The Cleankeepers / WASTER — Pitch
Written by Jonáš Verner
Imagine being in school during the break. You’re hungry so you take that ham and cheese sandwich you made at home from your bag, withdraw it from the paper snack bag, unwrap it from the aluminium foil and, finally, you proceed to eat the sandwich. After doing that, I guess you’d toss both the paper bag and the aluminium foil into the trash. Maybe you’d put it in the recycling trash, hoping that it will somehow find its way to be reused, but, most probably, you’d just use the general one and to cast the bad conscience away you’d swipe through Tinder for the rest of the break.
Although it doesn’t seem that way, that sandwich is a part of a big global challenge. Just in the Attica region, 6000 tons of waste are produced every day, which equals 2 million tons a year. More than 70 per cent of this waste ends up in landfills, some illegal, only around 20 per cent is recycled. This is way less than the EU average and it makes an enormous issue not only for the environment but also for the country’s economy. Now imagine that someone would interrupt your Tinder scrolling session by telling you that you could do better — sell the aluminium foil to one classmate, Exchange the paper bag for a blank sheet of paper with your professor or even make a profit out of the things you just wasted in the trash. You could do it all while staying on Tinder — the tinder for the trash.
WASTER — regional raw waste e-commerce platform can make a change. We are proposing to start a project that would help companies resell, reuse and get rid of unwanted production materials, from metal scraps through plastic foils to glass shards — anything that can be used by someone else. We are proposing to create a Tinder-like platform, working on the same matching algorithm that would reflect your needs and desires. By following the thoughts of the circular economy, WASTER points to reduce production waste, which currently stands at almost 20 per cent of Greece’s total waste production. While there are other great platforms that focus on food-wasting, redistribution, etc, there is no similar platform that would tackle this type of waste. For now, there only is the glooming and underdeveloped trash recycling facility which is underfinanced, under communicated and generally not very attractive.
Why would WASTER make a change? First, it allows the companies to make a profit out of something that would normally cost them money. As a parallel, this is what makes successful startups that focus on food waste reduction very popular — if one can make a profit, it just fits better than just to do things for the greater good. Second, the whole platform would be online — if you have something to sell, you just post it. If you need something, you search for it. In the times like these when mobility is challenged by COVID-19, this certainly shows great potential. The year 2020 was the year of e-commerce and WASTER is overseeing this fact.
While thinking big in general, we’d go small in scale first, focussing on the densely populated area of the Attica region with industrial factories and Piraeus. It would show us the potential of WASTER in a bigger scale. Furthermore, it would be the perfect starting point to go bigger and better and even to expand to the whole of Greece. To sustain financially, we’d ask the companies to také care of the shipping while the WASTER executive board will care about the e-management, run the website interface, give consultations to potential customers and work as a networking platform.
WASTER‘s goal is to improve our planet by focusing on protecting the environment. We thrive for a circular economy — what has once been used, can be used again. We want to help create a space in which waste is not an issue but a solution. A space in which even a ham and cheese sandwich can, eventually, make a change.
