Planet Champions: Ali Hood

How can we facilitate a seamless reuse economy?

As recycling rates for key materials like plastic remain stubbornly low, interest in reuse systems for everything from coffee cups to e-commerce packaging is growing. But making these systems work in practice is much easier said than done. We discussed the future of reuse with Ali Hood, founder and CEO of Recirculate Systems, a company that is tapping into payment systems for a more seamless customer experience.

The UK-based startup sells a bolt-on software that integrates with existing payment providers, enabling businesses to add a deposit for a reusable product simply by pressing a button on the point-of-sale device. The customer can then return the item to any participating shop or collection point equipped with Recirculate’s software. The initial target customers for the company are existing reuse networks such as Recup and ReCircle (which we previously featured on Springwise).

What do you see as the long-term drivers of reuse?

The long-term driver for reuse has to be legislation – that has to be the unstoppable wave that will drive reuse. At the moment, we – and when I say ‘we’, I mean the private enterprise involved in reuse collectively, not just my company – are enabling that wave to happen. We know that it will happen, but there’s just friction at the moment between legislators, the populace, and what’s possible.

For the planet, we should make massive and unpopular decisions, and I’m sure that regulators are just waiting for the moment to be right and for the technology to be available for them to push that button.

What have been the barriers to the adoption of reuse so far?

I’m really familiar with these barriers because, in a previous life, I had a small chain of coffee shops, and that’s what led me to doing this. The shops were planet first, as we liked to call it, so we would look at what the most planet-friendly decision would be and then there would need to be a very good reason not to do that.

But there was always a massive elephant in the room when it came to coffee cups. So, although what I’m doing now is very specifically software, I had first-hand experience of the challenges of reuse, not just as a person, but also as a business struggling with those barriers to adoption. Those barriers were very, very clearly price-related – we’re living in this capitalist society where if you don’t make that cheapest decision, someone else will.

I haven’t found a reuse system that’s cheap yet – they are, I’d be confident in saying, always more expensive than single use. So, you’re already limiting right down the number of people who are going to adopt reuse. That’s one massive barrier.

The second one, if you are prepared to put up with a more expensive option, is the enormous amount of friction that’s required in reuse. From my perspective as a coffee shop owner, this meant that a sale in something reusable took longer. So, as well as being more expensive, it’s getting in the way of other, cheaper sales.

From the customer’s perspective, you’ve got to care enough about the environment to make an active decision to do reuse because it’s not the normal option. Then, you have to download an app, another barrier, and provide a huge amount of personal data. If people make it over all those barriers then you’ve got a fit, but even those people have to remember, or be bothered, to use the reuse system in practice.

I’m using coffee and coffee cups as a really specific example, but this is replicated across the board. They are the barriers – it’s friction and price.

How does Recirculate solve these problems?

The underlying reason for all these barriers is the giving of data – and that’s where we come in. What if we could master reuse without asking anyone for any more data than they already give when they buy something? When you buy something, you give a certain amount of data to a payment provider. What if, using that data and our software, we could seamlessly, in the background, attach an object to a transaction and thereby facilitate deposits – and the returning of deposits – without an app?

From the business’s point of view, there hasn’t been any interaction – they haven’t had to load up another app to register the deposit, nor have they had to get the customer to load up an app. Instead, it’s as seamless as pressing a button to offer a discount for someone bringing their own cup. That’s all our system requires – you press a button to add a deposit. We’ve therefore solved that final piece of the jigsaw, which is price.

If you’ve ever seen a ‘bring your own cup’ scheme, businesses are typically offering a discount of at least 10 per cent or often more to incentivise people. On a £3.50 flat white, that’s 35p. We can make the cost of using our software fractions of that, so suddenly you’ve solved the price problem.

How do you get payment providers on board?

The ability to run a universal point of sale exists within all payment providers, but they must be able to talk to our software. Payment providers often already provide open APIs that give you the ability to bolt on add-ons that make their software stronger, better, and more desirable. It’s using those that we communicate with many payment providers.

When APIs aren’t open to the public, it makes an awful lot of sense for everyone in the chain required to make this happen to co-operate. Payment providers are currently getting 100 per cent of no deposit refunds. But if they open up an API to us, all of a sudden, every time something gets returned through their system, they get a small slice of the action. So everyone gains in this – the only people who don’t are those peddling single use.

What about hardware?

So our product is the bolt-on software that we give to reuse networks who have their own hardware, which we can code for. We do have a prototype hardware device but that’s really for community groups, like the Shrewsbury Cup, who currently run things via cash but want to be able to accept card. I’m trying to reduce the barriers to entry here as much as possible, and it’d be very difficult for those groups to buy their own hardware solution. If they did do that, we’d have to code for whatever RFID scanner they chose. We could do that, and that’s what we want to do for the bigger networks who have deeper pockets, but it’s easier for everyone if the smaller groups have an off-the-shelf solution. So, we have a bit of kit, but we’re not in the hardware business, and as soon as someone does that hardware cheaper and better than us then great.

What are the most promising use cases for your technology?

Anything that is currently single use. You could have any food packaging – McDonald’s, for example, could get rid of all their single-use packaging. They could have a deposit for reusable chip holders, and because they have a huge network, there would be lots of places to return them to.

Where we really add value though is in things that are less branded, although we can do branded options. For example, imagine a world where all plant pots have tiny RFID tags, a QR code, or a really long number built into them. All we would need to do is work out who Homebase and B&Q’s payment providers are, then as that product is scanned through the till, we get all the information we need to add a tiny deposit. Then, instead of having all of those horrible plant pots cluttering up your shed outside, you as a customer could take them back anywhere, regardless of where you initially bought them from, and get your deposit straight back to the card you paid for them with. Those returned plant pots will then be picked up the next time the shop has a delivery from the manufacturer, regardless of whether the pot was initially sold from Homebase or B&Q. Again, everyone in that supply chain benefits from this. No one benefits from single use.

Beyond plant pots, an even more powerful example would be any packaging that arrives to your door where we currently have reams and reams of recycled cardboard that eventually loses its quality and just goes to nothing.

The scale is as big as the problem we face – in fact it’s exactly proportional to it.

Interview by Matt Hempstead