ENVIE was founded by Bruno Lallemand in 1985 as a non-profit organization. It started as an organization which hired young people to sell used white goods. To increase more employment opportunities, it extended its business to collection, refurbishment, and dismantling of white goods. The machine parts recovered can be recycled. After a few years, ENVIE wanted to replicate its business model in other cities, and a non-profit franchise model was finally formed. Their management philosophy is to create a stringent quality system, which controls the quality of services and products in different branches (e.g. standard operating procedure, standardized collecting, refurbishing and training processes). By 2004, its sales reached 21 million euro, and created 587 social positions.

http://www.envie.org/