News

MELBOURNE: Materials recovery company Close the Loop Ltd (CtL) is pleased to announce that its founder and Executive Director (Business Development) Steve Morriss has been named as a Southern Region finalist in the 2011 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of The Year awards.

Morriss joined a line-up of other outstanding entrepreneurs from across Australia at the recent regional finals event in Melbourne. While not winning the regional award, he says the experience was fantastic: “The recognition, the networking, the learning, made the whole journey most enjoyable,” Morriss said. “It’s great that such a game-changing environmental initiative has now a proven market in the US, and strong recognition in Australia.”

Established from scratch in 2001, CtL has grown steadily since and now employs more than 50 full-time staff at Somerton, Melbourne, Australia and more than 120 at Hebron, Kentucky in the US. It has established a logistics network of more than 30,000 active collection points across Australia and is expanding its collection and processing facilities in the US.

“This is one of the most rewarding and important milestones so far, for me personally and the staff at CtL,” Morriss said.

Significantly, it underscores the operational mantra embodied in both the company’s name and zero-landfill promise,” he said. “We were really the only finalist that could be considered a ‘cleantech’ company.”

Before founding CtL, Morriss established a business specialising in the sale of imaging supplies, including original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and re-manufactured toner printer and inkjet cartridges. He developed Close the Loop as a unique selling proposition to combat the price pressure being applied by large, multinational office supplies companies.

Morriss’s simple – and entrepreneurial - offer was to take back and recycle everything that he supplied, at the end of its useable life. This proved highly successful, and he immediately realised that end users had a strong desire to recycle their cartridge waste. CtL was thereby created, with its “zero-landfill promise” and a mission to work in partnership with OEMs.