Leamington-born businessman helping to solve some of the world’s waste issues

By Mark Ribble

Leamington native Ben Wiper has travelled to many far-off corners of the world, but the corner of the world he currently resides in has given way to the launch of a new successful and sustainable business.

After studying economics and philosophy, Ben — the son of Barb and Terry Wiper of Leamington — took a job with Research in Motion, the company now known as Blackberry, in the Waterloo area.

“I left Blackberry just as they moved from the pager-style email device to the first real handheld smartphone,” he told the Sun.

His next stop was in South Korea where he taught English for about 18 months and then spent four months travelling throughout southeast Asia, visiting exotic places like Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and China along the way.

“That enabled me to save money to start my own business,” he said.

That first business was a Nerds on Site franchise in Nova Scotia, where he inched a little closer to his hometown by settling on the east coast of Canada. He managed to grow the business with 10-times annual sales and grew the staff from three to nine employees.

He soon landed in Chester, Nova Scotia — “a drinking town with a sailing problem” — where he learned to sail and became the president of the local chamber of commerce.

He had lots of clients in the fishing business, which began to open up new opportunities in different areas, including a two-year stint at a salmon company in the finance department, helping them bring sales up over 300 per cent.

From there, he began to do some consulting with a fish processor in Main Brook, Newfoundland, eventually moving there to work with the processor. That deal eventually

fell through, but Ben had an epiphany of sorts, realizing that there was a different kind of opportunity presenting itself.

“I loved the region and saw an opportunity in taking the abundant and underutilized fish, farm and forest by-products of northern Newfoundland and use technology to turn it into high value products like cosmetic and pharma ingredients, such as collagen,” he says.

“I had never made anything tangible in my career, just spreadsheets and presentations,” he says. “I wanted to get into manufacturing. I looked at what I had to work with in my region that had the best business case and aligned with government priorities for funding, and waste-to-value was it.”

That waste-to-value business model spawned his business — 3F Waste Recovery — which has flourished in the northern peninsula of Newfoundland.

Wiper says he felt compelled to do something in that economically depressed region, which he felt needed real infrastructure and manufacturing jobs.

“It was the clearest path to demonstrate our core purpose as a company and that doing good is good business,” he added.

Wiper explains that the difference between ‘upcycling’ and ‘recycling’ is that with recycling, it generally focuses on diverting from landfills and either converting the material to be used for the same purpose using a relatively low-tech, easy to manufacture process.

“Upcycling differs for me, in that it leverages biotechnologies and clean technologies (biochemistry and advanced engineering for example) to transform a waste into a high value product, used in new applications or industries than the original product from which it originated,” he said.

He’s very aware of the world and how it has finite resources, with a growing population and an increasingly unstable climate, and believes that closing the loop on our by-product streams minimizes the pressure on the planet and gives it time to heal.

“We cant just throw stuff in the composters and call it a day,” he says. “That’s not going to save us.”

Wiper now resides between Roddington, Newfoundland, and St. John’s, where he lives with his partner Hailee Keats and their Shitzu ‘Scotti’.

The company produces cod skin treats and chew sticks under the Collaskins

brand, being carried in Sobeys stores and by independent retailers across Canada, and also on their website. They have a farm called Zero Waste Farms, where they compost seafood, sawdust, manure, kelp, shrimp shells and cod parts.

They have also branched out into freeze dried cod skins and propeller clams, as well as freeze dried apple, strawberry and banana treats for pets which are called Collaskins Freez-Its.

And as if that doesn’t keep he and his crew busy enough, they have started a pilot project, venturing into the world of pharmaceutical-grade collagen, which he hopes will eventually lead to the 3D printing of organs and tissues for the medical industry.

“Picture a world where there’s no more need for live human transplants,” he says. “No more waitlists.”

All-in-all, you could say the young man from Leamington, Ontario — where tomatoes have ruled the roost for so many years — is leading the way in seafood and farm waste recovery across the globe.

As for the possibility of applying his technology locally, he’s already on that.

“We’ve had conversations with Essex County fish processors about their fish skin supplies,” he said.

He’s enlisted the help of his brother Jeff and sister-in-law Melissa, who own a retail shop on Pelee Island — a favourite relaxation spot of their late grandparents.

“Jeff and Melissa have the distribution rights for Collaskins in Ontario and if we can find a secure, sufficient supply of local Lake Erie fish skins, we may just add lake fish skins to our product catalog,” says Ben.

The company has also been featured in Reader’s Digest and other major publications.

You can learn more about 3F Waste Recovery on their website at 3fwasterecovery.ca.

Putting fish waste through a wood-chipper to start the production of farm and seafood waste compost, another product produced by 3F Waste Recovery in Newfoundland. All photos courtesy of 3F Waste Recovery

3F Waste Recovery’s Cod Collaskin Bites are an all-natural pet treat.

BEN WIPER