Jessica Bradley speaks to a few of the brightest young leaders in waste management about how their innovative businesses are changing their sectors.
Businesses today operate in a climate of rapid technological advancements, intensifying environmental concerns and shifting consumer expectations.
This means there is a generation of leaders that have an entirely new set of challenges and expectations ahead of them.
Many hope that, as the linear business model starts to fade into irrelevance, circular practices will become the customary way of doing business. Out with indefinite growth, in with recycling, repairing and reusing as standard.
Young leaders in the circular economy today have skills that previous generations of entrepreneurs didn’t need in the same way.
Among them is the ability to challenge the status quo, and solve age-old problems before they’ve even begun their businesses.
Circular Online speaks to some of the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs who are carving a path for the future for waste management and circular economy industries.
They discuss the challenges they’ve faced while trying to drive change and their visions for the future of sustainable waste management.
LabCycle
When Helen Liang was in the final year of her degree, studying as an exchange student at the University of Dundee, she came across a problem she couldn’t ignore.
Liang had completed the first part of her degree in China, where labs used some glassware instead of single-use plastics, but when she came to the UK, she noticed this wasn’t the case.
“All consumables in labs are plastic – it was quite a culture shock,” she says. “I was surrounded by so many scientists, researchers and engineers who were really passionate about sustainability and the circular economy, but when it came to the workplace, especially in the lab environment, everything is single-use plastics.”
As she started working more in the lab, Liang saw “enormous” amounts of plastic waste being thrown away by researchers to avoid contamination.
“I was trying to navigate why it couldn’t be recycled, what the barriers were,” she says.
Liang developed an idea to decontaminate plastic and engineer it into valuable high-grade recycled plastic pellets that can be manufactured into lab consumables.
Then, she started going along to events hosted by her university, including a dragon’s den-style event. The dragons – alumni of the university – invested in her idea, and she used this funding to do market research.
“I spent two years trying to understand the root cause, which, essentially, was that there’s a lack of technology and infrastructure to decontaminate and recycle waste,” Liang says.
She developed technology to efficiently do this and decided to turn the plastic waste into consumables. This, Liang says, pushed a door open.
I spent two years trying to understand the root cause, which, essentially, was that there’s a lack of technology and infrastructure to decontaminate and recycle waste.
“There is so much demand in the market from universities, research institutes, private companies – all sorts of industries, “ she says.
Her work started in 2019, but her proof of concept wasn’t ready until the end of 2022. Liang was given investment to help scale up the technologies, but there were a lot of regulatory barriers to navigate because she was dealing with hazardous waste and recycling, so needed to comply with both the environmental agency and HSCE.
Now the founder of LabCycle, Liang has also won two prestigious awards at the UK StartUp Awards for the South West region.
But she’s aware that her innovation will be tested by the trend of using plastic over glassware.
While more people are trying to be more sustainable, she says, it’s more difficult to make changes because of how the industry has developed.
“The scientific research industry was developed on plastic consumables, and more automations also make it harder to go back to glassware,” she says.
“Education is really important. When people train in the lab, the first couple of years can shape how they do things for the rest of their career. I was trained to be more aware of waste in the lab, sharing equipment and using more glassware if possible.”
Circular 11
In 2020, Benjamin Gibbons was working on a waste management programme in Nepal, and living with families who had to burn waste or throw it into waterways, when he saw a problem that needed a circular solution.
“This instilled in us [his future co-founder Connor Winter] a desire to dedicate a good portion of our careers to finding ways to valorise low-grade plastics getting burnt in those communities and incinerated in the UK,” he says.
Gibbons and Winter came back to the UK, where they set up a portable recycling facility that could fit within a shipping container, and spent a year developing composite materials from waste streams.
They built an interlocking building block with the intention of deploying it in emerging markets to make housing from plastic waste, but realised there were more suitable alternatives, so pivoted production towards high-volume plank manufacture instead, and spent the next year learning from manufacturing companies how to commercialise and scale up.
Gibbons and Winter raised the funds to set up a full-scale recycling and manufacturing facility in Dorset and developed a machine learning-led approach to standardise the quality of low-grade waste streams.
“It started off as a vision to take mixed plastics sent to incinerators by local recycling organisations and see how high quality we could get them to,” Gibbons says.
It took a while, he says, to understand how to create valuable material from waste for customers who will buy the kinds of volumes needed to create a tangible difference.
But now, Circular 11 has nine full-time staff, has raised £1 million in funding, and is aiming to increase its output tenfold.
“The challenge we’re facing now is trying to grow our small production set-up so we can leverage larger economies of scale,” Gibbons says.
Business leaders working with hardware and materials, he says, are constrained by the chicken-and-egg problem of not being able to offer low prices that come with producing at scale, but also not getting enough orders needed to justify investment, because prices aren’t low.
The sophistication and precision with which people talk about circularity is at least 10 years behind carbon.
“It requires a lot of commitment and risk to get out of this because we have to meet the market,” Gibbons says. “We don’t want to be a low-volume, very high-priced product – we’re interested in how to transition products with a sustainability proposition into the mainstream, and the mainstream is about price.”
Overcoming this impasse, he says, has been possible only with the support of early investors and backers.
One of the other biggest challenges facing circular businesses and entrepreneurs now is regulation, Gibbons says.
There needs to be more clarity, and possibly regulation, around how circularity is quantified and understood, beyond just carbon emissions, he argues.
“The sophistication and precision with which people talk about circularity is at least 10 years behind carbon,” he says.
“When we get a climate declaration done, there doesn’t seem to be clear standards on even something as basic as quantifying the carbon burden of recycled materials.”
Gibbons is interested in more complex concepts, such as additionality – the impact of which he says is difficult to make credible claims about because there’s no shared meaning.
“From a circularity standpoint, there’s less awareness among customers, competitors and trade bodies about how to quantify the impact of everything we’re doing,” he says.
This, he adds, is because of its complexity, since, for example, additionality relies on an imagined baseline that assumes if the company hadn’t done something, what would have happened.
“Concepts aren’t sophisticated enough for regulators to be able to say we have to use them, and there isn’t such demand from customers because, while everyone can understand that something is recycled, knowing what it means that something was genuinely diverted from waste requires more familiarity with the subject,” Gibbons says.
In the next 20 years, Gibbons would like to see businesses leading the circular economy mature the space so that they can help define it.
“We want to be alongside more companies that are transitioning products made from waste into the mainstream, into the most affordable option on market – and then it’ll be even more important to make sure these claims are correct,” he says.
PropUp Project
When Emma Chaplin and Kate Allan first met in 2010, they were working as runners on a panel show when they saw a huge problem that they couldn’t ignore – like Liang, also from within the industry they worked in.
“We were working in props cupboards as runners,” Chaplin says, “and wondered, ‘What are we doing, putting all this stuff away to never see the light of day again, or throwing it away when so many people could benefit from it?’”
Every time she and Allan worked on a job together, they’d share their horror at how many props and costumes were discarded at the end of filming.
They also saw the systemic issues in the industry that meant this issue was equally difficult to overcome and in need of resolving.
This, they say, is an industry in which there’s rarely anyone whose job description or schedule allows them time to do anything with sets and props that are no longer needed.
“Most people in the TV and film industry are freelance,” Allan says. “As soon as the job is finished, they go on to the next. There are only a couple of people left when the show strikes, so everything often ends up in storage or worse, skips.”
With a quick turnaround in production, items are often bought at the last minute. When people are stretched and things are time-sensitive, it can be easier to buy things overnight on Amazon, Allan says.
Another issue is that there’s no central place the industry can go to store or find items, Chaplin says.
“We hear from freelancers who also hate what’s happening with the waste, but don’t know where to put it all,” she says.
During the pandemic, Allan and Chaplin decided to do something about this. They started working with production companies to do a case study and came up with a “rehome, resell or recycle” model.
Since 2022, have been working full time on their non-profit, which they named PropUp Project.
They work with production companies across the UK to encourage the industry to reuse as much as possible and rehome, resell or recycle the remaining leftover props, production equipment and furniture.
Some items are donated to charity, and some are sold to generate funds to support PropUp. For anything that can’t be reused, Chaplin says, they’ll partner with sustainable recycling companies.
We’re more expensive than a skip because we do so much more, but there often isn’t a line in the budget for this at the end of production.
“We hunt down the best community groups and people who need it,” says Allan.
Then, the production companies they work with are given a report detailing where all the stock goes, including some human impact stories from some of the recipients.
“We get an incredibly positive reception, and the impact reports have a monumental effect that brings joy to something that is usually a hassle,” says Allan.
But the biggest challenge they face is the perception that their service – which includes picking the items up, removing anything confidential, and finding suitable homes for everything – is free.
“We have to charge for our service,” Allan says. “We’re more expensive than a skip because we do so much more, but there often isn’t a line in the budget for this at the end of production,” she says.
Another challenge for the pair is the fast pace of the industry, which means production teams often call them up at the last minute to ask for help. However, their long-term goal is to be able to respond to these requests immediately, in different parts of the country.
PropUp currently operates from their Brixton hub, but Allan and Chaplin hope to expand these hubs across the country, to Manchester and Glasgow in particular – especially because, with the rising costs associated with London, more and more productions are moving outside of the capital. In addition, their current space is being taken over by developers in 2027.
“Our dream would be a ground floor warehouse space with great access, with an office and a sorting section, and a community shop,” Allan says.
They also hope to expand their services to other industries, including theatre, too – and enable members of the public to buy items that have been in their favourite shows, too.
“The whole point of circularity is that an item goes somewhere else and has a second, third, fourth life,” Chaplin says.
