Jesse Naidoo | AfricanOptimists

#2 Jacendra (Jesse) Naidoo - About the most exciting time of his life, bringing an engineer's approach to waste, thoughts on Shared Value vs Shareholder Value and a mention of the New Capitalist Manifesto

14 January 2024

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1 Guest Bio
2 Episode Description
3 Show Notes
4 Time Stamps
5 Transcript

1 Guest Bio

Jesse Naidoo holds a Master in Business Leadership from the Graduate School of Business Leadership (SBL), an academic college within the University of South Africa (Unisa). He has over 20 years of corporate experience in various senior executive positions in telecommunications, engineering, telecommunications engineering consulting, project management, relationship sales, sales management, commercial management, marketing management and business management.

In 2011 he started Clothes to Good (CTG), a multi-award winning clothing recycling company that creates jobs, starts micro-businesses and empowers the unemployed, with a special focus on people living with disabilities.

In addition, Jesse is actiely pursuing the use of digital technology that will enable CTG to track the life of every item, from the point of collection to its recycled, upcycled or downcycled state. In the long run this means that producers can be held more accountable to fund the recycling of textile waste. He is also eagerly awaiting the technology that is becoming available in the emerging field of biochemical fibre recycling processes, which will reduce the complexity of textile recycling by breaking textiles down into their separate (mostly non-organic) components. The more this complexity is reduced, the more recycling will increase.

2 Episode Description

Where others see mountains of waste when looking at discarded clothes, Jesse Naidoo sees major opportunities. Opportunities to resell, upcycle, downcycle and anything else that can be engineered to extend the life of garments and keep them away from landfills - the world’s oldest form of waste disposal.

In this episode, Jesse shares his journey from the heart of South Africa’s corporate world, to building a social enterprise dealing with textile waste.

Jesse takes us on the step-by-step journey of a pair of recycled pants, and the kind of business thinking required to make the recycling of pants a sustainable activity. He questions the longevity of the continued dominance of shareholder value, and discusses the alternative of ‘shared value’ that can result in a more circular economy.

3 Show Notes

04:57 Centurion lies outside of Midrand, halfway between Johannesburg and Pretoria, in the Gauteng Province.

25:07 Clothes to Good partner Afrika Tikkun

25:55 Unbelievably, South Africa has no definition or legal framework for social enterprises or social entrepreneurship in the country. Read more in this 2016 ILO scoping study, the useful 2016 UCT Guide to Legal Forms for Social Enterprises in South Africa and in this 2018 GIBS report.

31:27 The Orange Farm community is a semi-rural, undeveloped area 40km (25 miles) south of Johannesburg. It is one of the largest informal settlements in South Africa, with most estimates giving a population of 1 million people. For more info, read this.

34:03 H&M and Clothes to Good 'Mother of Children with Disabilities Micro-Business Programme

36:49 Nim Nims were created at the Tommy Hilfiger Design Sprint Challenge. In 2021 Clothes to Good was awarded the audience prize at the Tommy Hilfiger World Frontier Fashion challenge. It was also shortlisted as one of the top six programmes from 430 applications from around the world.

44:56 South Africa's unemployment statistics Q2 2023; Unemployment rate in South Africa from Q1 2019 to Q2 2023 by age group

46:00 Friedman introduced his theory on shareholder value in a 1970 New York Times article, titled, A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits. Worth reading!

54:47 Umair Haque's The New Capitalist Manifesto, building a disruptively better business was published in 2011 and is both a critiqe of the current capitalist system as well as an exploration of alternative ways of conducting capitalism in the future

53:38 Original 2011 Harvard Business Review article, Shared Value - how to reinvent capitalism and unleash a wave of innovation and growth by Michael Porter and Mark Kramer

4 Time Stamps

02:46 Jesse’s early corporate career in the early 1990s

09:25 The need to keep products out of landfill

10:11 The extent of the dumping problem globally and the realities of microfibre pollution found in our bodies. Global commitment to eliminate production of plastic in fashion by 2050

13:36 The kilogram - the unit of measurement for textile waste and its power to eventually hold producers accountable

16:30 What happens to a pair of pants handed in to H&M

16:59 First audit to see what can be reused

19:53 Recycling plastics into paving blocks

21:23 New developments in sorting

23:54 40% of clothes can be reused in current form

24:01 Clothes to Good’s three dreams: creating micro-businesses, creating employment for people with disabilites, and creating processes that are good for the environment

25:15 Creation of micro-businesses for mothers of children with disabilities

27:15 The difference between a social enterprise and the traditional approach to business

31:17 Stigmatised mothers of children with disabilities running their own microbusiness

35:55 Next steps: upcycling and downcycling

41:23 Challenges of funding

43:05 The growing interest and involvement of youth in this sector