How we work

Our digital platform unlocks the maximum potential of your company’s materials, products and waste streams by matching them to their highest value uses. The best part about that? It’s better for your profits as well as the planet. In our experience, material flows increase by 110% on average in financial value, and the ecological footprint reduces by 60% on average. Four tools are instrumental to our method of working:

1. Resources Passport

The Resources Passport is a standardised and modular format to provide any material with an identity. This (digital) passport gives an insight into e.g. the composition, the origin, the toxicity or deconstructability of the material or product.

2. Tracking and Tracing

With tracking and tracing identifiers like barcodes, QR codes and chips, we effectively match physical materials to their digital twin the Resources Passport. This makes it possible to follow them throughout their life cycles.

3. Valuation

We quantify the financial, environmental and societal impact of materials, products and waste streams, enabling data-driven decision making between several next use options.

4. Matchmaking

We match the material, product or waste stream to a new high-value reuse option across industries, using a combination of Artificial Intelligence and human expertise.

Results of the pilot

Unlocked potential for 18 streams:

863,000

car rides from Amsterdam to Milan in carbon emissions reduction

64,000,000

financial value generated from exchanging the pilot materials

860

Olympic-size swimming pools of freshwater saved

Click to download the pilot report

Examples

Tulip flower heads

The Netherlands is famous for its tulips. After flowering the tulip heads are cut off and wasted. Growers sometimes even pay to get rid of them. Yet, they are a valuable resource in other sectors. For example, they could be converted into pigments for paint. 800kg of pigment can be retrieved from from one hectare of land. This leads to a total market in the Netherlands of all tulip field of 1,5 trillion euros in pigments.

Vitens

Water company Vitens regularly received phone calls of users that their water was oddly colored. This was due to harmless (actually healthy) organic compounds. Yet color was more important to their customers, so Vitens filtered out the organic compounds and send this excess material stream to an incinerator. Costs: half a million annually, and a waste of valuable resources. They decided they could optimize this process. Within two years they refined their purification installation and now sell the salts and organic compounds with a big profit to various companies. They also sell the technology behind the new purification installation.

Fruitleather Rotterdam

Each year we throw away 1.3 billion tons of food. Currently 30% of the world's farmland is used to produce food that will be wasted. Moreover 10% of all greenhouse gasses in rich countries is emitted by producing food that will never be eaten. The design duo Fruitleather Rotterdam transforms fruit into sustainable leather like material strong enough to be used in shoes, bags and other products.

Closing the Loop

Closing the Loop buys your redundant IT hardware - and gives it a second life. Data-secure, easy and uniquely sustainable. They also collect and buy end-of-life mobile phones in emerging markets Africa and Asia. This social business leads to sustainable jobs, waste reduction and more recycling. With the help of their strategic partners, over 95% of the metals can be retrieved from the already collected 1 million scrap mobile phones.