At ReCircled – we have literally gotten our hands dirty handling millions of items – learning what is possible, what is scalable, what needs attention, and what has no hope. So here's the deal, you can base your Responsibility/Sustainability strategy on ‘Hope” or what someone told you to do, or you can base it on reality. With all due respect, if you had a crisis in your personal life, would you base it on hope or in reality? It's time for our industry to jump into reality!
At ReCircled, we developed the TPV (Time, Purity, Value) formula. Quick refresher. The time it takes to harvest material at the purist level which yields the greatest value.
The equation really works when you start from the end with Value. Value can be created in many ways – Monetary, Environmental, PR, Goodwill.
Pick a component that as a company you find valuable. Keep in mind with recycled content, the Environmental value can be higher than Virgin – but not all of the time. Monetarily, it's really hard to create value, prices for recycled content is usually higher and the actual content is inferior to virgin content. Maybe it is a PR play – you want to create some PR using your own recycled content. This is most of the “Circular Economy” activity today, a one time PR/Project play.
We happen to agree with you. This will never scale. The Circular Economy is simply about Projects, not scale. The project size can get larger as we find and develop ways to bring the expense down - but at the foreseeable future they are simply projects.
The real end game for everyone should be scale. Just like a personal issue in your life, you are going to seek out the experts. The experts in creating Circular Solutions are actually touching, feeling, getting their hands dirty learning the issues and finding the solutions.
Do us a favor – look through the SKU’s of your brand. What percentage is mixed waste? The good news, we have developed Robotic/Automated solutions for helping you with the “Projects” – the “Scale” is something completely different.
We invite you to engage in reframing the conversation. It's a different conversation from those being held 5 years ago. If you're ready to open your mind after years of little progress, we welcome you to join us in moving the needle forward. It's time to move from projects to Scale. It's time to Think Differently.
