Another ClimateTech Podcast
Another ClimateTech Podcast is a weekly interview series that explores the fight against climate change through the lens of entrepreneurship, investment, academia, activism, and art. Join Ryan Grant Little, a seasoned climatetech founder, advisor, and investor, as he interviews the climate warriors trying to save us from ourselves.
#Climate #Climatetech #Cleantech #Sustainability #Environment
Another ClimateTech Podcast
A surfer decides to tackle ocean plastic, with Joel Tasche of CleanHub
Joel Tasche is the founder of CleanHub, and is on a mission to clean up our oceans, all while empowering marginalized waste workers. And it all started with his passion for surfing. 🌊 And it all started with his passion for surfing. 🌊
Listen to this episode to learn how CleanHub:
🚛 implements tracking systems all the way from households to disposal sites, ensuring transparency and efficiency
💻 is developing its platform into a full-stack waste management system, borrowing efficiency strategies from Amazon's playbook
🌍 is expanding its waste collection and sorting capacities in coastal communities in India, Indonesia, Tanzania, and Cambodia
🤝 is working on upskilling programs and social audits to improve working conditions for waste sorters
#cleantech #wastemanagement #plasticcredits #recycling #sustainability
Promo partner for this episode is Grizzle, helping B2B ClimateTech companies generate demand and customers through high-quality content, social media, and SEO services. Podcast listeners can book a free consultation here.
Welcome to another Climate Tech podcast interviews with the people trying to save us from ourselves. Joel Tasche is co-founder of CleanHub, which matches brands that produce plastic waste with the places in the global south that collect this waste Through collection, verification, measurement and a system of credits. They're working to help rebalance the system and get plastic out of the ocean. I reached Joel in Berlin. I'm Ryan Grant-Little Thanks for being here. Joel, welcome to the podcast.
Joel Tasche:Thanks a lot for having me, Ryan. Good to be here.
Ryan Grant Little:You describe yourself as a lover of the ocean, and no surprise. You said how much you hate seeing plastic waste in the ocean. So what's your connection? Are you a surfer? Where does this come from?
Joel Tasche:Yeah, I'm a passionate but very untalented surfer and I personally grew up at Lake Constance, which is in southern Germany, and we call it the Swabian Sea. We call it that because when it gets foggy, which gets a lot, you can't see the other side of the lake, so it does look like the ocean. But I grew up sailing, swimming and spent a lot of time outdoors. We had the Swiss and the Austrian Alps around the corner, right. So lots of outdoors activities. And then at some point sailing wasn't cool enough anymore and I started surfing and fell in love with it and dedicated basically my early 20s to it and kind of designed my life around it.
Joel Tasche:So I chose the universities where I knew that when I go for a semester abroad I can go to some of the best surf spots and always work during the semester to have the semester break off and go surfing. And that led me a lot to Southeast Asia, also, specifically Indonesia, and no matter where you went, it can be the shoreline, it can be a volcano. You'd see plastic pollution everywhere, and that's not something that I was used to, because Southern Germany is also, economically, I would say, a more strong area of Germany where things are in order, right, it's like almost stereotypically trimmed gardens and all that are in order, right, it's like almost stereotypically trimmed gardens and all that. And also, if you go to switzerland or to the alps in general, people take care of the environment a lot and then when you see such beautiful nature so polluted with plastic pollution, that is to some degree frustrating. And you know, I then participated in beach cleanups and did all that.
Joel Tasche:And the next day you come back and things look exactly the same. You wonder it's like what's behind that? And yeah, at some point I pushed that thought to the back of my mind and started my career in b2b software and, yeah, kept surfing and having that nagging thought in the back of my mind that there needs to be a somewhat scalable solution for the problem. And when I finally quit my job after three years I I said I want to start my own company. I knew that I wanted it to be dedicated to the problem of plastic pollution. I didn't know what the solution would look like, but that's where it all started.
Ryan Grant Little:My own surfing career lasted about 15 minutes in Morocco after the board got kind of like behind me and then the tip of it right into my ribs and I could barely breathe for about five days. So that was, uh, yeah, not my sport, I guess, but it's pretty cool to watch and I wish I I could do it.
Joel Tasche:But I'll stick to um skiing and running and yeah like every sport, it looks so easy from the outside, but once you're in the water, right then the wave comes crashing down. You're like, oh my god, what's going on?
Ryan Grant Little:I mean, and I also really don't like being underwater, so I've got like a real like phobia of that and so like a wave sweeping your way and not knowing which way is up, and so it's I think, yeah, maybe just sitting with like a john le carre book on the beach is a better fit for me, but so was this deep-seated connection and the frustration or despair or whatever noun you want to use seeing all this plastic wash up over and over, no matter how many times you do a cleanup. That led you and your co-founder, florent Dinga, to start CleanHub. That's five years ago, so 2019. Different worlds, basically, in a lot of ways, from pre-pandemic to interest rates and all that kind of thing. Take us back five years and talk a little bit about the formation of the company there in Berlin and maybe kind of bring us up, you know, to present day.
Joel Tasche:Yeah, the company officially started in January 2020, but I quit my job in December 2018. So there was an entire year between that and a lot of that year was dedicated to research. So I spent time in India, I spent time in the Philippines, I spent time in Sri Lanka quite frankly, always, always connected a bit with surfing as well, and because I wanted to understand where the problem comes from, right. And then I came back to Germany at some point and said, okay, maybe I need to do something in the German waste management ecosystem and understand that first. So I studied that. I unpaid internships, basically, with waste management companies. I attended conferences from the cradle who don't believe in the concept of waste, all the way on the other spectrum, which was the Waste to Energy lobby meeting in Brussels, and, yeah, so I've seen a broad spectrum and we tried different ideas in the waste management space.
Joel Tasche:And at some point we said, okay, if you do something here in Germany, how is that really going to have an impact on what's going on in the areas where pollution is really stark? And at that point, a friend from India actually messaged me and said hey, the government is dumping all the trash on my land. You're the only person that I know that cares about waste, can you help me? And I was intrigued. We had a phone call and after the call I actually booked a ticket to India and visited him for roughly two weeks and he took me around and showed me what's two weeks. And he took me around and showed me like what's going on and we sat at the dinner table and I was asking him hey, do you know what happens to your trash after you dump it? And he said I have no idea. So we started to follow that trash bag, basically, and stumbled across all these different things like the informal sector, the informal recycling industry. I learned that the circular economy meaning that you reuse things a lot, that you recycle things, that you don't throw anything of value and extend the life cycle of it is much, much stronger in india than it is in germany, and that goes for a big amount of the more emerging countries.
Joel Tasche:So, yeah, it was. It was a lot of learning, a lot of listening, a lot of observing and trying to understand where's the root cause of the problem and what a surprise it is in the economics. And yeah, with that insight, we came back to Germany and we said we have a rough understanding of what we need to do, and what we need to do is to increase collection and sorting capacity for waste. The early idea was and we almost had a deal with a mayor in Sri Lanka of a small village to build our own material recovery facility like a physical place to sort waste. But we quickly learned that no investor in the world wants to fund a waste management company in Sri Lanka, and so we had to change approach again. And then we found the model which is now CleanUp, which is more asset-light right, but we can go into that in a bit and that's when we had the idea. That's when we went out to fundraise, and that was then late 2019. And the company formed in Jan 2020.
Ryan Grant Little:2019- and the company formed in Jan 2020.
Joel Tasche:And we closed the fundraise in March 2020.
Ryan Grant Little:And then the pandemic. Devastating, for the pandemic was devastating for the waste sector and for waste pickers in particular, who have you know, of course no social safety net whatsoever. How did the pandemic change the nature of the business?
Joel Tasche:To some degree. We didn't have a business at that point.
Ryan Grant Little:We had business on paper Of the industry, maybe more broadly.
Joel Tasche:I think to understand how things changed, one needs to understand how it works in these countries, and what I mentioned was that you have a strong informal sector, and this informal sector they collect commodity. They collect whatever can still be recycled that is, pet water bottles, that is HDPE shampoo bottles or any hard plastic, because they're paid by the kilogram at the end of the day, and if you pick up a foil or a chips bag, you have to pick up quite a lot to get to something that somebody pays you for. They pick up glass, they pick up paper, cardboard, whatever you can sell as a recycled material. What they leave behind is all the non-recyclable stuff, all the multilayer packaging where you have aluminum, plastic compounds, all the thin foils like LDPE, pp foils.
Joel Tasche:And if you look at the pandemic, what happened is people retreated back home, right, no matter where you were in the world. There was an increased need for hygiene, and plastic as a packaging material is doing a fantastic job at providing a hygiene product, a sterile product, all the way around the world. So I mean, if you remember back to the mass, right, every single one was individually wrapped. Every single COVID test was individually wrapped. That increased waste a lot, and specifically of the non-recyclable sort. Then, at the same time, you had contaminated waste going out, right, all the COVID tests. Nobody knew at that point how contagious is all that. They used masks. All that stuff was thrown away.
Joel Tasche:And at the same time, people started ordering stuff home and also in India, right, no matter where you are. So waste volumes increased drastically. So waste got less valuable and on top of that, the working conditions got more dangerous for the waste pickers because they don't have social security, right, they don't have the luxury to sit at home and wait until it's over, and they live day to day. Also, cashflow wise, right. The informal waste collectors are usually the lowest income people, the most marginalized communities, and they couldn't stop working. So they still went out to pick waste, but in horrendous conditions. And, yeah, and that changed a lot.
Ryan Grant Little:I mean, it's not just the terrible conditions and having to be out there and being at risk, but there's also the I mean, having to violate stay at home orders and these kinds of things. And so I know a lot of waste pickers found themselves basically choosing between whether they want to get in trouble for being out you in violation of that, or if they're going to eat that day, and this seemed to be a kind of a cascading effect across the industry as well.
Joel Tasche:Yeah, it was also for me a very interesting cultural learning because you know, I was sitting in my apartment back in berlin and I was mostly safe. And then you speak to people I don't know from ghana and from around the world and you, you talk with them about COVID and it's like COVID. We have way bigger problems here, completely different perspective on it.
Ryan Grant Little:Like why does it take 15 minutes for my groceries to get here with gorillas?
Joel Tasche:Yeah, exactly. And then it's like, yeah, covid is a thing, but we have other issues and it was also interesting. But for us, as CleanUp, what we did in the end, we the first two, three months nothing happened, right, the entire markets were down, nobody was doing anything and we're sitting waiting wishing for better times and keeping the money together. But we invested in building relationships, we invested in building the technology at that point and, yeah, out of these relationships, I mean covid. Covid took a long time. Right, we started to help also the businesses that we work with, establish more safe work environments and making sure that there's emergency funds so that people were continually paid even if there were downtimes in the business. So these things happened on the scale that we were able to afford. I don't want to sit here and say we saved the entire world. That affected maybe 30, 40 employees in the project itself, but in the way that was possible for us, we tried to support.
Ryan Grant Little:I want to come back to some of this as well in a minute, but let's shift focus and talk a little bit about CleanHub as a product. So you're a SaaS company. What kind of customers do you work with? What problem do you solve for?
Joel Tasche:them. I would say the easiest way to describe CleanHub is we are a two-sided marketplace, right If you talk in business terms? And on the one side of the marketplace we have consumer good brands that have an issue with plastic, that need to use plastic to some degree Others already managed to completely phase away from it, but that's completely different discussion whether or not plastic has a right in the economy and on the other side of the marketplace we have the waste management companies, mostly in the global south, exclusively in the global south, exclusively in pollution hotspots, exclusively in the global south, exclusively in pollution hot spots, where there's usually no waste management. Because our goal is to solve one problem and that is two billion people in the world do not have access to waste management services and, as I eased earlier, that is for economic reasons, because if you collect trash, the majority of that will not be fit for recycling, so you can't turn it into a product and sell it, but you actually have to dispose of it and disposal, especially if you want to do it in the most safe way possible, which in this case is co-processing, which means you turn it into fuel in the cement industry you have to pay a tipping fee. You have to pay the cement plant to accept the waste.
Joel Tasche:So where's the money? In the market? Waste management only costs money. It's a service. It's not a manufacturing process where you have an end product and if nobody pays for the service, the service is not being performed. And this is how we get to pollution. Because if nobody comes to pick up your trash, what are you going to do? You're either going to burn it under the open sky, which is common practice around the world, and that practice is responsible for anywhere between 2% to 10% of greenhouse gas equivalent emissions, which is insane and nobody talks about it really or you throw it in the next river, you throw it in the ocean, you bury it. You just want to get rid of it, right, and we connect those that produce the plastic and talk with them and say, okay, maybe you can't get rid of it, but at least you can take responsibility for it.
Joel Tasche:And on the other side of the world, we then have the companies that receive the money to actually run the waste management services. What we do in the middle is because you need to establish trust in such a system, right? It's like people don't necessarily want to transfer money from the US or Germany or wherever they are into India for waste management. And that is the general issue in my eyes in the waste management world and we're getting very geeky and detail oriented here. But the problem with waste management as a service is it's one of the few services where you don't have evidence of work.
Joel Tasche:If I go to the hairdresser, I can look into the mirror at the end of it and say it's like, oh my God, what did you do? Hey, you did a great job. If I go to a massage I know I liked it, whatever right it's like if somebody cleans my apartment, I can see whether it's clean or not. In waste management I can say, yeah, somebody picked up my trash, but that's it. I don't know what happens to it afterwards. I don't know if they send it to Asia. I don't know if they dump it in the ocean. I don't know if they burn it because they want to save cost.
Joel Tasche:And what needs to happen is that consumers and the entire market gets the transparency that the waste management process is finished accordingly. And this is where we build software, this is where we build track and trace to really collect the evidence that waste is being collected from the household is going into sorting, collect the evidence that waste is being collected from the household, is going into sorting. Whatever can be recycled is taken out and whatever cannot be recycled is being responsibly disposed of. And this is what our tech does we track all that, we collect all the evidence from that and store it in one central place so we can verify whatever claims are being made and then we can establish trust in the market, and through trust comes more investment.
Ryan Grant Little:Interesting. Yeah, I mean, that's a topic I wanted to ask you about. Both you know as key words here trust and verification and just wondering how you verify that everything ends up where it's supposed to. I mean, these kinds of supply chains, all kinds of global supply chains, are very complicated and, you know, knowing how banners were picked or anything like that, is very challenging. With waste, which is you know less of a commodity, as you've just described, it's probably very difficult and I wonder, kind of, what does the interplay of technology and trust look like for a topic like verification? What kind of conversations are you having both with your customers and with the projects themselves about this topic? How is it evolving?
Joel Tasche:The conversations that we have, especially smaller brands. They look at it and for them it's an important factor. But you can establish trust in different ways. Right, it can be through personal connection, but I don't think that personal connection scales, and especially if you start talking to the larger brands, this is when certifications, data, all of that becomes really interesting, especially if you look at the shifts in also the regulatory frameworks.
Joel Tasche:We have the Green Claims Initiative coming up in Europe that says every green claim has to be substantiated. How do you substantiate? Only through evidence, right, so the evidence needs to be collected. There are traceability standards for recycling, where you need to collect data to actually back them up, and these are conversations that are accelerating a lot. If you talk to a big brand owner, one of the number one things that they care about when it comes to recycling is traceability. When it comes to any kind of environmental claim is evidence, and I think there's two ways to that, right, so we can do it the old school way and hire a very expensive consultant or oil team companies or whatever, and have these rubber mark quality checks where they look at it once a year and they say, yeah, it looks good, and charge a crazy amount of money for that, or we can do it in a more technology driven way, and I think especially if we know that it has a danger to sound buzzwordy but if you look at the developments in artificial intelligence and image recognition, software and all these different topics, there's a huge opportunity to make all of that cheaper. Because the number one thing when it comes to waste is things need to be efficiently planned at a ton of cost, and what we do is we established our own tracking system.
Joel Tasche:It starts at the household level in most cases, where people have a qr code on the door and when the waste collectors come, they scan the qr code in moment. We know that they checked in. They receive the bag. They take an image of the bag as evidence that this bag was collected. We pull the geolocation and we know that this bag was collected at the location where it was supposed to be collected. We receive the weight from that and the image model is actually making an approximation of what it thinks that bag weighs, and a lot of factors play in there. It's the size of the bag, it's the form of the bag Like is it very saggy, is it very fluffy and voluminous? And also what's the history of that household. It's like, have they always producing that amount of waste roughly, or are they crazy? Jumps in there and that's all playing together.
Joel Tasche:And that's then the first level. And that bag then goes onto a truck and on that truck we accumulate the different bags, right, and at some point the truck is full and it goes into the so-called material recovery facility where the trash is being sorted and that truck, going there, is being weighed at the entrance, and then we cross, compare do the volumes of the bags that we registered add up to what the truck weighs? And that way we know, okay, step one, all clear, no waste that we don't want on there has been added or we also didn't under-report, even though at this stage it wouldn't really matter. Then the waste goes into the facility. We know how much volume is being booked into that facility. So we're keeping book, basically, of what's going in and what's going out, and then the sorting process starts.
Joel Tasche:So we always know, okay, how much non-recyclables are being sorted out, and then at the same time that tells us how much recyclables there are, and in some cases we know it in more detail. Then we know, okay, this is blue pet. This is white pet, this is green pet. It depends on how precisely things are tracked, but we always, always know how much of that chunk was non-recyclable plastic.
Joel Tasche:And then we know how much non-recyclable stuff is sitting in stock and at some point, when the stock gets full let's say we're at 12 tons they send a truck. That truck is being registered and they book out all the volumes onto that truck, or partial volumes, and the truck is being weighed again and then we have the new book value of how much waste was there. Then the truck goes into disposal where it's being weighed again, and then we know okay, did the same volume that was sent out also arrived in disposal? And then at the disposal location we also get a lab test where we test for moisture in the waste, because if you are in monsoon heavy areas right, there will be 10, 20, sometimes even 30% water in the waste and we deduct that from the gross weight and that way we get to the net weight of plastic that was actually certified and recovered. And this is what is plastic credit for us. This is what's then the tradable unit, so we assign value to the non-valuable.
Ryan Grant Little:Basically, I feel like, in addition to CleanHub, you could white label this technology for other purposes. I'm thinking of DHL, which has lost my last two packages. But there must be interest in, I mean, what you've built scales to other industries or you know. Have you considered that as a model as well to white label White?
Joel Tasche:labeling not so much. Yet what we're currently very actively looking at is applying that into the world of recycling, because it comes natural to us right. We already know all the partners. So we are working on two pilots to actually track bottles into a final new product, again for supply chains that already work.
Joel Tasche:And we just recently signed a contract with one of our partners where we built our first co-owned waste management center, because so far we always had we sit on and expand existing operations, and this time we also participated in Carpex, where we then have a full center that's going to manage roughly 6,000 tons a year, and there we then also have more control in what the exact software setup is. So we want to digitize actually the entire waste management chain because we need to bring in more efficiencies. If you want to make waste management profitable, you have two levers that you can pull. You can either increase the value of the final output product or you decrease the cost that it takes to manage it, and you need to pull on both, and software is a great way to also be more efficient, be more data driven, make smarter choices. Also, we are planning to actually develop this more into a full stack waste management platform than expanding the track and trace element into different industries.
Ryan Grant Little:We talked a minute ago about verification. The first cousin of verification is measurement, and that's also a central theme of your platform, and I wonder what kind of your KPIs, so to speak, are for impact metrics and what do the numbers maybe look like? You know now, in aggregate across all of your customers?
Joel Tasche:So we track two numbers very meticulously, and I'm just waiting for the final Q1 numbers to come in. So the first one is total waste collected, which means across all projects that we have, across all waste management companies that we work with, how much volume is being booked into their material recovery facility. And there we are at close to 9 million kilograms. So 9,000 tons, which is, in the world of waste management, a tiny little drop in the ocean. Still right To also be very realistic here, but the growth curve behind it is the more interesting part. To also be very realistic here, but the growth curve behind it is the more interesting part. And the second metric that we track is how much of that was then certified disposed of. This means how many plastic credits did we issue? And there I would need to report back to you how much that is today, because I don't want to give any wrong numbers. I'm coming out of a paternity leave actually currently.
Joel Tasche:Oh, congratulations that is also my small eyes.
Ryan Grant Little:Don't worry, I'm not auditing you on this.
Joel Tasche:But other people do. So this is the interesting part. We are working together with TÜV Süd, which is a German auditing company that the Germans will all know, but they actually have presence in more than 180 countries and they are basically coming in almost like bookkeepers and look at the numbers and say does what CleanUp say make sense? Were the volumes, as CleanUp communicate them, also registered on the platform and are they allocated towards the customers, as CleanUp says, to the outside world?
Ryan Grant Little:That's a big one too, right. I mean in this industry to ensure that there's no double counting, exactly, and that's what TÜV does.
Joel Tasche:That's the one element of the business, right? But what we touched on earlier in the conversation is the social element of the business, because you are working with a very marginalized community of people and social standards are quite behind in the world of waste management. And one of our principles at CleanUp is that we try to bring people from a more informal work sector into a formal employment, and that works pretty well in most projects. In some others there's still work to be done, because it's also a certain barrier that you need to overcome, right? Some people actually want to stay in informal work environments for different reasons, but for us we need formal work environments that we can actually run auditing, and we have three people on the ground in India and Indonesia that are working together with the partners to level up the social compliance. So we do our own social audits.
Joel Tasche:So we do our own social audits and on top of that we work with a third party company called Supply Exchange under the management of Kate Larson, who has like 20, 25 years experience in social auditing.
Joel Tasche:She managed supply chains for Burberry, she managed supply chains for the children's place, mostly in the fashion industry, but they came from a similar background where very few rules were implemented, and she also wrote our code of conduct, which is based on three major labor standards, which is the SA8000, fla and ETI, and we basically currently audit against our own code of conduct and have that built into the platform as well.
Joel Tasche:So whenever we have non-compliances, this is flagged in the platform and then people can upload the evidence that they remediated things, and this can be things like firefighting systems, that can be things like a maternity policy for the female workers, it can be policies around bathrooms, restrooms, things that need to be in the facility, ventilation in the facility, all these things, and this is then more an internal metric, right? It's like how many non-compliances did we remediate? Because our approach is one of continuous work and not of exclusion, so if you walk into a facility, there will always be something that you can find. Right? It's like maybe there's no time tracking device or something like that, but we in the auditsits find all that and then work together with the partners to level them up.
Ryan Grant Little:I've worked a lot in this space as well and helped to fund eight projects in the global south, from the Philippines through to Peru, and to expand kind of existing facilities. As you mentioned, it's very hard to get access to financing in a lot of these countries and one of the things I see that you track a number of jobs made safer, which I love, and one of the numbers we tracked for this program was new jobs for women or women empowerment, and we did similar things. I mean a lot of it is some of the basic, literally plumbing, basic plumbing like getting bathrooms there.
Joel Tasche:Yeah, it's insane.
Ryan Grant Little:It's like, yeah, and then up to health insurance and and kindergartens and and education and stuff like that and trying to get make some pot like some courses so that a lot of the women waste pickers can kind of level up to the aggregator level and that type of thing, and I wonder.
Joel Tasche:My favorite part is we're currently looking at a at an upskilling program to make people from waste sorters into forklift drivers, which is a crazy jump, and it's also these, these things that sometimes are very hard to measure, that are more qualitative. But we have a wonderful person on the ground named Lakshmi. She's from India. She knows the waste management space inside out and she organized workshops on sustainable menstruation products with the female workforce. She's also touching a lot of the more taboo topics. She organizes workshops with the children of the village to do theater workshops, to educate on plastic pollution and all that. It's really the people there, and I think that's one of my biggest learnings and something that I've actually did right from the get-go. It's like don't assume that you can know everything if you go to a different country right, and that's also not the job there but hire people with a local context, with a local cultural context, that know how to have these conversations. It's impossible, if you didn't grow up there, to think that you can intervene in a meaningful way.
Joel Tasche:And also in respectful ways.
Ryan Grant Little:I mean country by country also. I mean, as you've probably seen, in the Philippines there are some interesting taboos around women lifting heavy items and that type of thing. So you really have to understand the country by country cultural context yeah, yeah, absolutely I was a forklift driver for a summer as a young teenager at a warehouse very illegally um doing 24-hour shifts, sometimes also and and I think, looking back, you know it's one of my favorite jobs ever.
Joel Tasche:It's like playing 3d tetris and getting paid for it, that's so cool. I only got to drive these little ones on the floor where you still had to pump manually, and all that.
Ryan Grant Little:Oh no, you got it. I mean, it's so much fun. So your plastics recovery operations are in India, indonesia, tanzania and Cambodia. I wanted to ask you how you decide to locate them. I think I have one of the criteria and that's good surfing. But what's some of the other criteria? And what else do you have on the radar looking ahead?
Joel Tasche:Yeah, for us it's the most important thing is always the relation to the local entity that we work with, and the projects that fall under our plastic credits all have to be coastal communities or within 50 kilometers of the coast. And that's the second point. And we need to make sure that there is additionality. And what that means for us is that we expand collection, that we reach more households, that we implement new things that weren't there before. And the other way how we ensure additionality is that our plastic credit is only assigned to the non-recyclable plastics, because what other people do in the market is they collect what is already being collected, namely PET bottles, hdpe bottles, and the bale of HDPE or a ton of PET trades for roughly $1,000.
Joel Tasche:It is a commodity. It is widely collected. Trades for roughly a thousand US dollar. It is a commodity. It is widely collected. There are maybe a few remote islands where it's not, because the cost of transportation eats up the entire margin. So there is the chance to have additionality with PET as well. The more remote you go, the less collection. But generally I think you have a very hard time to prove the additionality of a plastic credit on something that is recyclable already, which is why we don't do it.
Joel Tasche:And yeah, then for us, the core areas are India and Indonesia. Indonesia for the fact that it's such a massive country with so many islands, and I think you could just do a company there and focus on that and you wouldn't finish in a lifetime. The other thing is India because it's such a strongly growing economy with a long coastline and, at the same time, you have political programs there in place for Shabarat Clean India, so the country itself as an economy is thinking in the right direction, and these are the core drivers for us to go there, and also the fact that in the beginning, we only knew English right and we had to also see whether people speak good English.
Ryan Grant Little:Yeah, communication is super important with these projects, as I've learned. We spoke three years ago over Zoom, during the kind of thick of the pandemic, and since then I've followed you on LinkedIn and other places and the company has grown substantially. I think you mentioned you have about 35 people depending on how you count, working for the company now, so congratulations, things are going well. This is obviously a topic that's getting more and more attention, and rightfully so, and I wonder, just for the company itself, what does the next year or two ahead look like?
Joel Tasche:yeah, I think in regards of growth, we are venture-backed right, so you have to grow quite dramatically. At the same time, any kind of forecast is difficult, but we try to triple every year, especially in regards to volume. And the way how to get there is what I mentioned earlier. We're slightly changing the way how we work together with our partners and invest more into our own projects moving forward, meaning that we more or less co-own the operations, and that's very important for us because I believe that the answer to plastic pollution still needs to be scalable, and I think this will turn more into almost like a franchising system where we have to open new hubs along the coastlines. My vision is ideally a cleanup in every coastal community. That's a long, long way to go, but that's what's required, because we have to be realistic.
Joel Tasche:People will continue to produce waste. Since the dawn of time, humanity created waste. There is no process without it, and the nature of waste changes, but the fact remains that it has to be collected. Even if we will switch to biodegradable plastics, that's still not an excuse to just dump it into the environment and have nature take care of it. If you would throw your banana peels out of the window on the streets of Berlin, you would still get in trouble, even though it's biodegradable. You need waste collection no matter what happens, and you need to make sure that this material is being looked back into the economy right.
Joel Tasche:So we will continue to invest in expanding waste collection and sorting capacities. That will never change. And we will continue to invest into technology to make things more and more transparent, more and more efficient, because, especially if you grow that network right, you don't want to increase costs with every center that you build. But a bit like the Amazon approach and we can think about what we want. But in regards of efficiency, they did a fantastic job by continuously investing into their own platform and in making things more efficient. Investing into their own platform and making things more efficient and into making processes more and more data-driven, software-driven and I think that's what the world of waste management also means standardization, scalability and, yeah, repeatability so you can borrow from amazon's example to solve the problem that is largely being created by Amazon as well.
Joel Tasche:To some degree.
Ryan Grant Little:yes, yeah, sure it makes sense.
Joel Tasche:I can only encourage every entrepreneur to read the shareholder letters by Bezos and again, no matter what you think of him, there's a lot to learn.
Ryan Grant Little:Yeah, for sure that's right. So for people who want to get involved with the mission or learn more about it, where's the best place to find you and CleanHub?
Joel Tasche:I think mostly on Instagram. This is where we post most about our progress as a company. That's at cleanhubio, which is still our old domain. If anybody knows the owner of CleanHub on Instagram, it has two followers. It's impossible to get that account. Completely inactive account. We love to get that account. Completely inactive account. We love to get that Anyway. So this is the number one place, and on LinkedIn we are also quite active. I'm also active on LinkedIn, so feel free to connect there. One note on LinkedIn I'm currently on a bit of a LinkedIn detox, so I might respond to messages.
Joel Tasche:I'm jealous, but feel free to reach out by email.
Ryan Grant Little:Great. I'll put all of that, as always, in the show notes. Joel, what a pleasure talking to you. Great to see you again after three years.
Joel Tasche:Likewise, ryan, and let's hope there's not going to be three years until the next time.
Ryan Grant Little:I doubt it. Yeah, take care.
Joel Tasche:Fantastic. Thank you so much.
Ryan Grant Little:Thanks for listening to another Climate Tech Podcast. It would mean a lot if you would subscribe, rate and share this podcast. Get in touch anytime with tips and guest recommendations at hello at climatetechpodcom. Find me, ryan Grant Little, on LinkedIn. I'll be back with another episode next week. Bye for now.
