Only 6% of the world’s plastic is actually recycled: the rest is either burned, dumped in a landfill, or ends up in the ocean. In fact, 8 million m2 tons of plastics are dumped in the ocean every year. 11% of the methane in the earth’s atmosphere comes from trash, and being that methane is up to 88 times stronger than CO2 for global warming, this is another major concern.
These are some of the numbers that come from the recycling industry, and they clearly show a failed model. And why is that? Basically because people do not care about recycling. And, in all honesty, they should not.
Let’s be honest: what is for them? If they recycle properly, nothing happens. If they don’t, they get punished. It may be a note on their garbage bins from the local trash collection service informing of its refusal to collect the garbage, it could be a fine, it could be even up to 4 years imprisonment in the case of UK for fly-tipping.
Thus, we are in front of a stick instead of a carrot model. One that only punishes and never rewards. One that throws the entire burden of responsibility on its shoulders. One that will not consider that the producer of the improperly produced product is also responsible.
And this is actually a no brainer. For whenever we see on TV some dead sea critter being cut open and showing a bunch of consumer products it is not “John Doe” that shows in the labels of those products, but major brands.
And while those major brands publish pretty webpages with pictures of little girls blowing dandelions to claim on how green they are, the hard fact is that they are not. Just like with the beginning of the internet (I saw that), when they would publish a pretty webpage saying they were now “digital” when all they had was that very same webpage.
The solution? To change the status quo to a carrot model. One which effectively rewards people for recycling their products. And for that we need money. Which the current model is unable to provide as it depends on the sale of MATERIALS which do not pay well such as paper, plastic, metal, etc
But DATA is expensive. In fact, it has been dubbed “The New Oil”. So a model based on the sale of data should be perfectly able to reward for recycling.
This is the vision of my company TeknTrash. To collect data from end of product life cycle and provide it to companies so they can compare it to their sales data and thus understand their consumers better which means more sales which means being able to pay for the data service.
And to that end we created Stipra, which is a loyalty card for disposal. So, just like people get points from some loyalty card when they buy something, now they also get points from our loyalty card when they dispose that something. And those points can be traded for a number of perks.
All, while providing companies not only with post-sales data, but real ESG benefits, as now they can effectively say “We really care about the environment and to that end we will give you points if you prove to us you disposed our products properly”. And they can get real carbon credits from saying “Thanks to our reward, our products were disposed properly and thus did not generate methane”.
So, we effectively created a new business model. Which is what a startup should do. Something I learned after having created 5 in 4 countries. Still, it is a hard sale. And the reason is because there is so much greenwashing in this industry that people understandably look at us with mistrust. Good that I am a biologist, our ESG Director has a PHD in Microbiology from Imperial College, and he is led by a world known scientist who denounced Iran’s improper water management practices.
So, it is a new model and I’ve learned it is not an easy path, but things are moving quickly: we just opened operations in USA and raised funds, so that is reassuring. And, finally being also the son of a diplomat and having lived in poor countries and also a christian, I am so glad this company can create an effective source of income to people in those countries or out of a job in developed ones. Because a startup should also have social impact.
