Based in Johor Bahru, Rick Lim and Hwee Wen are the founders of two social enterprises, PYNG and Kawan Guni. PYNG (Protect Your Next Generation) is a zero waste store. Kawan Guni, a subsidiary of PYNG, serves as a clean recycling platform. Through proactively organizing unique and engaging events, the couple is starting a new local movement in sustainable living.
Photographs courtesy of PYNG and Kawan Guni.
Denise: Can you first share what was your work like before PYNG and Kawan Guni?
Rick: I worked for an auxiliary police company in Singapore and was planning to apply to be a state police. For 3 years, I traveled to and fro Malaysia and Singapore every day, so I’d often wake up at 4 am and only come home at 11 pm. If there was a manpower shortage, I’d even work up to 14 hours a day.
The whole routine eventually felt meaningless and empty … because there was no work-life balance. After I returned to Malaysia permanently, I knew I wanted to do something different.
Hwee Wen: I previously worked in HR at a real estate company here in JB. When Rick started PYNG, I was only helping and supporting him on a part-time basis, usually during the weekends. I quit my job and joined PYNG full-time around the end of 2021, when we were about to officially establish Kawan Guni!
Denise: How did the idea for PYNG come about?
Rick: PYNG started in 2019 because of what we heard about the forest fires. There was the Amazon forest fire at the year’s end, and then the Australian forest fire at the beginning of 2020. These happenings were what alerted us, on a personal level, that our planet is undergoing troubling changes.
I didn’t start PYNG as a business though. At that time, I only intended to use social media to share my sustainable lifestyle journey. But as people advised me: raising awareness is good, but without the financial resources, you can’t continue to promote this in the long run.
In September 2020, I started sourcing for products to sell. Around then, I also felt that there was a gap in the market. There were companies collecting used cooking oil from restaurants and e-waste from offices, but there aren’t businesses targeting household recyclables.
For households, middlemen are important because they can’t send their recyclables to a factory due to the low volume. Those recycling plants will just reject them. And if no one else collects it, the recyclables become waste. Therefore, alongside selling products, we established a home collection recycling service to collect these two types of materials.
On top of this, we also organize events. Earlier this year, we organized a barter trade! Bartering might be common overseas, but it’s rare in Malaysia, so events like this enable us to share and promote values with our community and show people that sustainable living isn’t limited to recycling.
Denise: Since Kawan Guni came after PYNG, what inspired this initiative?
Rick: It all started from an event in 2021. During MCO, we coordinated with an NGO to run a seven-day, drive-through recycling event. And it was a disaster.
Hwee Wen: We collected more than 13 tons (13,000 kg) of items. Initially, we thought the event was a success because of the large amount collected in just 7 days. But the truth is, it was a failure. Less than 30% of that 13 tons are recyclable. The rest are all trash. There was a lot of food waste and remnants in the pile, too.
Rick: After the event, we reflected and felt that it wasn’t right. If recycling meant heading in that disastrous direction, it’s not good for our community or society. There was zero engagement and zero education. The whole event was just convenient waste disposal for the public. The cleanup after the event was also exhausting. We were rummaging through bags of rubbish and going through things one by one.
That’s how we developed the idea of making recycling more proper. We also wanted to tackle as many recyclable materials as possible. Our aim is to educate people: when you recycle, you need to do it the right way. You can’t treat a recycling place like a dumping ground for your rubbish.
Our aim is to educate people: when you recycle, you need to do it the right way.
Rick lim, founder of pyng & Kawan guni
Hwee Wen: We also wanted to push for practical action, rather than talk about it theoretically. If we simply shared recycling tips on social media, it’s impossible to know if anyone sees the content and actually puts them into action. A physical event is where the public can directly carry out each step, hands-on.
We surveyed recycling plants ourselves to ensure that they process collected recyclables properly, while we reuse some items at PYNG to give them a second chance at life. With these plans, we started a completely new event in January 2022, and that’s how the Kawan Guni you see today came about!
Denise: Kawan Guni’s clean recycling is the first of its kind here. Can you explain more about the concept?
Rick: At Kawan Guni, our focus is not on monetary value. Our focus is on recyclability; whether an item can be recycled or not. Very few collectors and organizations accept batteries, light bulbs, glass, and styrofoam because to them, the little profit gain is not worth the cost. Take glass, for example. There’s the risk of injury when you handle glass. And even if you collect 200kg worth of glass, you’ll get around RM20 and that’s it.
Hwee Wen: And Styrofoam—it’s bulky and you might collect a lot, but they barely weigh anything in the end. More than 80% of it is air. However, we accept these items at Kawan Guni because they have recycle value. For instance, one glass bottle can be melted down and recycled to produce a new glass bottle. One-to-one, with no loss in quality.
Of course, there are costs when we choose to cover these low-profit items. On one hand, you see us selling recyclables and earning profit, but on the other, we often pay for these costs out of our own pockets or balance it out by taking the earnings from selling cardboard to cover the transportation cost for glass, and so on.
There are reasons why we focus a lot on recycling. Do you remember the triangle chart showing the 3 or 4Rs? It tells you to Refuse first. If you can’t, Reduce, then Reuse, or Recycle. But at Kawan Guni, we have the concept inverted: let’s recycle first before tackling the other Rs.
In the chart, notice how the section for “Recycle” is much larger than “Refuse.” What we interpret that to mean is the acceptance level. Also, notice when the word huan bao (环保)1 is mentioned, 9 out of 10 people in JB associate it with recycling. In conversations, people say, “Are you taking this to huan bao?” or “Take this for huan bao.” Although it’s a term that covers many different eco-friendly topics, these points suggest that recycling is the action that has the highest acceptance level among the public, compared to other eco-friendly practices.
Of course, all the other Rs are still important. But right now, we feel that educating people to practice clean recycling is more workable compared to expecting everyone to refuse everything.
Rick: Now, the other reason for tackling “Recycle” before “Refuse”: when you come to the event with your recyclables, you become aware of the type of packaging waste your home produces because you cleaned, sorted, and packed everything yourself. This encourages people to reflect, “Hey, why do I have so many recyclables in the first place? Are there ways to reduce them in my daily life?”
So, you’ll always see PYNG’s booth present at a Kawan Guni event because we’re demonstrating a linkage and sharing that there are waste-free substitutes available to them.
Hwee Wen: Let’s say you usually buy a plastic bottle of cleaning detergent every month. Once you change to bringing your own bottle to purchase refills from us, that’s one plastic bottle less for many, many months to come. Accumulating over years, imagine how much plastic bottle waste you have reduced!
Additionally, we use paper packaging for our products. Once you get home and use the product, just remember to bring the paper packaging over to recycle it at the next event. Overall, our events encourage a circular economy and show people how we can all create a cycle where there’s no waste.
Denise: What were some of the challenges you faced along the way?
Rick: I’d say it’s the low awareness. In JB, many people generally know what eco-friendly means. But to actually practice it in real life? That’s the challenge. Although we mentioned that people do associate recycling with going eco-friendly, if you look at the big picture, the awareness is still very low, so we need to put a lot of effort into education and raising awareness.
The demand for zero waste goods is also not that high yet because people have the mindset that eco-friendly products are expensive. They feel that such products are made for the wealthy and it’s not something normal people can afford to spend money on. To counter this, one of our goals at PYNG is to make the products more affordable. We lower our margins to remove the cost barrier, so that we can create opportunities for more people to experience what a sustainable lifestyle is about.
But going back to challenges … Another one would be manpower. Both PYNG and Kawan Guni are fully operated by the two of us. There’s a lot to cope but we try our best to allocate time for all the workload!
Denise: What do you think are the common misconceptions people have toward recycling and sustainable living?
Hwee Wen: One is the frequent association of recycling with charity. Quite a number of people come to our event thinking we’re a non-profit organization doing fundraising. But PYNG and Kawan Guni are actually social enterprises. We’re the middle ground between a commercial business and an NGO.
You might notice that we don’t present a Kawan Guni event as an “acts of kindness” activity. This is because what we want to bring out in people is not sympathy, but rather a sense of responsibility. Among the different Rs, R for Responsible is ultimately the most important one. When you buy and consume goods, you have the responsibility to deal with the plastic or glass packaging that comes with it.
What we want to bring out in people is not sympathy, but rather a sense of responsibility. Among the different Rs, R for Responsible is ultimately the most important one.
Hwee wen, founder of pyng & kawan guni
Rick: While it’s true that recycling isn’t difficult, it’s not effortless and convenient either. It’s more like a habit that you need to build up. But since young, the idea of being eco-friendly is projected to us as something convenient and a lot of us didn’t cultivate this habit as a child. That’s why many adults today feel reluctant to adapt because there are more convenient—but unfortunately environmentally bad—ways to deal with waste.
I think the existing educational content about recycling is one of the causes of such misunderstandings. The concept of the three-colored bins, for instance, is not wrong. However, it’s overly simplistic and not efficient enough in our current reality.
Take paper, for example. There are different sub-categories like cardboard, mixed paper, white paper, and newspaper. If these are all tossed into a generic paper recycling bin and sent to a recycling plant, the factory needs to use more labor and other costs to sort them all over again. Similarly, if you send dirty glass bottles, the recycling plant might just throw them away if the cost to clean and sort them exceeds the potential profit.
That’s why the Kawan Guni system requires people to sort their recyclables. Each bag of white paper, cardboard, newspaper, and other materials can skip the time-consuming sorting stage, and be directly taken to recycle. When we take our collected recyclables to these plants, the staff store ours in a separate area because it’s already clean and organized. They prioritize our recyclables because it’s much more efficient, which in turn, gives them monetary value, too.
Hwee Wen: Some people might say, “Why should I sort my recyclables? Isn’t going through and sorting bags of items your job?” But it’s not. It’s everyone’s responsibility. Whether something can be recycled or not starts at the source—with each of us. So, adopting this recycling system is good for yourself, good for others, and good for the environment.
Denise: What can people do right now to join in the movement—the work that you’re all doing?
Rick: Well, if you’re building a sustainable lifestyle, you’re already a part of us! Regardless if you’re a customer, or if you live far away and are not even aware of our existence [laughs], as long as you’re a person who strives to build a sustainable lifestyle and protect the environment, you’re supporting the cause.
Naturally, you’ll pass on this message to the next generation, and the next generation will pass it on to the next, and so on. This is how we can undo the older generation’s culture and create a new sustainable culture in our current generation, going back to what PYNG stands for.
Hwee Wen: We probably won’t witness the fruits of our labor in this lifetime. But we can at least initiate the change to help tackle the problem our next generation will face. Japan used decades—almost three generations—to achieve a culture where households aren’t allowed to throw everything away as rubbish, and where its citizens know they need to go to a recycling station to sort recyclables into specific categories themselves. If it takes three generations to achieve this, there are two more generations to go in our country.
We try not to let ourselves become overwhelmed by the negativity out there. The financial challenges aside, our mental and emotional states are also very important, so when people encourage us on Facebook or Instagram, that’s a form of support to us, too!
Denise: What are your future goals and plans for PYNG & Kawan Guni?
Hwee Wen: Hmm, there have been customers asking if we plan to open a physical store. It’s not that we don’t want to, but there are definitely costs. And if we have a store, we’ll be staying in it waiting for customers to come to us. It’d be more passive.
Not having a physical store allows us to be more mobile. We can be more proactive in reaching out to people and travel more to promote the cause, especially now that we’re still at a stage where educating the public is essential. It’s like how a company launches a completely new product. You need to educate your target audience to create a demand. Although we do plan to increase our product range at PYNG, most of our efforts will be focused on Kawan Guni.
Rick: Yup, we feel there’s a lot of potential there. In the future, we intend to organize more events, but those won’t be the typical monthly events like what we have now. We want to make things more interesting and attractive to achieve even higher engagement. We also hope to get more people involved. We’ll be looking for more collaboration opportunities and plan to target corporates.
Denise: What are the most rewarding aspects of your work?
Hwee Wen: I’d say that it’s the participant return rate. We’ve been organizing Kawan Guni events for almost a year now. Customer retention is more than 70 percent and a lot of new people come to know about us through word-of-mouth. To us, these are all positive results because we don’t define success solely based on how many recyclables we collect. We measure the level of engagement. Quite a number of participants are millennials, too! This shows that more young people are joining in environmental causes.
Rick: Thinking back to when we organized the first Kawan Guni event in January, we wondered if there would even be a second one! But this 70 percent is proof that our belief and effort are worth it and we’re on the right track. We don’t have exponential growth like a commercial business, but we do see a steady graph in terms of our business growth.
The comments have also been very positive. People share with us that the event is very meaningful and agree that recycling should have been done this way all along. Our event is not the kind where they feel like, “Oh, I’m going to drop off my trash and leave immediately.” We see people slowing down, enjoying the clean environment, and coming over to our PYNG booth to purchase refills and zero waste products.
Hwee Wen: We understand that our work won’t lead to a rich and affluent lifestyle. But along this journey, we have gained so many stories and experiences. Our lives are enriched in other ways that money can’t buy.
Rick: What’s really meaningful to us is that, through our business, we can play a part in constructing something new and positive for our community, and let people see new possibilities and ways of doing things.
Links
PYNG Official Website | Shopee | Facebook | Instagram | Xiaohongshu
Kawan Guni Official Website | Facebook | Instagram
Notes
1. 环保 (huan bao) is the Chinese word for eco-friendly. However, many people use the term as a verb in everyday conversations. If someone says, “Let’s take [item] to huan bao“, an English translation of the sentence might read: “Let’s take [item] and handle it with an eco-friendly method.” The “method” is then commonly understood as “recycling.”
This interview was originally conducted in Chinese. English translation by Denise Lim.
