurant closures
Advertisement
This year they will launch in Lidl as part of its Kickstart supplier development programme, which will enable them to scale up and move into a commercial kitchen. They already have a second product, a cracker made using brewers’ spent grains, in the oven. “Once your eyes have been opened to circularity, it’s hard to turn your back on it,” Nagle says.
Aisling and Sadhbh Wood’s father gave the Dun Laoghaire sisters the idea for their circular-based business, Bean Around, during the Covid pandemic. The family bought a coffee machine during lockdowns and their father used coffee grounds to ease the symptoms of psoriasis. It worked but “it was messy”, Aisling says.
The sisters took his experience and ran with it, securing an innovation voucher to formulate coffee grinds-based exfoliating bars. Once they had perfected the product they approached a local coffee shop to ask if they could take its grinds, turn it into soap and sell it in the café.
A new business model was born. Bean Around sells in 19 coffee shops across Dublin. It also provides a circular corporate gifting service for companies such as Google and CRH, made from their own coffee grinds.
Bean Around has also joined the Lidl Kickstart programme, which will result in the company supplying 220 stores in Ireland and Northern Ireland. “It’s just the start. There are 1,600 coffee shops in Dublin alone,” Aisling says.
Advertisement
This month the government awarded a €30 million contract to supply the civil service with “re-manufactured” laptops, a first for public procurement. As well as bringing environmental benefits, they are 30 per cent cheaper than new machines.
Investors are increasingly interested in circularity too. Fiona Kelleher and Kieran Coffey, a husband-and-wife team, are looking to close out the final €150,000 in a seed round that has already secured €900,000 from the venture capitalist BVP and Enterprise Ireland for their business, MyGug.
MyGug is a small, egg-shaped anaerobic digester that takes in raw and cooked food waste from small food businesses and schools, and uses it to produce biogas for cooking.
Not only does it prevent food waste from ending up in landfill but, as a by-product, it also generates a rich organic liquid fertiliser for growing more food. The potential is enormous. “Everywhere there is food waste we are going to have a customer,” Kelleher says.
The product has won awards at UCD’s AgTech accelerator programme, was a finalist in the IntertradeIreland Seedcorn competition and was accepted on the prestigious Harvard Climate Entrepreneurs Circle, for high-potential ventures working to address climate change.
The company, which was set up in 2022, already has customers in Ireland and the UK. It also has a strong pipeline of orders, helped by the government’s energy-efficiency grant for businesses, which has just doubled in value, to €10,000, and which can now include spending on MyGug.
It’s just another example of how circularity has moved mainstream, Kelleher says. “We are getting far more inbound inquiries now,” she says. “The first question isn’t, ‘How does it work?’ — which it used to be. It’s, ‘Is it suitable for me?’”
