The Future of Waste with Scrapp

Mikey:
I always like to tell people, cut out what you can. This isn’t about people living in tree houses, living off of nuts and berries. This is not what sustainability is meant to be. It’s about doing marginally better at the things that you can.

Benn:
Welcome to Responsibly Different, brought to you by Campfire Consulting. In this space, we kindle the stories, insights, and dialogues at the heart of conscious consumerism and impactful business practices. Each episode is a journey into the essence of making decisions and investments that nurture positive change. Join our impact strategist, Brittany Angelo, as she dives into the narratives of leaders and visionaries who are reshaping what it means to live and work with intention and purpose.

Brittany:
On today’s episode, I had the privilege of speaking with Mikey Brigido, who currently is serving as the co-founder at Scrap, a startup dedicated to creating data-driven sustainable waste programs. Through Scrap, Mikey specializes in product and packaging recyclability on a global scale. Mikey was born and raised in Massachusetts and graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 2021 with a dual degree in mechanical engineering and sustainability. His professional interests include renewable energy, sustainable systems, and all things trash. Welcome, everybody, to the Responsibly Different podcast today. I am so excited to have on my what feels like a longtime friend, Mikey. I feel like we’ve known each other forever. Hi, Mikey.

Mikey:
Hi, Brittany. Yeah, absolutely. I feel like it’s we’ve been around, you know, the UNH and sustainability ecosystem for so long. It’s like it’s like we know each other without having actually spent that much time in the same room.

Brittany:
Right, right. And I feel like that’s what I love about this podcast is it makes it easier to ask people, Hey, let’s go back to the basis. Let’s really understand what you do and, and let’s talk. So thank you for agreeing to come on the podcast. I think our listeners are going to learn so much from you today. So thanks for being here.

Mikey:
Yeah, absolutely. Happy to be here. And I always like to start by just saying, if you ever have a, if you ever put on like who wants to be a millionaire and they have the phone, a friend, and the question is about trash. You’re always welcome to use my number. I will probably know it. So if you’re on cash cab, who wants to be a millionaire? I grew up watching game shows all the time and you need a phone a friend for a trash question. I got you covered.

Brittany:
I love that. I actually love that show and I feel like I don’t watch it much anymore. So I’m now going to go search for where the closest, where the most recent cash cab episode is to watch.

Mikey:
Yeah, it was one of my favorites too.

Brittany:
So everybody at this point now is probably like, why does Mikey know so much about trash? So Mikey, let’s actually start off by talking about the beginning of Scrap. So I feel like what people see nowadays is this really well-designed company. But what people maybe don’t know is all of the hard work that went into getting you to where you are now. And you have this radiant, positive outlook on the workload and the overall startup mentality, which is just so fascinating, but also so exciting for me to be a part of. So thanks for welcoming me into your community. To hone in on my question here, Brittany, and stop rambling, I’m wondering, what really inspired you to start Scrap in 2019? And how have you gotten to where you are now? And if I’m not mistaken, I think you were an undergrad when you first took the first steps of creating Scrap. So how did UNH support you in starting Scrap?

Mikey:
Sure. So I can start, you know, I’ll take the first part first. Basically, I have stumbled my way forward through startup life. I never intended to run my own company. For context, my background is in mechanical engineering, and I do have a dual degree in sustainability and sustainable energy. I got my sustainability degree by seeing a table tent while I was at the dining hall, and I was like, that seems like it could be kind of cool. My background is actually in military and defense, and additionally, high-speed cable development, so I have no classical training in solid waste at all. I started Scrap with my co-founder Evan when we were on UNH’s campus. And shout out UNH, they are number five platinum rated in sustainability, but they still get an F on their waste score every year by the ACI standards. And if number five is struggling like that, that trickles down to every university. Solid waste is a massive issue. So I started Scrap by pretty much dumpster diving and looking at what people were recycling or not recycling and what people were throwing in the recycling bin that shouldn’t be there. So we created an SVIC, which for those that don’t know, it’s the Social Venture Innovation Challenge sponsored by UNH. We entered that, we’re like, we’re going to win it. We’re going to do it. Because the professor said you can either write a five-page paper, or do this project. And I still hold to this day. I was going to write the five-page paper because I said, that’s definitely going to be easier than the project. And I still stand corrected. Like my co-founder said, Oh, it’ll be like a in and out. Like, you know, like it’ll be like, you know, 15 hours worth of work will be done. It’s a lot more than 15 hours worth of work and we’re still not done. So we entered the SVIC and we actually lost But we sent it into the EPA as a joke at the time. And I say as a joke, we were serious about the thing, but we didn’t think they’d take us. Like the tagline was recycle your crap with our app at the time. So we get, it turns out they replied back like, this is fantastic. We’d love to have you come and present. Like this would be great to showcase. So we’re there. It’s us. Nestle, Coca-Cola, WM, all of these companies, prestige brands, multi-billion dollar market cap, multi-billion dollar profit reports every year, and then three guys with a sign. We’re just like, okay, we’ll make it work. We actually got to meet with the director of the EPA at that time, and then his deputy and his entourage. They have the posse right behind them. UNH actually supported us. They gave us quarter zips to bring and stuff, rep the brand. And they said, look, this is actually a really great idea that nobody is doing. You’re onto something. We’re three weeks in, three weeks to four weeks in at this point. We’re like, if the director of the EPA tells you that, you should probably keep going. So we did, and we re-entered the UNHSVIC, and we actually managed to win the following year two out of the three categories. I think ours were environmental impact and then actually financial profitability, because we’ve always wanted to design the business. in a way that it’s actually a self-functioning business, as we like to say, profit for purpose. That’s no stranger to the B Corp community, but very much profit aligned, because what we find a lot is a lot of people in the solid waste space that do advocacy work are non-profits. So when you’re financially beholden to the industry you’re supposed to regulate, it can cause conflicts of interests. And we never wanted there to be a conflict of interest between who our customers were, which are communities, everyday people, businesses, and sometimes even waste management infrastructure. And we wanted to make sure we could navigate what was best for all parties involved, not just one or the other. So that’s kind of the long answer. And UNH, they’ve been a long time friend of us. You know, I go and I teach some classes every once in a while about like, here’s trash, here’s what it is, here’s how it works. Because everybody thinks it’s one person picking up your trash, processing it, recycling it and turning it into a new bottle. That’s like nine, like it’s like a nine party chain of custody in some instances. Like it’s very complex and involved. It’s basically reverse logistics, which we’re now getting very used to. So I teach classes on that. And they also, you know, they support us. We have a summer sustainability fellow for the third year in a row. They’ve been a long time friends. We went to the Bee Impact Clinic as well. And we just had a very close relationship developing alongside UNH. And they’re always the first person or first group to really test something out that’s new.

Brittany:
Yeah. Oh, wow. I have never wanted to be an entrepreneur. I’ve never really wanted to work at a startup. All of those things are so like, so fascinating to me and feel so out of reach because they were never these dreams and goals of mine. I think what’s probably the most interesting part about your story is you and Evan truly fumbled into this and you were like, oh, instead of writing a paper, let’s go for the easy way out like most college kids do. Then it’s like, here you are five years later, six years later, and you’re like, Oh, my God, we have a full fledged company that’s like making a massive impact on the world. So like, first of all, congratulations, because that is such a huge accomplishment. But also, like, I think it’s really inspiring to a lot of people to know that this is doesn’t have to be like this well thought out thing ahead of time, like you can, you know, you can kind of make it up as you go and keep embracing every step through the process.

Mikey:
Absolutely. I would say to anybody who’s thinking about taking that first step, rule one, never just quit your job and say, I’m going to start a company. Like that’s not how it works. It’s very flipped. Like I still worked at Amphenol and then I worked for the NHBSR while I was working on Scrap at the same time. If anything, get a job that will further your knowledge in the field that you’re looking to pursue. That’s a misconception people get. Be prepared to not take pay for like four years. Like that’s also a very normal thing. That does not mean you’re not successful. I had the benefit of that. My family started their own businesses. My grandfather immigrated over, started a factory in his basement. worked at a factory, started sweeping floors, then got promoted all the way up to foreman and ran a 20 person floor, did not speak English when he came over, started his own factory in the basement, started taking on jobs in the basement, scaled that out, and it’s a 60 person company today that my dad now runs with his siblings. So I knew what it was going to take. That’s why I was kind of like, the paper is going to be easier because I knew what it took to start a business. Granted, that’s in manufacturing and like very high precision manufacturing, not trash. So the skills don’t always translate, but it’s good to see the sacrifices that it’s going to take ahead of time because you kind of know what you’re getting into. And I think Anybody can be an entrepreneur. It just depends on the type of entrepreneur you want to be. Some people just use it as a side hustle. Like, you know, some people flip furniture. That’s entrepreneurship. I don’t even call myself an entrepreneur because I’m a guy with a recycling software. Like I never like I never wanted to go out and say, I wanted to own my own business. I knew I wanted to do something that had purpose. And this just happened to align. I think entrepreneurs very specifically say, I never want to work for somebody else. And I want to go out and build a business. So you think immediately think Shark Tank, you know, investments, profit margins, P&L, like it doesn’t always have to be that it can just be as simple as, hey, I run a dog walking business. You just do your taxes at the end of the day, you have some extra pocket change, you might go on an extra vacation. And that’s perfectly acceptable. I think we get caught up in this, who’s going to be the next Amazon? Amazon is like a one in a million, one in a billion company that will ever happen. Most startups are in the, hey, I do it on the side for some extra cash. A lot of startups do fall in that field. And that is perfectly acceptable.

Brittany:
Thanks for sharing that insight. A lot of that is new knowledge to me. So that’s interesting. Okay, so you mentioned in that last answer that Scrap is an app, but Scrap is so much more than just an app. Can you actually elaborate on what is Scrap and what does Scrap do for people?

Mikey:
Yeah. We started as an app, hence the name Scrap. We actually have the trademark on that in the United States because it’s a pun. You don’t need to pass the bar, apparently. If you just have a really good dad joke, it circumvents patent law and trademark law because there’s a double entendre. Obviously, there needs to be an element of sophistication there. But that is my one funny story of lawyers like cry laughing when I say I got the patent or the trademark off of a dad joke. It actually did work against the PTO. But anyway, what we are is we wanted to build the original mission was to build an ecosystem for waste because the waste industry is very bad at talking to one another. It’s gotten significantly better since 2018, which 2018 is kind of like Think of that as the waste industries, 2008, where essentially material markets went into the negative, where basically instead of selling recycled material, you had to pay someone to take your recycled material. So somebody was getting paid to take the material and make it into a box, which is completely opposite of how it normally runs because China said no to the world’s waste. What we wanted to do was make it so people could talk to one another. In industry fashion, people tend to get really jargony really quick. We wanted to boil things down to a very simple answer that anybody could understand. And you could talk on the same level, even though there’s a bunch of sophistication in the backend, we wanted things to be approachable to anybody. So we made a platform where there’s a platform now where that’s web-based, where you can actually upload your holler invoices, your supplier information, all of your procurement, and even your product line and put it in the way you input the information. It’ll basically tell you the waste impacts of that based on where you distribute. It also. looks at your operations and really tells you a lot about what waste is being produced from different avenues what opportunities are to reduce that waste because we started as a recycling app but we’re pivoting as you will hear a lot every startup pivots or changes so it’s not about the initial game plan it’s about where what you want to do and how you’re going to get there is going to change so We basically said a lot of times, it’s not about recycling, it’s about designing it out. If you’re buying plastic water bottles for your business, you don’t need a better recycling rate, you just need a reusable water bottle. That’s it. Sometimes things are way simpler that you don’t need to recycle things. That’s what this new platform is really set up to do and what we’ve really pivoted to. We always emphasize reuse, donating. If you have a broken oven or a broken fridge, We always tell people like, hey, like if it could be repaired, bring it to a repair shop and they’ll fix it and then resell it. But if it’s beyond repair, you know, it does have to go to a landfill or a transfer station. So this whole new platform is really dedicated to bringing understanding to your waste through data. So you can track everything, you can manage your program better, you have better insights, and then you can optimize your program and ultimately design waste out of your systems. So A to Z. And then where the app comes in, the app’s like, hey, I still exist. That’s the education terminal where anybody can use it. Anybody in the community can use it. Anybody at the company can use it and interface with that high level data in a very synthesized, easy way. So that’s kind of what we are. Think about like smart ways, programs powered by data. That’s basically what it boils down to. But there’s a lot of nuance in the middle.

Brittany:
I didn’t want to interrupt you, but kind of towards the beginning, it sounded like you said holler information. Can you just tell me what that means?

Mikey:
Oh, a hauler is somebody who picks up your trash. So like the guy who comes around in the truck is the person who picks it up and they haul it away. So they are the hauler. That’s how we differentiate between like recycler and hauler. Hauler is the person who picks it up and sometimes they are the recycler as well when they own the recycling facility. And then from there, the recycler is the person who’s actually sorting the material and recycling it. So just to kind of go through what happens to your waist when you throw it in the bin, because this might be useful later too. So here’s your new wrinkles in the brain for the day. So when you throw like, say, I have an aluminum can next to me. So let’s throw an aluminum can away. And assuming you do not live in a bottle deposit state. where you can redeem this for 5 or 10 cents. So you throw this in your curbside recycling bin, or you bring it to your drop-off site. From there, a hauler comes and picks up that bin full of this material. They bring it then to what is called a sortation facility, which some sortation facilities are also recycling facilities, which is the step after, where it can sort and recycle the material at the same time. Otherwise, it sorts it into cardboard here, glass here. They do this with air, eddy currents. They have all different sophisticated technology, and now robot arms that will actually pick items out. So you can program the robot arms to say, I only want this can in this can only. And it’ll go, great, got it. I can identify that and do it. AI has changed the way we handle waste entirely. And then from there, after it’s sorted, it goes to the respondent recyclers, which are either plastic-based, paper, glass, metal, all of them at their own specialized facilities. And from there at plastic facilities, they get sorted again based on their resin type, like, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. And then also like their value as material, because there’s every waste trades like a commodity the same way gold or silver does. But it’s obviously it’s not as valuable as gold and silver. So it’s an ultra low value commodity that trades on the market the same way. From there, once it’s added to recyclers, the recyclers turn it back into the raw material that’s now made with recycled content, and they send it out to packaging companies to make it again. So they’ll make the same can over and over again. So A good example of why recycling is really important is that this aluminum can, if you made it out of virgin aluminum, you have to smelt it from aluminum bauxite, the raw ore, which has a smelting temperature, I think, I’ll say 2,400 degrees C, it’s very hot. But when it’s out of that form and you smelt it at say 600 degrees C or 800 degrees C, I might need a fact check on the numbers a little bit on the temperature, but you save 95% of the energy needed to make the can again by using recycled content because it’s already in a workable form. That’s why recycling is just incredibly important. Also, I apologize for the landline. I’m one of the few people that still has a landline in their house.

Brittany:
I was wondering what that was.

Mikey:
Yes. I am. I am a fossil in my own right as well.

Brittany:
Um, okay. So kind of where my mind just went, where is, you know, you mentioned that China isn’t taking our trash anymore. So you just described this process. So do we have a system here in the U S where everything that we recycle is getting repurposed or where does it, does it go to a landfill if it’s not getting repurposed?

Mikey:
So that. Entirely. So, you know, I talked about commodities a little bit. That depends on the commodity. We’re not really shipping aluminum across. So, basically, after China said no, we said, how about other developing Asian nations? They might take it. And that’s why you see it in Indonesia, Vietnam. That has slowly come to a stop. Some companies have banned waste exports, but it’s still a struggling field. What ends up happening is now the higher value commodities, I can speak for New England, we ship a lot of our glass and waste to Ohio because the tipping fee is lower. So you actually put it on a train and ship the waste to Ohio because the landfill fee is less. We’re due to run out of landfill space in the Northeast United States by 2040. And in 2050, they’re officially closed where they, they do save some room for like the more things that need to be put in a landfill. So they’re sequestered. Like, so that’s things like, you know, busting up furniture, things like that. That’s like, okay, we need, this actually has to go to a landfill. It can’t be processed any other way. But to answer your question. We don’t send it to China anymore because China passed something called national sword, sword and shield, shield prevented it further and sword caused penalties that would be any trash coming in. So long story short, not to China, not to Indonesia, not to Vietnam anymore. Now it’s having to be processed domestically or they’re shipping it out in more creative ways, but that does depend on what the commodity is. The high value stuff, I’m fairly confident it does stay in the United States. It’s the lower value commodities that end up going to different countries. Because if it’s valuable, we’ll do it here. And we’re building the infrastructure to handle things here.

Brittany:
Okay, interesting. Wow, you are like a walking encyclopedia dictionary, Wikipedia page all into one person. It is fascinating.

Mikey:
Exactly. All things trash and recycling. It’s super interesting. I always tell people, and we always joke in the industry, nobody thought they were going to end up in the trash business or the solid waste business. We just get stuck here because every day is different. Think about it. If you’re a brand and you’re trying to stick out on the shelf, you might package yourself in a different or unique way. We are called passive receivers. We do not control the material flow that comes in. And I like to say trash tells a story and it unites us all because I can tell what somebody’s habits are by looking at their solid waste bin. I can tell if they’ve had a rough week if there’s five pints of Ben and Jerry’s in their trash bin. For a great example, Mardi Gras completely changes the solid waste infrastructure of New Orleans, because you have beads everywhere, disposable cups, because you’re not allowed to bring drinks from different bars, all these different aspects. And think about it, in 2004, most of the waste stream was made up of newspaper and paper. Nobody mails anything anymore. Nobody reads the paper. The waste stream has entirely changed in 16 years because of email and digital printing.

SPEAKER_01:
Wow. Wow.

Mikey:
So you have to think of it in that way of if it, because you make a design choice as a brand, we as an industry have to come in and deal with it in an entirely new and different fashion. And that’s why AI is so revolutionary because we can basically tell it, Hey, you might’ve heard Colgate’s toothpaste tubes are actually like recyclable from a material perspective. Barring this is the debate that the toothpaste is out. This applies to Tom’s of Maine as well as their subsidiary of Colgate.

SPEAKER_01:
Right.

Mikey:
you could recycle a Colgator or Tom’s, you can’t recycle the tube from your Home Depot like you’re caulking or other brands of toothpaste might not use that format. So before AI, we couldn’t tell who’s on the safe list for toothpaste tubes and who’s on the not safe list. And if you have too much contamination coming in, you have to junk every other recyclable commodity. Wow. So it’s very, it’s very complicated and very changing. There’s a lot of nuance, hence why Scrap exists to like help navigate the

Brittany:
Okay, I have another question that I’m now dying to ask, so I have to ask it. I feel like a lot of the packaging that companies are now shipping whatever my products that I buy in are now compostable. I guess, what does the industry think of these compostable? I want to say they almost feel like plastic material, but it says compostable on it, but it’s almost like an envelope. kind of shape? Like, are those actually helping?

Mikey:
So that that comes down to it depends. So you really need to pull the material certification for things like this. Paper, I know there’s a company called I believe they’re Ecovative. They do mushroom packaging. perfectly home compostable. There are other people that make styrofoam replacements out of, I always called it chitin until somebody corrected me. I also called quinoa quinoa for four years and nobody corrected me. It’s chitin by the way. There’s a protein in crustacean shells that’s waste from seafood that you can actually turn it into a styrofoam or a foam substitute. So there are innovations like that, that yes, they are helping because you’re substituting polystyrene and PVC, which are the two more toxic plastics that contaminate other plastic recyclables. That makes it so you can’t even recycle a bottle if it’s mixed in with polystyrene in any capacity. But basically, yes, compostable packaging is helping, but people that are just making bioplastics and putting a biodegradable enzyme in them, so you just get microplastics faster, that is not helping. So it really depends on the supplier that they have, whether it’s going to help or not. And then also a lot of the times they’re certified for an industrial compostable setting. So there’s home compostable and industrially compostable. Home is like, you can throw it in your backyard and you’re good. That’s the gold standard and that’s what we should do. And again, pending that material certification. The second is industrial, which basically means you need an industrial facility of the same scale as the ones that recycle the other materials. So it has to be picked up, hauled, and brought to a spot that can process material in that large of quantities and either anaerobically digest it or whatever capacity would process it. So it’s not really helping because you basically removed fossil-based plastic and put in bioplastics that have to be handled the same way and can still produce microplastics. So those ones are much more contentious. And this is why like we have compostable tableware and like forks and spoons. They’re industrially compostable because if they were home compostable, you’d put them in your soup and you’d pick up your spoon and there’d be no spoon.

Brittany:
Am I a horrible person if I only have home compost, I don’t have industrial compost? I guess technically I could have it, but there’s not many things that I can’t compost at home. I don’t see the purpose of having industrial compost. If I’m putting those compostable packaging into my trash and it goes to the landfill, is that the worst thing in the world or is that okay?

Mikey:
No, it’s not the worst thing in the world. It’s no different than putting something in a landfill anyway. So landfills are notoriously not inert because the capping technology has gotten a lot better, but it can leach into a water table. These are things they’re resolving now. It’s not nearly as common as it used to be. It’s landfills built in the early 1900s or 1940s before they had the technology to make the liners very sophisticated. But landfills are largely like, I’m going to use the term inert very loosely, but basically somebody cut open a landfill that was capped in 1945, peeled back the cap, and you saw the newspaper talking about the end of World War II perfectly intact. So things don’t degrade in a landfill. They do produce methane, which that methane actually moves around to which parts of the landfill are bioactive. But by and large, like landfills are actually due to get mined in the next 10 years. fun fact about this is, you know why we call it a tin can?

SPEAKER_01:
No.

Mikey:
Because it used to be made entirely of tin, which is a precious metal with electronics because it’s used for soldering. So we were making the cans for your beans out of highly precious metals because we didn’t know what value it had. And there were things we threw away like copper, brass, things that were very precious earth metals and catalytic converters, which contain platinum and I think palladium as well, both incredibly expensive metals. People are out now contemplating cutting open old landfills and mining the material out to process and recycle it and recapture it. So landfills, you’re not a bad person for putting something in a landfill. I always like to tell people, cut out what you can. This isn’t about people living in tree houses, living off of nuts and berries. This is not what sustainability is meant to be. It’s about doing marginally better at the things that you can. I still eat meat. I tried being a vegan, but I have dietary restrictions that make it impossible for me to not eat meat. It’s very difficult. But I don’t drive because I work remote. So I only put like a 2,000 miles a year on my car. Like that’s, that’s a win. I take a shorter shower. I don’t take a 45 minute shower and drain the entire reservoir in town. I plant native cover crop, native cover crops for my lawn instead of Kentucky bluegrass. Like this is what we’re talking about. The same thing is true with waste. Do you really need it? Yes or no. If the answer is no, just don’t buy it. And the waste problem is solved because waste is when things are not used. And so that’s where like, don’t feel bad about putting something in a landfill. Feel bad when you buy a ton of food, don’t eat it and throw it away. That’s what’s bad. That’s the behavior that needs to change. Everything can’t be on demand all the time.

Brittany:
Fascinating. Okay. Wow.

Mikey:
And it’s just as much behavioral psychology as this is a technology issue. It’s behavioral change, which is arguably harder than technology change. And that’s what we do a lot at Scrap is like looking at the behavior of waste. Like I did a waste audit where I audited a family’s plastic consumption for a year. So I knew how many times he gave his daughter juice, what their morning routines were, all of these different things by looking at the waste data and going, if you change this habit, this much waste will drop.

Brittany:
Is that something that you really do often? You audit individual families to help them improve?

Mikey:
That is more of a rare case, but we do audit individual offices. It’s the same feel. Basically, my friend is a brand designer and he did this study because he just felt icky about plastic. He actually saved all the plastic for a year, so it’s all in his office, just stacked. It’s making people realize we were in a throwaway society for so long. The whole idea is to confront people about the waste that they have, because once it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind and there really is no way. And when you realize that, and this is why there’s such a huge interest in recycling right now, is because we live in a consumption economy where the biggest metric of success in the United States is gross domestic product. If you produced more, it is fundamentally a good thing. And this gets challenged when you put it through. This is kind of an unfair test, but According to the American economy children with cancer is a good thing because their treatment is very Expensive and generates more income and more gross domestic product for the country But everybody would unanimously agree a child with cancer is a very bad thing. Mm-hmm so this is the mismatch and this is why B corps are so important is you’re not aligning yourself with infinite growth as a the metric of success. It’s about better outcomes for all stakeholders and shareholders at the same time. And that’s why we chose to go the B Corp route. But this is very true of fast moving consumer goods. These companies don’t measure their success on how happy their drink made somebody. They measure it on how many drinks, how many products were sold. When you’re fundamentally confronted with the waste associated with that product, and you’re not comfortable with the waste being produced, if that product didn’t really mean that much to you in the first place, you will no longer buy it. So this is why companies are really owning the recycling narrative, or they’re really trying to. is because it gets very, very challenging to convince someone to consume mindlessly when they’re faced with the consequences of their consumption. And that’s a very meta-analysis I appreciate, but basically we’ve reached a point where people are starting to realize they can’t buy things forever and have everything they want forever and have it be sustainable. And now companies are really trying to take that over and really understand, and some with very good intentions as well, this isn’t like good versus evil in any sense of the word, to really understand How can we make it so people can consume comfortably? Which I’m in the camp of just buy what you need and then just be happy with less. Not everybody is of that opinion.

SPEAKER_01:
Yeah.

Brittany:
Yeah. Okay. Maggie, you have shared so much with us, so thank you for that. Of course. I’m going to change the topic slightly, although B Corp has come up quite a bit for us already. You recently announced on LinkedIn that Scrap became a B Corp, so congratulations for that. That’s pretty exciting.

Mikey:
Thank you. Thank you.

Brittany:
Luckily, that is what led me to reaching out and encouraging you to come on the podcast, so go LinkedIn. I would love to dive a little bit more into your story and understand what motivated Scrap to pursue B Corp certification. I believe that you actually started your journey through the B Impact Clinic at UNH, which you already touched upon, but can you share maybe what it was like working with the students and then what it looked like after you went out of the clinic and pursued B Corp certification?

Mikey:
Yes, the Bee Impact Clinic was awesome. So as a startup, I wear many hats and one of them is I am the Chief Sustainability Officer at Scrap. That’s my primary function. I’m also, if you couldn’t tell at this point, I am our subject matter expertise on recycling and solid waste in general. So with that, I’m very busy. I am responsible for three countries recycling guidance, US, Canada, and UK, and I do it at the municipal level. So that is 27,500 municipalities. Wow. And I am responsible for that every year. So when it comes to sustainability reporting, I’m like, can I just have the bee symbol? Because this app is free that people can use. Like, is that enough? And Bee Lab is like, well, you need to document things, which is fair. I’m glad they do that. So in comes the Bee Impact Clinic, where the people who help us were incredible. We trained student mentors, actual mentors, and then our student volunteers that really just hunkered down. We were lucky because of the work that we do. We started at like a 68 and we needed the 17 points to make up. And a lot of that was the handbook. And then we actually signed the legally binding amendment to say, like, we have a foot, not only a fiduciary duty, but a societal and environmental duty at the same time, which really passed with little to no friction, because we’ve been very honest and transparent about the mission the whole time. Like we’ve turned down very lucrative contracts because it was a conflict of interest with like ethics. So we were already pretty on brand and we attracted the right people, where if you’re genuinely interested, if you’re doing B-Lab for a marketing exercise, you’re going to have a harder time than if you’re doing it for something that’s foundational and you’re actually trying to do it. And this is very true of recycling as well. If you’re trying to market that you’re recyclable, you’re already going about it backwards. You should just let the product speak for itself, and that is the best marketing possible. So our experience with UNH and the Bee Impact Clinic was awesome because we came in mission-focused, and our volunteers were really passionate all the same, and they were incredibly helpful in getting things through the door. And that’s how we passed. I think we had a score of 94.3 at the end of it.

Brittany:
Now that you are B Corp certified and there’s the local community here in New Hampshire, there’s the global community, there’s just the recycling industry that other B Corps might be involved in, I guess what’s the most exciting part about now that you are a certified B Corp? What’s next in relationship to the community and the certification for you all?

Mikey:
What’s next for us is we want to connect with other brands that are in the B-Corp movement. Ultimately, because we feel like there’s a lot of alignment. A lot of people want to do the right thing with their products, but it’s very scary, especially from a brand reputation standpoint. It’s a risk issue when you don’t know where your product ends up entirely. With the new FTC Green Guides revisions, which are a myriad of Personally, I think they’re very relaxed considering Sub-to-Matter expertise, which basically as long as it is recyclable in 60% of communities, you can just say it’s recyclable, which that’s a very low bar to clear in my opinion, relative to when aerospace components, if I said your plane landed 60% of the time I did my job, that would quite literally not fly. Like that just wouldn’t work. So we really want to connect with people and we always, I know I’ve, I don’t want to say I’ve become out of touch, but because of my subject matter expertise, I’m certainly at a certain level with recycling where I might lose sight of what the average person is thinking of, where that doesn’t spend their day just rummaging through trash for fun, where I want to really understand what are those questions that people have? How can we help? Where can we meet people in the middle? How can we educate and how can we feel, we felt there wasn’t a lot of talk about recycling in the B Corp community, which is, it’s an afterthought. You’re running a business. A lot of B Corps are small businesses that, you know, you’re wearing a million hats. You shouldn’t have to think about trash. You should just trust that your hauler is going to take care of it for you in the right way. And we wanted to really bring that conversation to the community, talking about waste issues, what they imply, because waste issues are an environmental justice issue. So if there’s anybody from the B Corp community listening and they just have recycling questions, if you could not tell by this point, I am very happy to answer recycling questions and composting questions and waste questions and what it means for society. Because I know everybody thinks like, oh, as long as it’s not in a landfill, it’s fine. Things like litter actually impact community health, not from just like a actual biological health standpoint, but there are certain instances where you can reduce crime by upwards of 40% by just keeping a neighborhood clean, because drug dealers feel very uncomfortable by keeping a neighborhood clean. And that is a different societal motivator. I do actually this fun comparison in some lectures between how Philly deals with recycling versus how my hometown of Burlington, Massachusetts does, because Burlington has tripled the household income of Philly. and about 30% of the crime rate. So we recycle so we feel good about all the things that we buy. So it justifies the expense that we paid and we’re like, oh, we’re doing the right thing for the environment. People in Philly recycle, and this is a story from my friend who’s a hauler in Philly, they don’t care about the environment. They’re struggling to survive and make ends meet in their households. If you tell them keeping the neighborhood clean keeps drugs away from their children, they will do it. And that’s not saying Philly’s a developing nation with a crime issue. That is not the point whatsoever. But the societal and community motivators are entirely different relative to where you are. And that’s something people don’t realize that waste is a societal issue, not necessarily an environmental issue. We tend to miss that. And it’s an economic issue too because improper disposal leads to health hazards quite frequently.

Brittany:
Right. Wow. Okay. So I feel like you kind of have already talked about like you know, some of the struggles of the industry. But I guess I want to ask you now, like, let’s think about the future and like the hopes of the future. I’m wondering, like, where do you see the concept of circular economy evolving in the next few years? And like, what’s the specific role that you envision that Scrap can play in that transformation?

Mikey:
Yeah, so I think the circular economy, so Circularity has, you know, sustainability turned into a greenwashy buzzword. And so like, I always tell people about this. I have to put up the definition of sustainability on the whiteboard and what is sustainable. I said, this is a failure of the English language because you can use it in the tense, like something that emits nine kilograms of CO2 is more sustainable than what emits 10 kilograms of CO2. But neither are sustainable because they emit nine or 10 grams of CO2. But because of the way the English language works, you can say, oh, this is sustainable relative to the other. And that’s where the fault is, where it’s like, you can’t get a marketer on that because like, they’re technically using the word correctly. So that’s how I kind of start because the solid waste industry is like, we’re being sustainable. I’m like, not really. You’re processing trash and putting it in a hole in the ground, like sometimes. And they’re also recycling and there’s other aspects too. Like it’s, it’s far more complicated. And so when we talk about the industry, like where we’ve been before, and this is, I’ll get to the circular economy piece after is that you basically told an entire generation study and stay in school. You’re going to be a trash man, but they forgot to tell you the guy who drives the truck makes more than the school superintendent. Oh, it’s a very trash. People aren’t poor. Like it’s not a poor person’s job. It’s a very like dignified job with good hours and you make good money and that’s truck drivers. There are resource managers. There are professional engineers. This is an entire space where the average age was like 56 years old. So I came in at 21, like, hi, like, does anybody want to teach me about trash? And I had mentors come out of the woodwork, like, we need someone to pass this knowledge down to. So if you’re looking for a change of pace, there are people hiring for solid waste stuff. And this is what’s been amazing about AI is you have a bunch of people that were never college educated. Now, granted, there are very highly educated people in the solid waste space, but the industry as a whole, when you talk about the blue collar guys that are working the floor and a very manual labor intensive field relative to the white collar guys running the facility, business decisions, et cetera, and some of those white collar people work their way up and never needed the degree. When you talk artificial intelligence, SOPs, these kinds of things, they’re not necessarily first nature. They’re not going to take a consultant’s approach because they’re just going to get the job done. And I like that about the industry. They’re very much roll up the sleeves and just do it. No sense standing around and talking about it. So you have an aging industry of a very different skill set. Now a new age of industry coming in with a very different skill set as well, especially where Solid waste used to be like the contents being thrown out, not the packaging. Now packaging dominates that waste stream and where there’s a policy coming out called an EPR, extended producer responsibility, which has existed for years, but it’s only existed for things like smoke detectors. where because of the mercury in a smoke detector, it has to go to hazardous waste. The smoke detector company and the mattress company as well, because mattresses have an EPR fee on them as well, because they can’t go in a landfill, you had to pay a special fee at the purchase to fund the collection of that item. This is now becoming true of every single item on the shelf. The way it’s packaged, you know, cardboard box, bottle, electronics, all of it. You have to pay now a tax on top of that to fund the collection of the item later down the line. So now the waste industry The narrative is now being dominated by brands that want to take accountability for their products before waste was this amorphous blob now it’s specifically the coca cola can in the stream the colgate toothpaste tube in the stream. even even Aunt May’s local honey syrup in the stream, like all of these things are now individually identified. And now the circular economy is being talked about at a product specific level, not this gigantic bubble of waste as a whole, where it’s like, can we recycle it? What can we do? What can we do with this item? So I think the circularity, like narrative, I think that’s being a bit misused at the current moment because we’re not at what we call bottle-to-bottle recycling yet, which a lot of commodities that are recycled are downcycled, which means I’ll take plastic bags, like a great example, plastic film bags are usually shredded and then turned into Trex decking. Great, we recycled it and we made something useful out of it, but how much decking and park benches do we really need? We need it to be back in the bags. So there’s a lot, I could talk for like 10 minutes about material loss and that recycling isn’t 100% in 100% out. Great example, you got a PET bottle, like your drink bottle, only about 83% of that material when you recycle that bottle comes back out as usable. The rest is lost to the machinery or lost due to like not useful, et cetera. And this is true of paper and aluminum as well. You do have some loss. So we’re talking about circularity as a buzzword when we’re really not there yet. And I, what concerns me is that. we’re kind of setting ourselves up to over promise and under deliver. Like every single large company that had zero waste goals for 2025 has kicked them to 2030 or 2040. So it’s like, how are you going to get consumer or everyday person buy-in when you’re not holding yourself accountable to your policies? And to be fair, some of them had very good explanations as to why they did. I’m not saying it was malicious, but when you’re setting yourself up to fail and people just saw this waste pile up in the ocean, you’re going to create very difficult engagement barriers around the circular economy. So I’m hoping In the future, it becomes a societal benefit, but I think right now, it’s a corporate marketing exercise, which I would like it to transition much more forward to the sustainable future for everybody.

Brittany:
How is Scrap going to help do that?

Mikey:
Basically, we track everything and we measure everything. If you’re going to do sustainability or circular economies right, you need the data to back it up to do it right. And that’s what we specialize in. Like we basically are your accountant for waste. So when you think about it, taxes are coming due for trash. You scrap. We are your QuickBooks for trash. That is essentially how it works. So we can track, like if you set up custom recycling programs in your office, we actually program your bins in so we know which items are moving where and why. So we actually see the flow of waste or the waste stream as we call it. Yeah. So we can see what’s going up, what needs to be designed out upstream, what’s going out of the building downstream, what’s in the waste stream through the building. And really we’re bringing that expertise and that knowledge throughout to really understand what is going on in your building or your town or your household.

Brittany:
Yeah. I’m wondering, are there any case studies that you could talk about? Are there any projects that you’ve maybe recently worked on or any upcoming projects that you’re excited about that you could share with our listeners?

Mikey:
Yeah. I think the big thing is we actually just launched with Avon Cosmetics for their top 100 products. They have over 10,000 products. So before they took on something of organizing all that data, we went ahead and just said, why don’t we do the first 100? And so across the UK, they’re having their reps use the app and teach people about what they can do in their community with the product. Because we do location and product specific recycling guidance. That’s our specialty. So that’s a huge project we’re excited about. We just concluded our trial at Heathrow Airport. We got mixed results. What we found out is if you’re going to put out hardware, assume people are going to borderline and take a sledgehammer to it. People are very rough with hardware, especially in a terminal that has millions of people coming through it all the time. But we got some really great insights around consumer behavior with waste, where a lot of people do actually want to do the right thing. There’s just a knowledge gap. And when you shrink that knowledge gap, people become better at doing things. So that was a really great insight as well.

Brittany:
When you say hardware, what did that hardware look like?

Mikey:
So we have a policy that we don’t want to make more waste trying to solve the problem. So you might see there are companies that do smart bins, which like they have the big TV screen and then like as a camera and it’s like, oh, this goes here. I don’t necessarily think that the solution to the solid waste problem is a giant TV screen over every trash bin. To me, that just sounds a little bit counterintuitive, which I could be wrong because consumer engagement is very important in this type of thing. Where, and there are some instances where that is an appropriate solution, especially around education, where we designed a station out of used Samsung tablets. So we could basically build a recycling station out of off-the-shelf hardware, smack it together, very low cost, so anybody could have access to a smart bin. And so the hardware was like, we had charging cables plugged in, uh, to the tablets and stuff like that, where someone wants to charge their phone, they’ll just take the charger out of the tablet. Like, like it was silly things like that. We’ve never had it. We’ve rolled out in like over nine offices and the offices have done really, really well. And we’ve had no downtime. It’s just, we’ve never carried it to a terminal that big where people will do things you would never expect.

Brittany:
Yeah. Okay. All right. I can see how that happened. Yeah.

Mikey:
Cool. So like works very well in an office.

Brittany:
doing it at an airport there are different expectations of a facility of that magnitude yeah how people it’s like the the amount of resources that people feel that they need and have when they’re in an airport is not normal consumer behavior exactly everybody’s in a rush so

Mikey:
basically an airport just brings out the worst in everybody really does in a rush you’re sitting in a line you’re getting frisked by TSA or whatever organization is there you’re on somebody else’s timetable you have no control over your own like timing Right. Where everybody’s basically just to the point like, F it, I’m just throwing this forever. Like that is a very difficult behavioral environment to get the change. Yeah. So, but versus if someone’s in the comfort of their own home and like, I got a few seconds, let me scan this and figure it out. And that’s why we’ve always taken the approach. We never want to reward a ton of scanning. Like that’s not really the purpose of the app. Our purpose is to say, we taught you what happens with this once. If you ever need to check again, you are welcome to. and then you now know, so now you can do whatever you need to do. It’s kind of, we took the hinge model and said designed to be deleted. That’s basically what scrap is meant to do, but for trash, not for dating.

Brittany:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool.

Mikey:
Unless you are very into trash in that way, which I can comfortably say I am not, but to each their own.

Brittany:
Yeah, yeah. Oh, wow. Mikey, you shared so much with us and our listeners and me, and I My brain is at max capacity. I can’t learn anything else today. I possibly can’t because I just learned so much from you. Thank you so much for taking the time to educate myself and our listeners and to share everything from starting a company to learning a brand new industry and just getting thrown in. I love that.

Mikey:
Thank you. I appreciate you having me on. Like I said, If anybody has any questions, just reach out. I’m not going to start the clock and say it’s billable hours. I just like to help people and answer their questions. I don’t think anybody should be gatekeeped from an education, which is why. You know what Scrap does now? We’re really good at trash and recycling, so if you need our help, call us. But if you just want to learn something, just ask, because my crowning achievement was I taught a class at Phillips Exeter, and one girl showed up, and it was an hour class. Hour came by, over 77% of the students still chose to stay, and I just kept answering questions. It was 40 minutes over at that point and one student goes, I’m sorry, I have to go, but this was really, really interesting. I meant to come to my sister’s final project, but I sat in the wrong room and it took about 10 minutes for me to realize, but this seemed more interesting anyway, so I decided to stay. So if you’re very good at presenting and you’re very engaging, trash even beats family apparently. I don’t know if it’s a good life lesson, but I am more than happy to talk the spots off of Dalmatian when it comes to waste and make sure everybody is able to make the right decisions for themselves or their organizations.

Brittany:
I will put all of Mikey’s information in the show notes so that people can reach out to you. Seriously, thank you so, so much. Welcome to the B Corp community and I cannot wait to see what you do now that you are an active member.

Mikey:
Thank you. I’m looking forward to sinking my teeth and really diving into the B-Corp movement. It’s been a long time coming and we’re really excited to be a part of it.

Benn:
Thank you for joining us on Responsibly Different, a Campfire Consulting initiative. We hope today’s conversation has sparked new ideas and inspired action towards purposeful leadership and sustainable choices. For insights and strategies that elevate your brand story in a meaningful way, visit us at campfire.consulting. Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and share as every interaction helps spread the warmth of responsible living. Until next time, keep the fire of curiosity alive and embrace the power of being responsibly different.