FEATURED TOPIC – AUSTRALIAN MADE
Consider it done JEFF GRACE, GENERAL MANAGER AT EASYQUIP, LIFTS THE LID ON AN AUSTRALIAN SUCCESS STORY.
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hen Greg Beer began making welded-steel bins from a factory in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley he welded the number 01 into the first bin he made. In February 2022, Easyquip stamped its 61,391st bin. Skip bins, hook lift bins and waste handling equipment manufactured from the Morwell site are now used by some of the biggest players in the nation’s waste and recycling sector including Cleanaway, Veolia and Suez. The company has come a long way from its origins in the back shed of another business to help someone in need. What hasn’t changed is the value that “it can be done”. “It’s part of the company all the way through,” Jeff Grace, General Manager says. “We’re not afraid to try something new.” It’s that “can-do” attitude that led Greg to start the business in 1993. As Jeff tells it, a local depot truck needed some repair work and nobody in town would take on the project. “It might have had something to do with the repairs being inside the compactor body and there was still half a load of rubbish in it,” Jeff laughs. But Greg was undeterred and, working in the back shed of another business, he got the truck fixed and back on the road. His determination was rewarded with more work from waste collection companies, and he began manufacturing bins not long after. The company changed its name to Easyquip in 2009. “Keeping that ‘it can be done’ attitude, we wanted both our equipment
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Australian manufacturing has always been a key part of Easyquip’s strategy.
and business to be easy to deal with,” Jeff says. He says the core business has always been manufacturing equipment for waste collection companies. Australian manufacturing has been a key part of the strategy. “The Latrobe Valley can be a difficult place to get employment,”
Jeff says. “One of Greg’s motivating factors in going into business initially was to provide good employment opportunities.” Easyquip started a manufacturing plant in Brisbane, Queensland in June 2017. The company now employs more than 60 people across two sites and supplies much
