Beyond the Skills: What ReMA's Mentorship Program Actually Does

By Siam Sukkhee Trading Co., Ltd — 2026-10-05 — ISRI (Institute of Scrap)

A program that started as a vision in 2019 quietly became one of the most useful things ReMA has built.

When Brandi Harleaux and Nidhi Turakhia first conceptualized the Women in Recycling mentorship program, they weren't thinking small. Then in 2024, when additional improvements rolled in—better mentor-mentee matching through participant assessments, more professional development events, corporate sponsorships for celebrations—the thing started to move with real momentum. That's the point where something stops being a good idea and becomes something people actually use.

Here's what actually matters about this program, though. Everyone talks about skills transfer and career development, which are real things. But the actual value sits somewhere else entirely.

The recycled materials industry faces a brutal set of problems that a spreadsheet won't solve: workforce succession, knowledge retention, expertise that walks out the door when someone retires. You can't teach someone thirty years of yard wisdom in a two-hour training session. That's the gap mentorship fills. Not textbook stuff. Real-world insights, patterns, judgment calls made over decades.

Actually, that understates it.

What the program creates—and this matters more than people admit—is an actual relationship. Two people meeting once a month, talking about their work, their challenges, their ambitions. Friendships form. Networks expand. Someone new to the industry has someone who can answer the question they were too nervous to ask. Someone established gets reminded why they stayed in this work. That collaborative spirit ripples through an entire sector.

The matching process is deliberate—questionnaires, evaluation, intentional pairing around shared values and goals. Mentor and mentee pairs commit to meeting at least monthly for a year. There's structure, but the real work happens in the conversations.

This is particularly sharp in a sector that's still male-dominated, where women need someone in the room who understands both the business and the particular pressures of working in it. The program knows this. It was built for that reason. But over time it expanded beyond gender—it's open to all ReMA members now, anyone from newcomers to industry veterans.

Is this revolutionary? No. Is it necessary? Absolutely. Every industry with depth, with knowledge worth preserving, needs this. Mentorship works because it's not about filling a skills gap so much as it's about pulling someone into the actual community of people who do this work.

Source: "Mentorship matters, especially in an industry as hands-on, fast-moving, and experience-driven as recycling." — Recycling Product News

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