The First Mile

First Mile helps brands reach their 2025 and 2030 sustainability goals. They formalize waste collection networks in low-income communities and bridge the gap for global brands to purchase from the value chain while diverting plastic waste from leakage sites. Their work maps wastesheds and helps large corporations and NGOs alike understand their waste, water, and climate footprints beyond tier one, and how best to tackle the social and environmental issues inherent to informal waste economies. They then help them implement those solutions directly. First Mile has created value chains that have saved hundreds of millions of plastic bottles from landfills and the ocean, supported jobs for thousands of waste workers, and developed programming that has curtailed and remediated child labor in landfills, undercut bad faith practices like predatory lending, and ensured that families can safely make the transition to the formal economy, all while supplying over a dozen Global 1000 brands with First Mile approved materials that they and their consumers can be proud of. They have experience working with waste collectors and in recycling operations in over a dozen low-income countries and helping some of the most complex organizations in the world navigate their sustainability journey by tying climate and waste directly to business objectives. Their work focuses on goals 1, 3, 4, 8, 9, 11, and 12 of the Sustainable Development Goals.