<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/cirplus-plastic-recycling-online-marketplace/>
"After establishing the world’s biggest online platform for long-distance
carpooling, BlaBlaCar, in Germany, Christian Schiller took a year off to travel
around the world. He was sailing between Colombia and Panama when the boat hit
a garbage patch several hundred meters long. “When the rudder got stuck in the
plastic trash in the Caribbean, I thought back to my time in Houston, Texas,
where I had done an internship as a Fulbright Scholar with one of the biggest
international construction companies,” he says via Zoom from his Hamburg
office, shaking his head. “In Texas, I had seen the crazy effort we need to
extract oil from under the earth. Then we use it once and it ends up in the
ocean. I can hardly imagine a bigger waste of value.”
When he got back to Germany in the summer of 2018, he didn’t have a job lined
up and started reflecting: What am I really passionate about? Where can I make
the biggest difference with my background as a digital platform builder?
At an innovator conference in Berlin, he met software engineer Volkan Bilici
who had worked as a software developer for plastic manufacturers. Together,
they started Cirplus in the final months of 2018, an online platform designed
to solve one of the most vexing problems this planet currently has: the plastic
crisis. The company name for the world’s first global recycling platform for
plastic is a wordplay, meant to indicate both the need to move to a circular
economy and the outsized value of plastic. “This motivates me to this day,”
Schiller says, “how wasteful humankind treats this incredibly valuable
substance.”
Schiller’s idea seems simple: connect recycling companies with manufacturers
and distributors to close the loop. Currently, the low level of digitalization
and the opaque market for different kinds of plastics make it difficult to even
get an overview of the available material. Cirplus uses its own software to
follow the material across the globe and create transparency for buyers and
sellers of recyclates — think post-consumer shampoo bottles, caps and more.
Once broken down, they can be used to make new products. The platform — which
Schiller hopes will one day be the Amazon for recycled plastic — currently has
2,500 users, including packaging giants that handle big labels."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
