HappyPorch Radio: Circular Economy & Technology

The construction industry has long functioned on the basis that waste is an inevitable byproduct of doing business. With up to 30 percent of all materials delivered to construction sites ultimately ending up in landfill, there is an incredible opportunity to not only to recycle more construction waste, but to repurpose perfectly good materials to address socioeconomic inequalities. Today, we are j...

In season six of Happy Porch Radio, we are focusing on the circular economy across the continent of Africa. Today, we are joined by Keiran Smith, Cofounder and CEO of Mr. Green Africa, which is the first recycling company to be a Certified B Corporation on the African continent. Mr. Green Africa leverages business as a force for good to realise sustainable and long-term social, environmental, and...

The concept of circularity operates on various spheres of life and business. Today’s guest, Fela Buyi, prioritises a number of these with his social enterprise and trendy shoe business in Africa.  He founded Salubata, a company based in Nigeria that makes modular shoes from plastic waste with a mission to invent lifestyle technologies that help people and the planet. You’ll hear how this inspiring...

Today’s guest, Sarah Karamsi, is a project manager at Hello Tractor, an agricultural technology company that connects small, struggling farmers to labour, equipment, and access to mechanization to rise above the poverty line. Tune in to hear us reflect on the differences between the European and African contexts, with a particular focus on using infrastructure as a tool to reduce poverty in the ag...

In season six of Happy Porch Radio, we are talking about the circular economy across the African continent. Today, we are excited to be joined by Chris Whyte, the co-founder of the African Circular Economy Network (ACEN) where he currently serves as an executive team member. His work examines the developing circular economy applications across Africa, with a particular focus on transitioning to a...

In season six of Happy Porch Radio, we are talking about the circular economy across the African continent. Today, we welcome Joanna Bingham and Deborah Nartey of Footprints Africa to provide us with some really powerful context to set the scene for a new season. Footprints Africa is an organization that supports small and medium-sized businesses to adopt future-friendly practices, address the cha...

This is a little teaser for the next season, which is coming in the next few months. We've had a bit of a break after Season Five, and we're really excited about what's coming next! African entrepreneurship, enthusiasm and innovation can create solutions that work in the local context and cultures. Opportunities that can be harnessed to tackle climate change and reduce environmentally damaging con...

Hello everyone, and welcome to the final show of Happy Porch Radio Season 5. Today, we look at this past season, highlighting each of our guests, how they’re changing the world, and some of the pertinent details about them. A few of the main topics and themes we covered in this season were keeping things in use, reuse, and services. One overriding theme, though, was how holistic the circular econo...

Reath is on a mission to build the digital infrastructure required for businesses to shift to the circular economy.  They specialise in the tagging and tracking of reusable assets, and building the “digital passports” they need – think Google Analytics for the circular economy! Co-founders, Claire Rampen and Emily Rogers combined their professional backgrounds in operations and commercial strategy...

The pandemic has given us the time to redesign our business processes and move us toward a circular economy. As today’s guest, Unusual Rigging Managing Director Tom Harper explains, our industries are having a “Phoenix in the flame moment.” Our conversation with Tom focuses on his passion for the circular economy, how he introduced sustainable innovations into his company, and the challenges and o...

Bright colours might be in, but fashion and glamour have a dark side, with textiles and accessories being a major contributor to environmental damage. Today we speak with Aisling Byrne, co-founder of Nuw, a clothes-swapping app built on community ideals. We open the conversation by taking a look at Nuw’s inception, as Aisling details the characteristics of fast fashion and why it’s so important to...

Did you know that 99% of the things we buy are thrown away within 12 months of purchase? When it comes to pollution, the world is in a post-crisis state, and recycling alone won’t be enough to bring us out of it. Yet, Stephen Clarke says that we can start taking achievable and cost-effective measures to reverse our damage. As the Head of Communications at TerraCycle and Loop Europe, Stephen argues...

The vast majority of material resources are lost into landfill or leaked into the environment after consumption. Some companies see a real opportunity to bring together the biggest global brands across a variety of industries, using insights and data intelligence to understand the impact of materials throughout their lifecycle and create a more sustainable future. Welcome back to Season 5 of Happy...

Continuing our exciting exploration of the circular economy, we are joined by Ellekari Klaasse and Mariëlle van Hemert, the brains behind Circular Stories. The organisation is a magazine and online platform for the sharing of inspiring stories of companies and individuals in the circular space. Our guests see their role as connectors in the greater picture of circularity and by promoting these exa...

Along with some of the other big problems with the fast fashion industry, the incredibly high volume of textile waste is a major one. These materials end up burned or buried, but there is one company here to rescue them, resurrecting an age-old model to try and solve it in a brand new way. Today’s guest is Stephanie Benedetto, a corporate attorney turned fashion tech and sustainability entrepreneu...

In this episode of Happy Porch Radio, we speak with a circular economy pioneer and the co-founder of Circular IQ, Roy Vercoulen. Circular IQ helps their customers to transition towards a restorative and regenerative circular economy through their digital platform and circularity programs. One of their many successes includes having developed the CTI Tool for the World Business Council for Sustaina...

The impact that the circular economy would have is so broad that no single conversation can quite cover its reach. Today’s conversation with Craig Melson, Program Manager at techUK, touches on many topics, proving an excellent overview of how technology is moving us towards the circular economy. We open by talking about Craig’s role and what techUK is doing to help the tech industry embrace more s...

Achieving sustainability requires that companies know what’s in their product, know their suppliers, and understand their direct and indirect environmental impact. By digitising the life cycles of products and supply chains, iPoint is driving industry transparency and empowering business to achieve sustainability. T Today we speak with iPoint CEO Joerg Walden about how digitising processes is a ke...

As-a-service business models align the priorities of the vendor and the customer, while also having the potential to drive sustainability and the circular economy.  Today’s guest is Dave Mackerness, Customer Success Lead at Kaer, a firm based in Singapore that sells air conditioning as-a-service throughout Asia. We talk to Dave about how Kaer has shifted to the as-a-service rubric and in so doing...

 In circular economy terms, reverse logistics involves the collection of goods, transportation to a given location, and sorting prior to remanufacturing, refurbishing, reusing or recycling or failing that, disposal. Today, we are joined by Paul McSweeney, who is the Founder and CEO of the ZeroNet, an app that allows households to simply and quickly donate unwanted items and have them collected rig...

When many people think of the word ‘waste,’ something formless and brown springs to mind. Part of the struggle to eliminate waste is that the materials it consists of don’t have an identity. Today we speak with Pablo van den Bosch, the co-founder of Madaster, a company that shows how valuable waste is by identifying its material components in the built environment. After explaining Madaster’s role...

Understanding waste as something valuable not only requires new systems but massive paradigm shifts too. Today we talk to Maayke Damen about the work she is doing in this regard with her company, Excess Materials Exchange, a digital marketplace with the core goal of matching waste with its highest reuse assignation. Maayke tells us about the research she began to do about taxing resources rather t...

The move toward a more circular economy is contingent on many things – transparent supply chains being one of them. Here to talk about how he is using technology such as blockchain to bring transparency and trusted data sharing to global supply chains is Jordi de Vos, Co-Founder of Circularise. We kick things off with Jordi talking about the research that Circularise was born from before getting i...

The ultimate ‘out of sight, out of mind problem,’ when we throw something away, it seems to disappear into a magical space that sits apart from us and our responsibility. Tom Passmore and Sophie Walker, founders of Dsposal, are using data to bridge this knowledge gap by showing people what happens to waste once we throw it away. On this episode, We speak to Tom and Sophie about their journey in bu...

Carrying on our exploration of the circular economy, we are joined today by Lieke van Kerkhoven, the co-founder of FLOOW2, a sharing platform for healthcare and beyond. Lieke had experience in the healthcare sector leading up to her work with FLOOW2, having worked across the Netherlands in different managerial positions after studying medicine. In our conversation, we get the low down from Lieke a...