Enhancing Value in the Circular Economy

Your bio:

Stan Chen’s passion for sustainability along with 20+ years of experience in the recycling industry has inspired him to design ever-innovative solutions for the recycling industry, the economy, and the environment. Stan serves as both CEO of RecycleGO Inc., a US-based recycling technology and service provider, and President of United Metal Recycling, a recycling facility. A born mentor, Stan has spoken at the Virtual Blockchain Conference and the Future Horizons Conference, as well as mentored at Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition’s hackathon for social impact use-cases of blockchain. Pre-Covid, Stan was selected to be a delegate of a US Department of Commerce sponsored trade mission to Malaysia and Indonesia, and was scheduled to speak at ISRI and SWANA national conventions. Dedicated to international human, economic and environmental health, Stan works with global organizations to improve recycling economies and supply chain efficiency.

Project name:

Enhancing Value in the Circular Economy

One-line project summary:

RecycleGO's blockchain introduces economic value to recycled material by validating recycling efforts and proving brand sustainable impact.

Present your project.

RecycleGO offers a blockchain platform to help businesses, governments and citizens align efforts to prove recycling efforts and reduce plastic waste in the environment. By tracking recycling activity on a decentralized ledger, RecycleGO establishes transparency and accountability in local recycling systems. Using RecycleGO's blockchain, recyclers can track their material, municipalities and corporations can monitor their sustainable impact and consumers can make sustainable purchases. As a verifier of recycled material, our blockchain can legitimize deposit return programs, local cleanups and other incentive-based recycling initiatives. We propose working with a community and a brand owner to track local recycling efforts of plastic waste as it is removed from the environment and re-processed into recycled-content products. Validating the informal work of waste pickers on the blockchain leads to a more economically-secure payment structure, and incentivizing brand owners to recycle with sustainability verification advances global sustainability goals.

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What specific problem are you solving?

Lack of proper plastic waste management is an environmental, economic and health issue. Each year, only 9% of plastic products made are recycled. 10% of plastic ends up in the environment, adding 13 million tons of plastic pollution to the ocean annually. The economic costs of ocean plastic pollution are estimated to be at $13 billion USD per year. Pollution-derived human welfare losses are over $4.6 trillion USD per year, equivalent to 6.2% of global GDP. In 2019, insufficient recycling infrastructure, access and education lost the recycling industry an estimated $1.83 billion USD in the US alone.

Recycling is undervalued, and thus underperforming, at multiple points in the system. Currently, there aren’t many incentives for residents or businesses to recycle. Low participation rates, littering and lack of access to programs prevent material from ever entering the system. Recyclers receive poor-quality materials at inconsistent intervals due to lack of consumer education and accountability. Brands, recyclers and municipalities don't have economic incentive to recycle consistently, and often cut programs due to budgetary constraints. While value could be created by translating recycling performance into sustainability indicators, there is no measurement tool to transparently report recycling activities.

What is your project?

RecycleGO's blockchain platform and operations software track the recycling activities of recycling supply chain stakeholders. After consumption, waste collectors register recycled material on the blockchain using easy-to-navigate apps. Material data is recorded as it travels through to the material processing facility, processors, re-manufacturers and product brands. Users can review data via their apps and inspect transactions accessing the secure blockchain records. By tracking supply chain characteristics information, RecycleGO provides verified data reports to its stakeholders that are valuable in terms of their potential for analytics in consumption, operational performance, supply chain management and more.

Who does your project serve, and in what ways is the project impacting their lives?

We are working to improve the lives and livelihoods of sanitation workers. Our frontline workers at the most disaggregated and informal stage in the recycled material supply chain, sanitation workers and waste pickers perform dangerous tasks to collect, transport, sort and process recyclables. Working conditions, job security and income vary vastly by region and community, and so it is crucial not to generalize. In addition to our experience in the scrap and waste industries, we have learned best by interviewing potential and current clients and maintaining scrupulous customer feedback procedures. We also read high level reports from organizations such as UN Environment Programme, UN-Habitat, Closed Loop Partners and The Recycling Partnership. The needs of sanitation and recycling workers inform the customer interface (the UI/UX) of our software applications for the industry.

Which dimension of The Elevate Prize does your project most closely address?

Explain how your project relates to The Elevate Prize and your selected dimension.

Waste removal and recycling is a globally overlooked economic sector. Just as waste is expected to go "away", sanitation workers, waste pickers and recyclers are often prioritized below other seemingly more essential services. RecycleGO's blockchain instates economic value into the informal work of international waste pickers and small-scale community cleanups by verifying the correlation between these efforts and the economic and sustainability value of the final recycled-content product. Producers are incentivized to make concerted progress towards their sustainability targets by means of the verifiable supply chain data that the blockchain provides.

How did you come up with your project?

RecycleGO's blockchain was the evolution of an idea to utilize ICT software to improve the relationship between commercial businesses and their waste haulers. Shortly after RecycleGO co-founders Stan Chen and Jan Gerards had developed the concept in 2016, China implemented its National Sword, preventing the US and other countries from sending their recyclables to China. As experts in scrap commodity trade and tech-based systems design, Stan and Jan began to create a business model that would utilize distributed ledger technology to restore economic value to increasingly devalued recyclable materials such as plastic and maintain value throughout the supply chain. RecycleGO believes what's good for the environment should be good for business--and this meant creating a SaaS solution that achieves environmental sustainability with social and economic prosperity.

Why are you passionate about your project?

RecycleGO's team members are dedicated to improving conditions of Earth's environment and the people in it. We truly believe that what is good for business should also be good for the environment.

Why are you well-positioned to deliver this project?

Our team's background knowledge of the waste hauling industry has guided our development process, so that our software meets essential components of our customer needs. Stan Chen, Co-Founder and CEO, is a prominent member of the recycling industry with 20+ years' experience and is a proven successful eco-entrepreneur. He founded United Metal Exports in 2007, which he has grown to be a multi-million dollar recycling operation today. Jan Gerards, Co-Founder and CTO, brings to RecycleGO a deep background in project management and software system architecture design. He has worked with a range of Fortune 1000 companies, including Accenture and Deloitte, to design flexible, scalable software solutions for complex business problems. Matthew Volpe, Head of Sales, has 10 years in hospitality and recycling and has previously led business development in the waste technology industry. DeNeile Cooper, Sustainability Analyst, has 5 years of sustainable waste management programming and is the founding chair of the public housing recycling committee for the Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board. Misha Hanin, head of the blockchain development team, is CEO and CoFounder of DeepDive Group, with 25+ years of experience in architecting and implementing Microsoft technologies. He has a winning track record in building and bringing projects to operational and measurable success. In addition, Misha was awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and is one of 500 trained Microsoft Certified Masters in the world.

Provide an example of your ability to overcome adversity.

In 2017, China introduced its National Sword policy that severely disrupted the global trade of plastic waste and other recyclable material. The commodity flows from the US and Europe to China and Southeast Asia underwent massive and rapid shifts, causing many American municipal recycling programs to lose their economic viability. RecycleGO quickly realized that our original business model wasn't going to work, it was based on the recycling economic model of high end market valuation. We had to pivot to envision a recycling system where the value of recycled material would be supported by the environmental and social impact of participating in recycling. RecycleGO currently has no revenue coming in as we work to sell the value proposition of such a disruptive technology and system-wide change as blockchain for recycling, but we have incorporated this idea into the development goals of our company due to our passion and belief that a blockchain solution fore recycling can make a valuable change to a global challenge.

Describe a past experience that demonstrates your leadership ability.

I am always ready to use my knowledge and experience to help combat societal challenges. In early March 2020, I went to the Dominican Republic to make a presentation at a sustainability event. While there, I met other New York area professionals making a difference in their sectors. When we all arrived back to New York, the state was already undergoing a rapid upswing of COVID-19 cases, so we decided to build on the inertia of our overlapping missions and form a group that would optimize its supply chain networks to fast-track masks to those in need. I tapped into my international supply chain network to bring 29,000 KN95 masks to healthcare providers and vulnerable communities in NYC and other urban areas.

How long have you been working on your project?

4 years

Where are you headquartered?

What type of organization is your project?