rethink sustainability
“We want to be the App Store for Recycling”: meet EasyWaste the tech entrepreneur working to eradicate waste
Entrepreneurship came early to Iiro Kankaansyrjä. It was a gift he discovered aged 16, when his teachers asked his class to sell detergents in their local area to raise money for school trips. The Finnish teenager quickly collected USD 3,250 – many times more than all his fellow pupils put together. Spotting a business opportunity, he made contact with the detergent company, began buying their products directly and selling them door-to-door.
Twelve years later his entrepreneurial spirit has seen Kankaansyrjä transform his family’s business from one that made and imported waste-handling machinery into one that is using Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to boost corporate recycling rates – significantly, in many cases. The company is called EasyWaste. Its work led to Kankaansyrjä being honoured with a Family Business Network (FBN) NxG Lombard Odier Award in 2023, receiving the prize in the new Intrapreneurship category.
The award recognises young, innovative talents working in areas such as sustainability, whose entrepreneurial talents are helping make the world a better place. We spoke to Kankaansyrjä about how he integrated technology to transform his family business and support the transition to a circular economy.
Read also: FBN Next Generation Lombard Odier Award 2023 champions young entrepreneurs
You joined the family business when you were 17. When did you start thinking about changing how it worked?
I started changing things from the minute I joined. We made, imported and sold waste-management machines to various companies, but I saw immediately that there was huge value in repairing machines rather than replacing them every 15 years. I created a portfolio of spreadsheets that showed our customers how much money they could save if they worked with us and let us manage their machines in this way.
From there it was a pretty clear path from just managing machines to entering the operational side of waste management. I looked at what customers paid for waste collection, for waste processing, how much they got paid for every tonne of cardboard or plastic they recycled – as is the case in Finland1 – and I saw there was huge variety in pricing. It made no sense, but the waste-management companies were getting away with it because it was a huge effort for their clients to change provider, plus nobody knew what anybody else was paying. I had that pricing data, and I anonymised it and took it to our clients, showing them that if they let us manage their waste so they worked with several collectors instead of just one, we could save them 30-60% on costs.
This company was still not EasyWaste though. How did today’s version of the business come into being?
It was all about figuring out how to extract data and integrate technology. I was inspired by a German company I read about that was digitising paper invoices. I realised that if we could do that, we’d know everything we needed to know about pricing and volumes in waste management. Our clients happily provided the invoices because we could save them money by getting access to their data. I got help with the technology side from some friends who work in the IT sector.
Today, EasyWaste offers a platform to create smart waste management contracts for companies. A smart waste management contract allows companies and waste producers, to utilise all the players in the market under one contract. The platform holds all the relevant data making sure customers can kick back and relax. Together with intelligent IoT devices and custom-built AI, EasyWaste gathers data like no other company and uses that data to turn waste to be a remarkable revenue stream for companies.
How exactly does your IoT technology work and how is it encouraging recycling?
Individual companies can use it to monitor waste, but we also install it in what we call “multi-use environments”, such as shopping malls, where you have supermarkets, restaurants and other retailers all using the same waste-management equipment. The IoT sensors know who is producing what type of waste and how much they are producing. This means we can tell each company if they are doing better or worse than others on recycling.
We worked with one shopping mall that had a very poor recycling rate. The average for companies in Finland is about 55% and theirs was just over 40%. That’s particularly bad for a shopping mall because over half their waste is cardboard, which is easily recyclable. We visited the site, audited every single store, created a new waste-management process for the whole mall and got their recycling rate up to 78% within the space of three months, and it’s stayed that high.
Part of the work was about putting the right machines in the right places and spreading information about recycling through posters and flyers. But another big part was exposing the data. The stores in that shopping mall were ashamed when we told them how far below average they were. There was a huge psychological motivator for them to get better.
How has winning the FBN NxG Lombard Odier Award helped your company?
Because Lombard Odier is a well-known bank and the FBN is widely known, this award has really helped us convince companies in Finland that what we are doing is working. It’s making it much easier for us to tell our story, as well as to connect with the business community and with the wider FBN community.
This is helping us plan for the future and think about the next direction we want to go in. We want to start expanding, into Sweden at first, and to become a platform that companies use to control their waste management – to be the go-to-place for taking care of your recycling and for making sure your waste-handling machinery is repaired and has as long a lifespan as possible. We want to be like the App Store for recycling.
What does the future hold for the wider recycling and waste-management industry, and what impact do you and your company hope to have?
Big companies such as IKEA have programmes allowing old, unwanted furniture to be sent back to the store and resold2, like Patagonia does with clothes3, and they’re doing this because their customers like it. Initiatives like this are creating disruption and evolution in the waste-management industry, and I’m really happy to see this becoming more common.
To be a successful business, you have to align your incentives with what the customer wants. That’s what I did at EasyWaste – I enabled people to save money while recycling more. To me, good companies are just a bunch of people solving problems, and hopefully having fun along the way. The problem we want to solve is waste – we want to show that there is no need for there to be any such thing as waste. We want to inspire machinery manufacturers to consider changing how they work, to see the incentives in making it easier for people to recycle. Making economies circular is what waste management as an industry should be doing; collecting all the streams and returning them back into the economy as recycled materials. Helping this happen is my mission.
1 Waste legislation - Ministry of the Environment (ym.fi)
2 IKEA Buyback & Resell - IKEA
3 Returns, Repairs & Exchanges - Patagonia
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This document is issued by Bank Lombard Odier & Co Ltd or an entity of the Group (hereinafter “Lombard Odier”). It is not intended for distribution, publication, or use in any jurisdiction where such distribution, publication, or use would be unlawful, nor is it aimed at any person or entity to whom it would be unlawful to address such a document. This document was not prepared by the Financial Research Department of Lombard Odier.
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