Omnivor

Recycling is broken.

Everyone wants it to work, but it is working for nobody.

Every year Americans throw away about 292 million tons of municipal solid waste (MSW). About 50% of that is valuable materials such as metal, paper, plastic, and glass [1]. The value of the material that end up in landfill is about 31 billion USD annually. In addition to lost value of material, landfills in the United States are the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions. The EPA claims the “methane emissions from MSW landfills in 2019 were approximately equivalent to the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from more than 21.6 million passenger vehicles driven for one year or the CO2 emissions from nearly 12.0 million homes’ energy use for one year.” [2]

The larger problem is that we cannot keep landfilling and trashing the planet like we have. But the problem of resource reclamation is more nuanced. The waste chain has many actors: 1) The municipality 2) The consumer good companies 3) The consumers and 4) The recyclers. All of them have different pain points that are explained in simple terms below.

Problem 1: The supply chain is global, organized, traceable and sexy. It is everything before the hands of the consumer. The waste chain is local, disorganized, untraceable, and ugly. It is everything after the hands of the consumer. The same materials (paper, plastic, glass, metal) are essentially in both, the supply chain, and the waste chain. We thus argue that waste is a problem of organization.

Opportunity 1: To make the waste chain become the (re)-supply chain, it needs to be organized, traceable and beautiful.

Problem 2: Contamination levels are high in recycled materials. For most manufacturers in the supply chain, raw materials need to be at a purity level of 99.99%. Most recycling materials have a purity range of between 85-95%, which is not enough to re-enter the supply chain. [3,4]

Opportunity 2: The demand for recycled materials of high purity levels is high, but this demand is not met.

Problem 3: Consumer goods companies have made numerous commitments to increase the recycled contents in their packaging with no way to delivering on that promise. This is due to aforementioned contamination issues that affect purity levels to re-enter their feedstock. Furthermore, covid-19 and foreign wars have exacerbated material prices and stalled various parts of the supply chain. 94% of fortune 500 companies agree that a global supply chain is now a risk to growth. Nestle and Coca-Cola could not restock grocery shelves with their products recently because they could not source packaging materials for their products. [6,8,9]

Opportunity 3: Supply consumer good companies with local recycled packaging materials that have high levels of purity.

Problem 4: Consumers want to recycle, and 74% of Americans say that recycling is important to them. Yet many claim that recycling is confusing. They do not know what is recyclable and what is not. [4,5,7]

Opportunity 4: Consumers are confused about recycling and want fast, modern, easy and convenient ways to contribute to recycling.

Problem 5: Collecting mixed recycling does not work. It is like mixing ink with water and then trying to separate the ink from the water after the fact; it can be done, but it is expensive and inefficient. Since most consumers are confused about recycling, many materials end up in the recycling stream that contaminate the recycling stream. Materials Recycling Facilities (MRFs) use labor and machinery to sort through and extract valuables from a mixed waste stream. This is expensive and inefficient, with low quality output. This is quite an outdated way to recover value from waste – a system that has not been technologically innovated on or disrupted for the last 50 years. [10]

Opportunity 4: Find ways to separate resources at point of consumption, so that we do not need to retro-actively sort through waste to recover valuables.

Problem 5: Municipalities want to divert waste from landfill but have to focus on keeping cities waste free and their constituents satisfied. Thus, waste management companies are hired and paid by the tonnage they haul away from city to the landfill. This keeps perpetuating the landfill cycle, as waste management companies make money from this business model. Recycling and material recovery does not currently make as much money in it as landfilling.

Opportunity 5: Make recycling more lucrative than landfilling.

The scale of this problem is global, but America produces the most waste per capita globally (3.2 kg per person per day). Source say, "USA houses 4% of the world’s population but generates 12% of the world’s sold waste [12]". The global waste management market is project to reach 542 billion USD by 2026, with the north American market values at 208 billion dollars [13]. Waste management is the least disrupted space in the USA. 

[1] https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-...

[2] https://www.epa.gov/lmop/basic-information-about-landfill-gas

[3] https://www.rubicon.com/blog/recycling-contamination-facts/

[4] https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2019/10/31/recycling-programs-trouble/

[5]https://nypost.com/2019/04/16/more-than-half-of-americans-are-confused-about-recycling/

[6]https://supplychaindigital.com/digital-supply-chain/accenture-building-supply-chain-resilience-amidst-covid-19

[7]https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/03/13/fix-recycling-america/

[8] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/02/coca-colas-supply-chain-under-pressure-due-to-shortage-of-cans

[9] https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Food/beverages-cans-short-supply-due-lack-materials-global/story?id=81646871

[10] https://www.npr.org/2015/03/31/396319000/with-single-stream-recycling-convenience-comes-at-a-cost

[11] https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/united-states-most-wasteful-country-world

Nothing is more powerful than technology in the hands of the people. We replace the labor and machinery of the waste chain backend, with technology in the hands of the people, to stop the ink mixing into the water in the first place. Omnivor offers recycling solutions at point-of-consumption to Americans through mobile phone application across Android and iOS platforms. This ensures two things: firstly, confusion about recycling is cleared up with the App informing consumers of the material recyclability. Secondly, this also stops contamination, and gives us separated resource streams from each household/ business. We employ a few things here that are important: once a consumer sorts out their metals, plastics, paper, and glass theses resources are then picked up separately by them requesting a pickup on the App (like an Uber service for recycling). Once it is picked up and digitally registered, the consumer gets recycling points that can be redeemed like coupons or credit card points. Furthermore, the consumer is notified on the app when their product got turned into a new product showing them tangible outcomes to their actions, ensuring that a dopamine rush is trigger with the act of recycling – making recycling fun, easy and tangible.

Then, we take a data-driven approach by tracking resource streams to increase the recapture of end-of-life resources such as glass, paper, metals, and plastics – making the end-of-life chain organized, traceable and sexy. Think of it in terms of engineering principals, a mass balance where input must equal output. The input data is clearly available in the supply chain infrastructure. The output data is what Omnivor captures.

There is ample potential to integrate blockchain concepts and AI into this idea as well as gamify the App to better encourage resource separation at source. The above is Phase 1 of the business concept.

The real aim is to eliminate the word waste, because as Einstein said, “No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it.” All waste is just misplaced resources.

Actor currently underserved:

Consumers do not know what to recycle and are apathetic towards recycling because it has no tangible immediate rewards (like social media or gaming does).

To the Consumer Omnivor provides:

1.     Precise actionable Recycling information

2.     Instructions on how to prep the resource (e.g.: “give it a rinse”, “make sure no food is in the bottle” or “take off the cap”. These are the small actions that have big consequences at the backend with AI recycling applications).

3.     On demand convenient resource pick-up for materials, making recycling easy.

4.     Tangible data driven dopamine triggers married to the act of recycling, making recycling fun and rewarding.

Actor currently underserved:

Recyclers who wash and shred end-of-life resources want uncontaminated and consistent feedstock.

To the Recycler Omnivor provides:

1.     Clean, sorted, homogenous material streams of high purity levels.

Actor currently underserved:

1.     The Municipality is measured by how much the divert away from landfill, which is a very important performance metric for them.

2.     Looking for ways to keep city clean and save costs.

To the Municipality Omnivor provides:

1.     Precise data on diversion from landfill.

2.     Save them money on many fronts.

Actor currently underserved:

1.     Consumer Goods Companies are really struggling right now procuring packing, due to Covid-19 and foreign wars increasing prices.  

2.     They are also struggling to meet their promises of incorporating recycled materials into their packing.

To the Consumer Goods Companies Omnivor provides:

1.     An opportunity to re-supply their packing materials locally (circumventing global supply chains) with high purity levels because of at source separation of materials (that PET bottles has never touched coffee grinds, a banana peel, or a diaper!).

2.     Make good on their sustainability and consumer promises to incorporate more recycled materials back into their supply chains. 

3.     Data on recapture of their supply chain inputs.(!)

To Society:

All the above will make recycling more attractive than landfilling (given the current state of covid-19 and foreign wars) decreasing landfilling, and reclaiming the 31 billion we lose to landfills, and reduce the methane emission from landfill as well. Omnivor creates local streamlined supply chains and circular economies.

Note: We will be disrupting waste management companies, and companies that profit from landfilling.

A short story:

One evening I (Nivedita) was heading over to her good friend Sara and Ahmed’s house. They have four children and the youngest of them; Ali who is 13, walks through the door with a bag of cans in his hands. I asked his father what he was doing, and she said “He is collecting cans to take to the recycler. It’s the only way he gets pocket money, by being resourceful. So he is also knocking on the doors of the neighbors to ask them to give him their cans, but he is not having much luck. Ali has made 625 USD in the past year just collecting and selling the cans and water bottles from our house only.” That evening I walked home, I realized something about this was resonant with my work in India with rag pickers. It is always the informal and the underserved that work with waste. Waste is not sexy or innovative.

I was so impressed with Ali, that the next time his father drove him to the recycler to sell his cans, I collected mine and went with them. I was amazed and shocked at what I saw. Behind a back alleyway in Phoenix, Arizona, was a run-down mechanic shop. Scribbled on a chalk board with white chalk it said “1$ per lb. of aluminum, 0.60$ for clean plastic water bottles.” Ali was so excited. He told me, “their buying prices has ranged from 0.40$ per pound of aluminum to now 1$!!, it changes every time!” I was stunned. Here I was in my ivory towers of academia figuring out circular economy, but circular economy was and is always done by those on the fringe of society, no matter if India or USA. I really should have known. In India, I had spent months working with waste pickers on the edges of society to see how they collect waste and how much informal waste management saves the city of Bangalore in India. A year before that I had volunteered for an NGO that worked with slum sanitation and I had the privilege of working with residents of the slum for hands on community driven solutions to their solid waste problem. And now here in America, it was no different. Ali handed off his bags of collected resources (not waste!) to an elderly Hispanic lady who clearly spoke no English. Her hands were rough, worker hands. She smiled at him and said a few words in Spanish, and he politely nodded. After weighing his collection, she handed him 26$ and some spare change. Ali was beaming.

All this time and talk about circular economy. And the prices of recycled material were being scribbled on a chalk board?! Is it time to innovate this space? And is it no wonder that it has not been innovated upon. No one with means and a good life has the time to collect and sell their cans/ plastic at back allies like this. I look around me to see who else was selling things to this wonderful lady. An old toothless white man. A black woman with two children. I spoke to them both and the old man said he was a janitor for a school and thus collected these cans to stop them from going to trash. The lady told me the money she made here was valuable to her and her children.

I left that day, asking myself; how can we get all the cans from everyone? How can this be made scalable? How can we help people at the fringes of society with this?

That is how Omnivor was born.

We are currently 3 people on the team.

Academic but pertinent: Nivedita (Nivi) has an undergraduate degree in Environmental Engineering from the University of Nottingham (UK) and her master’s from Arizona State University (ASU) in Sustainability. Her Ph.D. is in Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering (ASU), where her focus is on Solid Waste Management (SWM), specializing in plastics, landfill mining and material reclamation. She is wrapping up her PhD 3 months from now. She has worked on the solid waste management space in 5 countries, most notable on sustainability and renewable energy for the United Nations in Vienna (Austria), with NGOs in India on slum sanitation, and for the Government of Singapore's Solid Waste Management Branch as an Engineer. She is Austrian and Indian and speaks 5 languages: German, English, Kannada, and Tamil and a working proficiency in Spanish and Hindi.

Omnivor is her brainchild and the sum of all her experiences working on waste. She is the CEO.

O Reid Nelson is a seasoned entrepreneur who has created and exited 3 multi-million companies in the health care industry. He is an avid recycler and is passionate about the topic of recycling. He was one of the confused and frustrated residents in the city of Mesa (AZ) that wanted to recycle better but could not find the means to do so. He also often saw the same truck pick up both bins (the recycling bin and the landfilling bin) and was furious that his hard work to separate out valuable materials was in vain. He emailed a bunch of people at ASU before he landed in Nivedita’s inbox. To his first meeting with Nivi, he brought with him a grocery bag of recyclable materials that he had washed out and cleaned, explain that all materials had an end market if they were clean. The rest is history.

Deepak is an entrepreneur and a very strategic thinker. He is focused on developing and democratizing sustainable solutions to improve the efficiency of resource reclaiming and consumption. He is a proud graduate of Arizona State University, where he successfully co-founded and scaled his first startup - to improve neonatal healthcare which is currently valued at 20 million USD. Deepak has technology roadmap and deployment expertise, product placement strategy, intellectual property strategy, and technical marketing. He is not into recycling nor is he an environmentalist. And this is precisely what we need. Here is why: not all consumers are going to be geared towards environment as a value proposition. Not only is Deepak entrepreneurially savvy but he also looks at our technology, and its application to the masses. He says “You need not be an environmentalist or an avid recycler to want to use Omnivor. That is the goal.”

We approach Solve with a very specific ask. While we at Omnivor have the data of the backend, and are building the infrastructure of the backend, we encounter barriers to collaboration with consumer goods companies and grocery stores that are an important part of the front-end supply chain. IBM for example, is a very important player in logistics and integration of tracking in the front-end. We would like to partner with them to make the waste chain the re-supply chain, bring the traceability to the back end. We would like Solve to help us approach these companies and entities to specifically leverage the information that they have in the front end (supply chain) to match our back-end data tracking. This would then complete the engineering mass balance – integrate product information data basses in supply chain, so that we can match them after the hands of the consumer.

We need Solve’s help to open doors to rooms where we can make these partnerships. Please help us. This is so important. We are thinking of the same problem differently.

Traceability is really needed at the backend of the waste chain, and that is currently undervalued. If we want the waste chain to stop becoming the waste chain and become the supply chain, we need to think about how we bring the technologies we use in the supply chain to the waste chain. This is exactly what Omnivor does.  

Our solution is innovative because we approach the same problem with a different lens. Technology in the hands of the people who are then rewarded for separating resources at home has never been done. Furthermore, most people would not drive to hand over their recycling. Instead, they can conveniently request a pick up from the ease of their phones. Once we have separated and clean resources, most of the work is done. 

Honest answer: We have not thought about this. 

Honest answer: We have not thought about this. 

Use something that everybody has (a smart phone) and make it fun, easy and dopamine triggered to effect a cause that you believe in (in this case increasing recycling). Everybody has phones. Why not leverage that to enable recycling and traceability of resources.  

Technology in the hands of people. 

Nivedita, the founder and CEO is a brown indian female who is 33 years old. 

Reid is an older white gentleman who is 70 years old. 

Deepak is a brown indian male also 33. 

B2C sales of:

1) The App would have a Free version and Pro version. The Pro version would have better features and the ability to trade crypto for separating out resources. 

2) A beautiful modular bin system for separating out resources.  

B2B sales of: 

1) Data of the recapture of their materials 

2) Software solutions to track material inventory 

B2G sales of: 

1) Data of diversion from landfill 

2) Contracts with the city 

Sale of recycling materials we collect from households and business. We are already making revenue with that right now. 

Sale of recycling materials we collect from households and business. We are already making revenue with that right now.