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How circular economy acts as an enabler to build sustainable societies
In this episode of Decoding Innovation, Keiran Smith, CEO and Co-Founder of Mr. Green Africa, discusses circular economy and how technology is changing the way plastic is recycled worldwide.
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Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts.
Sustainability has been of key focus in modern day living. Circular economy plays a key role in achieving sustainability by reaching maximum input efficiency using minimal resources, as well as reducing waste production. The regenerative economic system aims to achieve sustainability without diminishing existing products but to churn the “waste” into something useful via systematic shifts.
By extending the life of products, especially plastic, the natural capital that goes into recycling can be reduced. The life of plastic products can be extended by bringing in a loop of reuse, repair and remanufacturing products. Circular economy involves a clear distinction between technological and biological cycles that aims to rebuild all types of capital.
Keiran Smith is a disruptive innovator in the recycling space. The CEO and co-founder of Mr. Green Africa shares his insight on the right combinations and necessary understanding needed to implement circular economy for plastic recycling, and how Mr. Green Africa is paving the way to building a sustainable tomorrow.
Key takeaways:
- Circular economy holds a key role in building sustainable societies and can lead to increased efficiencies using minimal input resources and a connected ecosystem of capital.
- Awareness and technology are the biggest hurdles faced in plastic recycling that need immediate addressing.
- Connecting a commercial model with a sustainable, social-friendly model is the way to go for recycling plastic worldwide.
- Partnership element plays a key role in successful implementations of plastic recycling based on the circular economy approach.
For your convenience, full text transcript of this podcast is also available.
Intro
Recycling, unfortunately, is on the tail end of circular economy. The more we break through that barrier, it allows us to put more value on these packaging or these flexible or multilayer packaging that are out in the world that we can technically collect, just not put a high enough value to it for the waste-taking community making it worth their while.Announcer
Welcome to the Decoding Innovation podcast series, brought to you by the EY-Nottingham Spirk Innovation Hub, where we explore the innovative technologies, business models and ideas that are shaping the future of industries. During each episode, Mitali Sharma, a principal in the EY-Parthenon Strategy practice, meets with stakeholders at the cutting edge to discuss innovations in their space, challenges they need to overcome and their outlook on the future.Mitali Sharma
Hello and welcome. I'm your host, Mitali Sharma. And today's topic is circular economy, in particular plastic waste recycling. Our guest is Keiran Smith, the CEO and Co-founder of Mr. Green Africa, a company that specializes in collecting, converting and selling post-consumer plastic waste. Welcome to the show, Kieran.Keiran Smith
Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be on the show.Sharma
Keiran, before we get into the specifics of how you and your team are trying to solve one of the biggest issues facing our modern world, which is plastic recycling, would you mind sharing your background and your journey so far?Smith
Yes, sure, happy to. I had the privilege to grow up in Zurich, Switzerland, where I did my normal studies and ended up actually in the financial industry as a junior. And while I was there, I co-founded a company also in the recycling space, which is called Mr. Green in Switzerland. And while I was able to work as a part-time entrepreneur and in the financial industry, I realized a couple of things. Number one is that being in the financial industry, my impact, my contribution to society was very limited and that prompted me to be much more exposed into part time entrepreneurial world, where I realized that as well being able to contribute to society with activities like we were doing in Switzerland has much more impact. And they felt like magic. And one example that I always like to share is we started with an idea where we do a collection service. We put all recyclable materials in a bag, and you put those recycling bags outside of your house where we do the tour and we collect these bags. And one day I was walking down the street and I saw that it was a collection day of that street. And I saw many Mr. Green bags in the street. And I realized, wow, we were able to transform from an idea into our physical world, a product, a service, and whatnot. And so, it really felt like magic, that you were able to make a thought process and bring something and change your environment. And this is really powerful and impactful. So comparing the two worlds, financial industry and this part time entrepreneurial system or environment, I realized I'm a born entrepreneur and I want to contribute on this journey. That's pretty much my background.And I traveled out of curiosity. I traveled to Kenya and I was hooked by the emerging markets. They used to say, go west, young man, which is the United States or the Americas. And then 20 years ago, they said, go east, young man. And I think now is the time for people, especially for young people, to go south, where the emerging markets, the global south has a lot of opportunities to change the way we look at the world and the way we see the world and how we can transform and make more equality in this world. So that's in a nutshell how I ended up going to Kenya and I saw huge opportunities around the plastic recycling space that have already been exposed to. And I'll tell you a little bit more about how we originated.
Sharma
That's great. Thank you for sharing. Keiran, we'd like to start with the basics on this show. What does the word circular economy mean for you and why do you think plastic recycling is not really taken off globally?Smith
So, you know, at the time when we started Mr. Green Africa, the word circular economy was not as existent or prominent as it is today. Also the plastic recycling move and push, etc., was not existent. The word in its principal and I really love how when I was reading about it and when it emerged more and how we started realizing how we fit into this equation, it pretty much means copying and adapting to how nature works. That's the core meaning of the circular economy and thinking of somebody else’s waste or a certain wastage or outdated elements that we have in nature is actually an input for another element of nature. And that's the word circular economy. I think the best example is a leaf from the tree is nutritional for the soil. It decomposes as it is, provides some nutrition for the soil. And the soil picks it up and enables the organisms in the soil to start working.And I think that's really the core meaning of circular economy. If we look at our economies or the system, especially the capitalistic system, how it has been built, it's very linear. And I think this transformation from linear to circular is something very critical and enables really the generations beyond us to kind of enjoy mother nature the way we have been able to enjoy mother nature so far. And then if we take plastic recycling, I think recycling, unfortunately, is on the tail end of circular economy. The closest part of circular economy is reusing something that we have already produced. The second part is trying to kind of dismantle elements from the products that we've created and bring elements back into product, so not removing the state of the product. That's most closely to the concept of circular economy and recycling is actually has a lot to do with decomposing and bringing it back into either the same or different applications. And in the plastic recycling, there's a huge, huge opportunity for us to think this way, especially in our outer recycling part, where we can bring back some of these resources that we've produced back into the state. And the ultimate goal is from packaging to packaging or bottle to bottle. That's the highest and closest form of plastic recycling toward circular economy. And with today's technologies, we have some limitations to get there, but I think that's how we fit in and can contribute. But ultimately it applies to any material stream that we see and find and work with as a society or human beings.
Sharma
So what in your mind, has been the biggest challenge in recycling plastics in particular?Smith
Awareness, you know, awareness of the people who produce the waste or the plastic waste, enabling them in a convenient way and an easy way in a cost-effective way, and bringing back their resources that they produce with wasting or consumption into a system that facilitates a circular plastics economy. This is a key barrier at number one, and number two are technologies that will facilitate the conversion from waste back into value and keep it in to its highest form of state. So, there are these words we call about when we talk recycling, upcycling and downcycling. Upcycling meaning can we bring a product from a bottle or a packaging back into something that is more valuable, which is upcycling. The true form of recycling would actually be from a bottle back into a bottle, which would already be great. And unfortunately, today most technologies only allow us to go from a bottle back into another product which is less valuable. And I think number two, when we talk about technology in unlocking or the full circularity or recycling aspect of our material streams with plastics as well is a barrier that we need to overcome.But on that part, I'm very, very hopeful because if we compare the solar industry around 20 years ago, it required a really big panel to produce a little bit of energy at a really high cost. And if we fast forward to today, we have much smaller panels, producing much more energy at a much more effective cost. And I think the same transformation or evolution we will go through with the focus we have today in processing technologies in the plastic recycling space. So I'm very hopeful there that we will be able to make smaller lines, better quality that will fit back into either the full recycling aspect or upcycling aspect of it. So awareness and technology, I think, are the biggest hurdles that we face.
Sharma
So that's perfect segue into Mr. Green Africa and the technologies that you are deploying uniquely to solve this problem. Can you talk to us more about that?Smith
Funny enough, what we as Mr. Green Africa do, it's actually somewhere in between of awareness, convenience for people who produce the waste or the consumer who produces the waste, and technology. And especially with this focus on the global south. So, when we focus on the global south, we have a lot of marginalized people who are already collecting plastic waste. But if you want to put it plainly or simply, they're cleaning up after people's ignorance, wasting and littering, etc. And if they were not there, things would be much more difficult and challenging in various different countries in the global south.Sharma
When you say global south, what do you mean? And I think you're talking about pickers who go out and pick the plastic waste from dump yards and places like that. Could you explain that a little bit for our audience benefit?Smith
When I talk about the global south, I talk about Latin America, I'm talking about African countries and nations, I’m talking about Southeast Asia, India, and countries that have a lot of similarities when we talk about plastic recycling or waste solutions that are there. The infrastructure is not as developed as it is in the global north, where you have Europe, the United States, you have Canada. There's a lot of things that have been implemented in terms of system by governments. And for nations of the global south, we don't see that or it's not there yet. And as an effect of that, we have huge waste challenges. As you mentioned, dumpsites, illegal dumpsites, littering into rivers, ending up into oceans, etc. So, there's a lot of cause-and-effect relationship there. And that's just an environmental problem. And on top of it, we have a social problem as well, where we have a lot of poor people, marginalized people, homeless people who try to make a living and survive.And one way for waste pickers, as you mentioned, is to pick valuable waste and sell them for a living. When we started, Mr. Green Africa, we realized those two elements, the environmental challenge and the social challenge that we see, because when the waste pickers go around, they do it under very poor circumstances. They're exposed to hazardous waste, exposed to burning landfills. They're exposed to all sorts of health elements doing the job right. And of course, from a societal perspective, they do it also in a very undignified way. I mean, society looks down on them. Nobody wants to be associated with waste pickers. For us, when we started Mr. Green Africa, that was of course like, how can we give them visibility? Because they're truly heroes, if you think about it. I mean, they're cleaning up after people's waste in such a way that we don't live on a dumpsite overall. It could be much worse if they would not be active. So that recognition, that understanding of these two elements was really the core foundation of why we started Mr. Green Africa. Coming back to the solution of what we are doing and why we are there is really about the concept of how can we integrate this informal waste collection community into a more formal system, and make them part of a functioning, scalable, replicable system where they are still collecting but in a much more dignified way, in a much more productive way, and aggregating plastic waste through that system and bringing it back in and serving it or kind of supplying it to enable full circularity of plastics, so high quality. And so, Mr. Green Africa is built on two foundations and solutions, if you will, where we make the informal market part of it. So number one is we leverage technology. This is software and hardware technology or processing technology. Software technology we're using to register people, to pay them in real time and to facilitate many small transactions that we do to pay the waste picker community and kind of like put that inclusive, fair-trade layer on top of it, which segues into the second aspect of it which is anything we do is local, fair, transparent and inclusive. And by local, I mean not only including the waste picker community into the transaction and enabling them to pay at a higher price to Mr. Green Africa. But also processing locally because ultimately, we're talking of a commodity here. And so if we think about commodities, there's also many instances of how the global supply chains work is that you extract the commodity from the country of origin, and you do the high value addition, you do outside of that country of origin. You take tea, coffee, banana, and many, many elements of trade chains where you see that not happening in terms of local processing. And for us from day one, it was very clear that we would do the local processing aspect and convert the plastic waste that we do buy back from the communities into the highest possible quality and form within the country of origin.
And so that's the technology that we bring to the table and the solution is a blend of off-the-shelf processing technologies, an inclusive approach on how we integrate the waste picking communities and other marginalized communities who want to make a living of collecting plastic waste into one format and making them ultimately part of the solution. We think with this, we can truly address the two issues, environmental issues, extracting more at scale, at speed, waste out of the environment, and two, solving to some extent the social challenges that we face in a much fairer transactional conditions, much fairer in health and safety conditions for the communities. And I think that's the solution that we bring contextually in our markets or where we intend to operate, which is predominantly the global south.
Sharma
So, there was a lot to unpack there. Let's start with the first phase, which is the plastic pickers. How do you ensure that the quality of the stuff that they're picking is what you would want? Do you train them, or do you interact with them, or they're already doing it and you're just enabling it with the technology as you mentioned?Smith
One thing to note is that that community is super smart, and they understand obviously the economics. They understand input and output of their time and value that they can extract. The easiest way for us to train them and show them how they can extract the most value is to show which types of pieces of plastics are we attributing to value and we pay for that. It's pretty much a price element, a street value to a certain packaging that we put, and that will enable them very quickly to understand which packaging to prioritize in their collection activities versus others.There is also this notion of how we can increase street value for the stuff that is unvaluable today. That will have a huge impact on the community who is picking today because they can unlock much more income for the same activity because as they pick one bottle, the other bottle that they see on the street, they could pick as well. They just don't do it because they know it will be not worth their while. But the moment it is worth their while, they will certainly start engaging. So it's these two aspects of showing them and creating street value of the things that have value today, but also enabling them to unlock more value over time with leveraging new technologies for things that are today not valuable, but we can turn it into more about.
Sharma
So, talk to me a little bit about the technologies that you are currently deploying and what do you see coming in the future?Smith
Right now, Mr. Green Africa supply chain is set up on mechanical recycling, which is the oldest form of recycling, also at the moment, from an energy efficiency perspective, the most viable form to plastic recycling. And at the moment we are doing that on the polyolefins HTP and PP rigid plastics and we're about to do it on PT food grade, bottle to bottle. So, easy types of packaging that one can recognize. So, excluding flexible packaging, that's what we're focusing on converting on in terms of aggregating, processing and selling back as a high quality, post-consumer recycled. And in the future, I would say there's a lot of conversations ongoing and trials ongoing on advanced/chemical recycling technologies.The entire barriers there are just around energy efficiency, the energy we put in, the value that we get out, etc. But I see those elements, mechanical recycling and advanced chemical recycling complimentary to each other in the future. And as we look forward in ten years from now, I think these energy efficiency balances will become much more efficient, especially on the advanced and chemical recycling space. And this is really exciting, because the more we break through that barrier, it allows us to put more value on these packaging or these flexible or multilayer packaging that are out in the world that we can technically collect, just not put a high enough value to it for the waste taking community to make it worth their while.
Sharma
Is cleaning of that plastic a major issue that you collect?Smith
We do it through the mechanical recycling process. In terms of major issue, contamination is an issue. But the quicker you collect the bottle and back to our point of value, the more value that bottle has, the less long it will lie around, and the less contaminated it will be. But today's technology allows you to convert highly contaminated materials into high quality. So it is possible, it's just a higher wear and tear to your machinery, which you just need to make part of your business model.Sharma
This is interesting. So what you've done here is, you have somehow been able to connect a commercial model with a sustainable, socially friendly model so you can get more value if you collect a better bottle, and that motivates the picker to get you the right bottle. And of course, in doing that, gets them more money out of the system. Your website mentions technology models for collection, cleaning and obviously converting. Could you talk to us about those models?Smith
Sure. So, when we talk about technology, we differentiate among two things. One is software technology and the other one is processing technology. And processing technology, I have just touched on earlier, the mechanical recycling, cleaning the plastics. And these are off-the-shelf technologies that we buy from the different markets and vendors who create these technologies. That's not rocket science. The rocket science that we've done on this processing technology, we brought them into context of the Kenyan market, for example. We make them work in the context of our market, in the context of contamination, in the context of from how we get it to run it through this machinery. But that's not the rocket science part. And if you look at mechanical recycling, there are two key elements. You sort of separate the plastic by type and by color. You wash it, you run it through a rigorous washing process, and then you go into an extrusion process, which means you melt down the plastic, you keep it in its state and form, and then you turn it into a post-consumer recycled, which is a pellet very similar to the form and state to the virgin plastics. And so we're just using off the shelf technologies and one of our key partners that helps us to convert from washed flakes into high-quality pellets is one of the leading processing technology companies in the world when it comes to mechanical recycling now. So that's the processing technology piece.I've mentioned the software technology piece. There, we have to do a little bit more in-house development and custom-made activities to enable the business to do many small transactions. For example, when a waste picker comes, they typically bring between five and 20 kilos of plastic waste to one of our biotech centers. And there we try to solve a couple of things to facilitate this transaction. And that's where we brought software technology. So, in a nutshell, we developed kind of a reverse point of sale system at the biotech centers that allows us to register a new picker who comes and wants to supply plastic to us. If they're already registered to come to the station, to the biotech center, they mention their ID, their Mr. Green ID, and then from there on, we start the transaction. We select the material that we can buy, the qualities, we weigh them, and then automatically from the weight-based system, it enables us to say, okay, this, this how many kilos you brought, this is the price. And this is how much you can get paid. It calculates automatically what you earned in that transaction. And then you have, again, a couple of choices, either get paid directly through the mobile wallet, on your electronic wallets and you get your money, or you get cash, or you can choose how you would like to have the payment. So facilitating those many small transactions worth between one and US$2 or US$5, to facilitate that and do that at scale, we have to build a software technology, kind of like an app, a point of sale system that allows us to do all these small elements and transactional elements that are required for us to have traceability, transparency in the value chain, but also do it in an economically viable way. So that's what we've built and can use now for many stations, for many biotech centers across the world.
Sharma
I'm curious about the fact that you're not from Africa yet you decided to do this in Kenya. Were you familiar with the geography or the environment that you were getting into?Smith
Not at all. And that's part of the great things to be an entrepreneur. They say an entrepreneur is someone who jumps off the cliff and builds a plane on the way down, and of course, there are many nuances that you have to learn around people, around culture, around how things are being done and how much time that he can take to do a certain thing. But, you know, that's the exciting part that we were able to go. My co-founder and I were able to go through this journey and building the essence of Mr. Green Africa, you know, and we always joke, we didn't realize that we actually have to build three businesses. We had to build the business of collection, aggregation, and buying back plastic. We had to build the business of converting plastic waste into value with the recycling, the manufacturing piece. And we had to build the business of selling this product that we're producing back into the right supply chain. Working with brand owners who are keen to buy high quality, locally produced, and kind of fully transparent, fairly sourced, recycled plastic, and getting it into their packaging, right?So doing that was also novel at that time. And putting these three pieces together was part of this journey. And coming back to your question, it's exciting part to do it in a completely new field and very early on. So, when we started, as I mentioned earlier, nobody was talking about circular economy. Nobody was talking about the need for plastic recycling. And we just simply did it to redistribute value in a local value chain where nobody else was doing it. We had a little bit of a competitive or pioneer market advantage to do many mistakes, to learn a lot, to do it slowly, five steps forward and ten steps backwards, and ultimately end up where we are today.
Sharma
That gets me to the genesis of the idea. Where did you come up with Mr. Green first and then Mr. Green Africa idea and why did you pick Kenya, not another country in Africa if you even wanted to get to Africa?Smith
The funny part about this is, the spirit of both Mr. Green’s, Mr. Green in Switzerland and Mr. Green Africa that we've started in Kenya, that the core and the spirit of it is that we do a purpose-led business. While we're doing good financially, we can do good socially and environmentally. Those things can be co-inherited and actually are connected with each other rather than just being driven financially and profitably and then do something good for our good consciousness. So basically, you can't make money without doing good. The spirits of these of these two businesses are the exact thing. Now, how did we end up doing it in Kenya? It was very clear that this opportunity with waste pickers, there's like 20 million waste pickers in the global south practice. Yeah. Why Kenya? Why not another country? The main reason is many African nations at that time, when we started eight years ago, were on the verge of growing really fast, a middle-income society growing really fast.There was a transition of doing pen and paper elements to technology-driven elements. The fact that we have a huge scale and adaptation of mobile money in Kenya, those were all indicators that there's a huge opportunity for us to integrate this technology thinking, this redistribution of value thinking in a country where there's little to none of waste collection infrastructure and a huge group of marginalized waste pickers. So that was a key part of our decision to start in Kenya. And I don't know if you've ever been to Kenya, but the people in Kenya are very entrepreneurial, and it's an amazing country. Amazing weather, and it felt like home when I arrived there, and I could have really imagined myself to spend the rest of my life to build this business there. And those are also very soft factors that you need to take into account. You can't build a business somewhere where you don't like living. And so, that's how we ended up starting in Kenya. And we knew that Kenya or Nairobi has to scale the business model requires in order for us to crack and scale into, we can do it profitably. And from there out start replicating it to other sections of the global south.
Sharma
I'm really, really curious about the partnership element and your funding mechanism, but before we get into that, we have talked a lot about the front end of the collection, cleaning or even processing. There's the back end where value is created, meaning, you know, you end up selling it to customers, and they give you the value for your product, which enables the whole cycle to go through. So, if we were to talk about your customers right now, which industries were the first takers of what you were selling? And going forward, where do you think it could go?Smith
We had to do a lot of business development in that space. We had perfect timing where a lot of multinational, fast moving consumer goods companies have promised to the world to use recycled material in their packaging. And that was around 2016 with really huge commitments. Bringing our value proposition that I've hinted before, high quality local availability and full traceability into the supply chain, if you will, was not an easy task because we're talking of technical validation of the product. To have a validation that, yes, our material quality is technically sound to be applied into the packaging, safe for the consumer, etc. And then the whole notion of what is the price that we will be paying, there was not a benchmark. And so, developing this together with the customers was a very critical point. And today, we were at a point where we say we can be very close to par with the price of virgin or it even starts detaching itself from a virgin price environment, where the value proposition becomes very clear. Sustainable manufacturing, local availability, local impact, environmental impact, all of these elements are critical for their goals that they have set.So when we talk about this and we've launched the exciting news in early 2020, we've launched in East Africa the first packaging made out of 100% recycled material that was locally collected, locally recycled, locally made into packaging again. And what did this do? This demonstrated that it is possible to do it locally, to do it at high quality and to do it sustainably. The effect of that is that all other brand owners have to recognize that it is possible and they can do it too.
And just recently we've been able to now even pivot. So this is just FMCG industry. Consumer packaging industry. If we look at the plastic industry, it is so diverse, so and we've just been able to launch conversations with the automotive industry as well. There are many applications that you can bring your plastic recycled materials back into the automotive industry – car parts in various different aspects of any transportation vehicles, etc., which is really exciting. And I've completely underestimated how ready and how big the automotive industry is and how much potential we have to also through that industry from the impact that we're looking to do.
Sharma
Keiran, you talked about specifications being very different for different industries, how did you figure that out? Because that's an uphill battle on itself. When you were talking about recycled materials, how do you ensure that the material grade is what your client is looking for?Smith
There's a couple of things to unpack in that question because, number one, how did we find out that there are certain specifications is? There was always the myth of the industry saying, you know, recycled material, we can use it. But from its technical aspects, it's always inferior to the virgin. And because of that, it has to have less value. So that's how the recycling industry, the last two or three decades has been operating. Yes, you can recycle. Yes, you can bring it to a certain specification, but it's never as good as virgin plastic. That was a technicality that the industry was facing. Now when brand owners come in for this push and they said, we want to start using recycled material, there was always this push and pull, it can never be as good as virgin. So what are the things that we need to give in on as brand owners now? And what are the things that recyclers need to upgrade to, to get to a certain level? So where can we meet in the middle? That was the requirement that needed to happen. And that was a key barrier for the industry to unlock value out of recycled material from both ends, for recyclers and for brand owners. And what we did on a very micro level with one brand owner on one product is to see where we can meet in the middle. We tried our very best to get to the highest possible outcome in terms of quality, color specifications, purity specifications. Because there are multiple plastic fractions in the world. If you mix them all, they have no value. If you separate them well and you have a pure form of HDPE, again, you can have much higher value. So us understanding that there's things we can do, and the brand owners understanding that there are things they can start being less restrictive on, that's meeting in the middle. And that's what we have to do on a very micro level. And we've been able to successfully do, as I mentioned. And I think that's what also is happening now in the world. As we see what technologies are unlocking or enabling quality or upgrading qualities from a recycling point of view, and just from a brand owner view, acknowledging that there are certain limitations that recycling truly can do versus virgin material and meeting in the middle will unlock this.Sharma
So in other words, if I can summarize it, what you're talking about is figuring out what is the minimum requirement needed from the brand perspective. So there are some things that are must haves and some things that are good to have. You narrowed your focus on the must haves and then try to meet those, is that right?Smith
Precisely, yeah.Sharma
If you were to look back on your history, what would be some of the things you would do differently?Smith
Wow, good question. I would do different is number one, I would put much more money in people. And what do I mean by that? We started off of hiring people with much lower salary requirements. Much more inexperienced, who believed in the journey or who didn't even understand the journey, but it was work for them. And what I would do differently very, very early on is bring together top-notch talent to contribute and pay for that talent to contribute to the journey. Because you can do much less mistakes. And when you do them, you can take the learnings in such a way that you capture these learnings and not do the same mistakes again. And I think that is a very critical piece, there's so much great talent out there, but you have to pay for it. And I would do that from day one. Get a great team together, pay well from day one. And I think the outlook of where we would be today would perhaps be a bit different, same outcome, but maybe a bigger scale, more relevance, more stability, etc. So that's one. Two, I would probably try to focus on one of the three businesses that we have built more longer, as I mentioned, we built three businesses in one, the collection side, the manufacturing side, the selling side, they're all critical. And because we did them all together, we are where we are. But I think we could have much more relevance if we would have started with one piece and make that bigger before going into the other pieces. So, I think that I would do differently.Sharma
Thank you, Keiran, for telling us about the two things that you could have done differently. But I'm just going to give you a counterargument, and we'd love to get your thoughts on it. It seems like you're saying you should have picked one of the three businesses, but maybe the counterargument to that was the fact that you had all three in the value chain enabled you to get the value of your product and complete the cycle that has kept you in business. What are your thoughts?Smith
We've asked ourselves this question a lot. It is true that having done all three has brought us where we are and have been able to prove that selling high quality into the value chains is possible. So the business model in its completeness, we've been able to do. Now, why I stated that in my explanation of what I would do differently is, we now still have three elements that we need to build strongly in order to make them ready for scale. And we always had the conviction that once we get the collection right, we can do the mechanical or the processing part right, and we can do the selling part right. This conviction in the journey, if we kept true to this conviction and focused on having the collection part right, and bring that to a certain scale and relevance, we could now do much easier the step-up in the value chain when it comes to processing, when it comes to selling it into the markets. We didn't have the data points at that time and hence that’s why we decided we going to go into these steps to create the data points that we can do and now bring all the three to the next level. But where I am today, I do see that bringing all three elements to the next level is a big endeavor, and has its complexity on its own, versus having built a strong collection system at the relevant scale would made the technical aspects of it, of turning and converting and selling it into a market at some point, much easier because what the scale we really need is collection, not so much the processing and the selling because processing selling is very technical and you can buy it into the business.Sharma
So this has been fascinating. Just to round out the conversation for an entrepreneur starting on a journey of passion where they might be like you, not know everything about it. What would be your advice?Smith
As I went through this journey, I started pretty young, quitting my job, moving to a new country, moving into a new environment and building a business also helps you find yourself because you get exposed to many, many challenges, many problems, many uncertainties. And what helped me or what I realized that I had to do is, get really a good understanding of my own core value system. What is my value system? What is it that I can compromise and what is it that I cannot compromise on? Once you figured out this values system for yourself, it makes making decisions much more easy. Not easy, because hard decisions are always hard and they really remain hard. But it makes it easier, and it makes it better for you to stand by once you made a decision. So I think that is my key advice for any acting and new, incoming entrepreneur.Sharma
Thank you so much, Keiran.Smith
Most welcome.Announcer
The Decoding Innovation podcast series is a limited production of the EY-Nottingham Spirk Innovation Hub, based in Cleveland, Ohio. For more information, visit our website at ey.com/decodinginnovation. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe. Leave a review wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to spread the word.The views of third parties set out in this podcast are not necessarily the views of the global EY organization or its member firms. Moreover, they should be seen in the context of the time they were made.
Presenters
Mitali Sharma
Former host, Decoding Innovation podcast