Every cleaning contract already handles waste; the question is whether the business captures any value from it or simply carries it to a skip. Adding waste-recovery services is one of the few ways a cleaning company can grow revenue without chasing new clients, because the raw material is already on site. The trick is to add these services gradually, and to partner rather than pretend to be a full recycler. Here are five realistic extensions, roughly in order of difficulty.

That such services pay is not theoretical. When Polyco and the community enterprise Itheku Recycling launched a new Packa-Ching mobile recycling unit in KwaMashu in September 2026, it joined a national network that, through a simple model of paying people directly for the plastic, paper and cardboard they bring in, has paid out more than R57 million to collectors and diverted over 45 million kilograms of material. Lisl Doherty, Polyco’s enterprise development manager, said the partnership showed “what meaningful collaboration can achieve when we invest not only in recycling infrastructure, but in people”. Itheku, founded by Reuben Govender, now employs close to 100 people. The lesson for a cleaning business is that the buyers and the infrastructure already exist; the opening is to feed them.

The detail that makes the model bankable is that every transaction is recorded. Payments to collectors run through Polyco’s WeighPay system, which logs each weigh-in, so the volumes and the money are auditable rather than estimated. In 2025 the network registered 8,650 reclaimers and supported more than 200 jobs, and the KwaMashu launch was backed by the local ward councillor, Mandla Biyela, with fuel sponsorship from Sasol. For a cleaning business, that transparency is the useful part: a client will pay for, or believe, a diversion figure that comes off a weighbridge rather than a guess.

1. Sorting at source

The lowest-cost addition is to separate recyclables from general waste as part of the cleaning round, rather than mixing everything into one bag. Clean, sorted cardboard, plastic and cans have a value that contaminated waste does not. It requires little more than an extra bin and a briefed crew, and it is the foundation every other service is built on.

2. Scheduled collection coordination

Once material is sorted, someone has to move it. A cleaning company can coordinate a regular collection between the client’s site and a buy-back centre or reclaimer, charging for the logistics or splitting the value of the material. This turns an occasional favour into a scheduled service with a predictable rhythm.

3. Recyclable aggregation

A single office does not generate enough recyclable material to interest a processor, but a contractor serving twenty of them does. Aggregating sorted material across several clients into volumes worth selling is exactly the model the Packa-Ching units and buy-back centres use, and it is where the margin lives. It needs a little storage space and a relationship with a buyer who pays by the tonne.

4. Event and project waste

One-off jobs – a market, a conference, a post-construction clean – produce large, concentrated volumes of waste over a short period. Offering a sort-and-divert service for these events, with a report on how much was kept out of landfill, is a high-value add-on that general cleaners rarely provide and organisers increasingly want.

5. Supplier and buyer partnerships

The final step is not to buy a baler and become a recycler, but to build standing relationships with the businesses that already are – buy-back centres, reclaimer co-operatives and packaging producers running schemes like Packa-Ching. A cleaning company that is a reliable feeder to those partners captures a share of the value without the capital cost of processing, and can lean on their infrastructure and pricing.

A word on how to charge. Some of this value is a saving that belongs to the client – a lower skip bill – and some is a sale of recovered material that the contractor and client can split; being clear which is which, in writing, avoids the argument that sinks these arrangements. The simplest opening offer is to take over a client’s recycling at no extra fee in exchange for keeping the proceeds of the material, then to add a reporting line – kilograms diverted per month – that turns an operational favour into something the client can put in its own sustainability numbers.

Staffing work that comes and goes

Each of these steps needs hands, often for irregular, project-shaped work rather than a permanent post. This is where an introduction platform fits the model: Kleana lists commercial and project cleaning crews and suppliers by skill and area, so a contractor staffing a weekend event clear-out or a new collection round can find people for that specific job and pay a single introduction fee rather than expanding a fixed payroll. It is a way to scale a crew to match a contract that comes and goes.

Taken together, these additions do two things. They give the client something – lower disposal costs and a diversion figure it can report – and they give the cleaning business either a saving to share or a service to charge for, from assets and crews it already has. Neither requires the company to stop being a cleaner.

The move that matters is to partner before you vertically integrate. Start with sorting on one contract, find one buy-back centre or reclaimer that will take the material, and prove the model on a single site before adding a second. The businesses that have made this work, from Itheku upward, did not begin by owning the whole chain. They began by reliably supplying the part of it that someone else was ready to pay for.

Source: Kleana Africa – kleana.africa