Episode 159: Garry Cooper, Rheaply
Today's guest is Garry Cooper, Co-Founder & CEO of Rheaply.
Rheaply is empowering companies of all stripes to reduce their CO2e footprints by curbing internal waste. It does this by creating a circular economy of reuse, both within a company and through a marketplace of asset exchange with other companies.
While pursuing his Ph.D. in Neural Science at Northwestern, Garry was trying to find a cure for Parkinson's Disease. Working in a lab, he noticed valuable and expensive materials that not every lab had access to. Garry started a materials sharing program at Northwestern. He realized the linear economy didn't just affect labs but affected government agencies, tech companies, and universities as well. In 2015, Garry co-founded Rheaply. Garry has served as a Google Scholar for Google for Entrepreneurs and sits on the board of 1871 and P33 Chicago. He has also been an R&D consultant at EY and Promidian. Garry is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Northwestern.
I was excited to bring Garry onto the show and learn more about the work Rheaply is doing. Garry walks me through how he founded the company, what Rheaply does, and who they serve. We dive into the value proposition for customers and what incentivizes them to choose Rheaply. We also discuss why reuse and the circular economy are critical to addressing climate change, what's holding back wider adoption of reuse, and how Rheaply affects change. Garry is a fantastic guest, and this is a great episode for those interested in the circular economy.
The MCJ Collective has recently invested in Rheaply. To learn more, check out Our Investment in Rheaply.
Enjoy the show!
You can find me on twitter @jjacobs22 or @mcjpod and email at info@mcjcollective.com, where I encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
Episode recorded May 17th, 2021
In Today's episode we cover:
Rheaply's thesis and the problem the company is addressing
Why reusing is vital to addressing climate change and a thriving circular economy
How Garry first came across the reuse problem and what motivated him to found Rheaply
The problem of reuse and the drawbacks of the linear economy
The larger landscape of reusing assets and the extensive areas Rheaply focuses on (environmental materials, real estate, and manufacturing equipment)
Rheaply's value proposition to customers from cities to universities to government agencies to the military
What makes Rheaply unique and incentivizes customers to work with Rheaply
What holds back the broader adoption of reuse and a circular economy
Garry's response to the critics of reuse and what will move the needle on climate change
Why reuse is a both/and solution
The three legs of the circular economy and how they fit into Rheaply's model
The incentives for manufacturers to adopt reuse
A discussion about voluntary versus compliance offset markets and how government policy can only go so far
How reuse & justice go hand in hand when addressing climate change
Links to topics discussed in this episode:
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Hello everyone. This is Jason Jacobs and welcome to My Climate Journey. This show follows my journey to interview a wide range of guests to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change, and try to figure out how people like you and I can help. Today's guest is Dr. Garry Cooper, CEO and cofounder of Rheaply. Rheaply was a recent MCJ collective investment, which is our climate tech fund. They have a platform called asset exchange manager that makes it easy and efficient for organizations in tech, government, retail, healthcare and higher education to track and utilize the assets they already have before making a purchasing decision.
The platform enables companies to share and sell physical assets within and between organizations. It turns out that organizations, especially big distributed ones have a lot of stuff and that stuff often times gets underutilized and either ends up leading to unnecessary purchases or leads to things ending up in the landfill that otherwise didn't need to. Rheaply helps address that and we have a great discussion in this episode about their approach, why it matters, their progress to date, some of the things that they're working on next and also just a higher level discussion about how the circular economy and reuse ties into climate change and the clean energy transition. Gary, welcome to the show.
Garry Cooper: Thank you for having me, this is awesome. Excited.
Jason Jacobs: Well I'm excited to have you as well and yeah, I mean you know this story already, but for listeners, the first time that we met was on a, on a Zoom but it was on a Zoom when it was like right in the thick of the pandemic and I think there was like a repair person in my house upstairs or something so I didn't wanna go upstairs and there was like homeschooling with the kids, so they were in like the other room in the basement, so I actually took the call from my boiler room.
Garry Cooper: [laughs] Yes. Yes.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, if you re- you remember that, I'm sure.
Garry Cooper: And that was... yeah, we had a, a very over subscribed [inaudible 00:03:45]. I was like that guy has to be in my company. Like I have to have that guy on my team. There was something about doing that that really spoke to me. [laughs]
Jason Jacobs: Well like, I've tried it again, I tried kind of staging it and just going back in the boiler room even though there's no reason to do it, but, but nobody else has, has felt the same as you, so.
Garry Cooper: Boiler rooms are a natural currency. You can't stage them. [laughs]
Jason Jacobs: [laughs] Yeah, that was funny, I haven't done that much laughing in awhile, actually. It's a nice intro. But at any rate, welcome to the show. What's Rheaply?
Garry Cooper: Rheaply is a software company based in Chicago that helps organizations scale reuse. So there is a lot of focus in the market when it comes to recycling, whether that be mail solutions, whether it be tech, whether that be robots and AI, I know all those people, they're amazing people. There's not a lot of people building in the reuse space, and so Rheaply is trying to do that.
Jason Jacobs: Why does reuse matter?
Garry Cooper: [laughs] Reuse matters... oh my goodness, can I write a dissertation in 30 minutes on this podcast? Reuse matters for at least two major reasons. One, it's a central part of this concept called the circular economy, which I know we'll talk a little bit about. But keeping materials in use as long as possible is like the corner stone of the circular economy definition.
The second is is it's a way better alternative to, than recycling. We can't one, manufacture our way out of the oncoming slaught of climate change. We can't recycle our way out of the onslaught of waste that's produced by our current linear economy, so we have to have better solutions, both in the working world, but also for mom and pop at home. So Rheaply is really focused right now on the working world and helping scale material reuse because we... global recycling's at about nine percent in success rate right now. So the problem is too hairy and reuse is obviously the next best thing and so we're just trying to build technology to make that super easy and valuable to some of the leading organizations in the world.
Jason Jacobs: And how, how did this all come about? Or, or if we go even further back, when did you first come upon this problem and why does it matter to you?
Garry Cooper: Yeah, so my mother now, she fe- finally knows what we're doing after five or six years of me running the company and she's been in asset management in- inventory management her whole life and she's like, "Oh my gosh, I can see it. I saw this when you were a baby." But that's not where we, I got the idea of Rheaply.
Jason Jacobs: And I never knew that element of the story-
Garry Cooper: Yeah.
Jason Jacobs: That your mom actually worked in the industry, that's cool.
Garry Cooper: Yeah. I actually didn't know that she was in inventory and asset management until about 30 days ago, which is really strange. But I love my mom, hi mom. So I came about Rheaply organically in the lab, so nerd alert here, I did my PHD in neural science really trying to find a cure for Parkinson's Disease at Northwestern University in Chicago. I'm a faculty member there, we're still trying to commercialize a drug product that I, that I coinvented during my doctorate work, but it was just an observation.
Labs have lots of materials, have lots of, uh, what I like to call stuff, and that stuff is super, super, super pricey and valuable, and it turns out back then, just like now, and for the last 50-60 years, labs in the United States have suffered from being underfunded. So I would have friends of mine who were just next door who were saying, "You know, if I only had this antibody or that piece of equipment or whatever it might be, I might be able to pilot these experiments to then justify purchasing something," so they can do more experiments towards some type of publication or finding. And I would go, "Oh, we have that stuff in my refrigerator or in a back room that we're not using or on a shelf that we th- we've forgotten about." And so just connecting the dots, I started a sharing program at Northwestern where in I would pile things on a cart that we no longer needed in my lab and just share it to other people on the same floor who might, not super like genius idea.
Jason Jacobs: It's like the eBay Pez dispenser.
Garry Cooper: Exactly, you know, just a little... well see, you use that analogy, I use the analogy of the ice cream truck man in the neighborhood who just comes around and who's just distributing sugar to all the kids unbeknownst to the parents. So that's, I was the ice cream man, I was the Pez guy and [laughs] it turns out I went into supply chain consulting work after my post doctoral fellowship there and people would still email me from Northwestern, like, "Hey Gary, where's the cart? Where's the cart? We need this, we need that," and I would think, "I don't know, I've not been there for three or four years, I have no idea where a cart is." But it struck me as something worth diving into a little bit.
And so my best friend was and is a, a very senior web, front end web developer who for maybe nine years prior to that, I had pitched umpteen number of ideas, having nothing to do with sustainability, by the way and all those ideas he thought were just absolute trash. And so I remember one night, after a few beverages-
Jason Jacobs: What was the worst idea?
Garry Cooper: Um, I've forgotten them all, but if we have some time at the end, I'll tell you about some other bad, new ideas that I have.
Jason Jacobs: Okay.
Garry Cooper: So I pitched this idea to him after a couple libations at a very early AM in the morning and his first response, I, just, I feel like he's sitting here today was, "Not bad," and I tell you, it sounds crazy, that was the first validation that there was something to this idea 'cause here's a guy who's worked in tech his whole life, I've not worked in tech, I've only just been this guy at the lab and starting to see some of these things in supply chain and bigger organizations and for him to say, "Yes, this is somewhat interesting," to me was validation of a sort and so we started working on it.
Jason Jacobs: What did it say in the text?
Garry Cooper: I just said this, I can't say it because I'm on a podcast, but I did this, I just shook my head like mmmm. It was a new day. It's like when you... the aha moment.
Jason Jacobs: But what was, what was the idea that he said not bad to?
Garry Cooper: Oh, the idea of basically internal Ebay, right? So basically something... if you're at a big organization, there's so many tools right now, I used to sell these tools, to procure, like e-procurement systems, P2P systems, all these things, but there aren't a lot of systems to save, right? When it comes to like sharing and saving within an organization, it really breaks down to like Brenda or Sam who knows everything or some like weird email chain or list or if you're very advanced, some spread sheet system and so organizations pay tens of millions of dollars to figure out how to procure better, but they put [inaudible 00:10:35] dollars in how to save and that actually is the problems with the linear and the circular economy.
So we thought, he thought it was interesting, from kind of a what's the market look like perspective. I thought it was interesting because I knew what it should look like to solve a problem in the lab, at, at a university, and so there was the hallmarks of the, the can do and what it should be coming together and kind of cofounding a company and we recruited his then boss who would come on as our CTO and us three founded the company back in 2015 and haven't looked back since. We've just been fighting, learning, laughing along the way.
Jason Jacobs: And maybe talk a bit about, and you just touched on it but the, the initial thesis that led you to found the company and then maybe talk a bit about from where you sit today, how that's evolved if, if at all.
Garry Cooper: Yeah, so the initial thesis of the company was let's build a platform by which people could start their procurement journey by starting with things that had, wait for it, already been purchased and weren't being used. So if I'm at an organization and I'm a person, just to be clear, who's looking, who needs something, the question that Rheaply software started out trying to answer was do we already have it and who has it and in what condition is it in and how do I get it?
It's evolved in such that the problem of reuse within a organization, scaling it across, you know, up an organization like a Microsoft or Google or you know, some of these... the US Air Force, it's as hard as recycling, right? Recycling programs have taken a long time to be instituted, and I think the results are meager to be, to be quite frank. But it's not just implementing a tech product into a department and then walking away and everything works. Right? So you have to intersect with upstream suppliers, down stream recyclers and haulers and community organizations who might take things from organizations already. You have to think about all of the value chain of how an item, we call it the life of an asset, who touches it, who has to prove this, what P and L is it on?
Right, so there's complicated thing outside of just be sharing something with another employee that we've taken the time to really learn and be able to help organizations scale, no matter if they're in the public sector, no matter if they're in the private sector and we're really excited about the next 12 to 18 months of our growth and, and helping clients in the market.
Jason Jacobs: And putting Rheaply aside, how big a problem is this issue of stuff that exists that could be useful within an organization that is not getting utilized?
Garry Cooper: Yeah, so the federal reserve kind of keeps these kind of numbers as it pertains to CapX, or capital expenditures and of course the federal reserve numbers, last year, if I remember them correctly, about $630 billion of... $630 billion of underutilized capacity within corporate America. So that does not include universities, like I, I talked about where we first started or the federal government. It really just includes for profit commercial entities. And so there is a, I think, the most massive opportunity globally is scaling a circular economy and it's exactly because of that number from the federal reserve which again is probably quite conservative.
Jason Jacobs: And within that 630 billion, and I, I don't know if you know this off the top of your head, but just generally, what are some of the key category areas and how does that pie chart break down? I don't need exact numbers but just a sense.
Garry Cooper: Yeah, so some of the big areas to think about are manufacturing equipment, are what we like to call built environment materials, so that would be concrete and plastics and steel and organics like wood. Third would be we call REWs, real estate and work spaces materials, REWS. One can think of that as the things that you use to do your work, right? So desks, chairs, monitors, things that are peripheral to your computer and then e waste, so that probably needs no explanation, cell phones, I- tablets, computers, hard drives. So those are some.
There's also capacity in physical storage, so literal buildings that are being lit that have, you know, are pulling out energy by no one's occupying them or they're severely under occupied. So again, it's really just connecting the dots. One of the guiding thesis I have about the company right now is that we don't actually know what is in our physical world. We have no record of that. We think we do, but COVID taught us a really interesting lesson.
One might recall the governor of New York and ma- many other governors blasting out, "Hey, does anyone have any ventilators or masks?" This is the governor of New York in the middle of a pandemic and we can't even lock down the number of ventilators which have to be finite and easily countable in a state like New York, never mind if someone's looking for some type of brick or concrete for a building, that's an even harder question to ask, right?
So, so what Rheaply's really trying to do at large, you know, maybe two or three years from now is really build a Google for physical assets. Really be able to help people understand what the physical things are in the world so that we can make better procurement decisions because when we don't know where things are, we go purchase because the linear economy has made it very, very easy for us to go online and get thing in less than two days. We need to make that as easy on the circular side and so we're trying to do that at Rheaply.
But it, it does take some time, but having done an eight year PHD, I have the patients and the grit to get it done. [laughs]
Jason Jacobs: Mm-hmm [affirmative]. And maybe talk a little bit about the profile of customers that you're targeting and the, the value proposition that you lead with for those customers as well.
Garry Cooper: Yeah, so our customers tend to be fortune 500, fortune 1000 companies if we're talking about the commercial sector. We got our, our founding DNAs in the universities, we work with over 20 universities from BL to Northwestern to state schools and then of course we work in the, the public sector with cities like Chicago, the US Air Force, the NIH. Our typical profile or use case is this, an organization tends to have many locations, so fe- different physical locations, they tend to have a large and kind of broad portfolio of physical assets and resources, so things from couches to chemicals to big machinery to make thing and they typically have decentralized operations, right? So you know, I'm in location one and we purchase things for location one and I'm in location two and we purchase things for location two.
And so that tends to be our kind of typical customer profile and examples of this would be like retail, so you know, a retail organization having lots of locations. Another example of this would be someone like google or Microsoft who do a lot of e manufacturing. Another example of this would be bio pharma or, or healthcare organizations who order masses of material to do either science or to help patients. You don't skimp when you're trying to help patients and do research, but then you have all this extra stuff just sitting around, figuring out what do I do with it?
So those are, hopefully, that's a little bit helpful and instructive of who we typically help and kind of target.
Jason Jacobs: And what's the pitch to those companies? What do they get for working with Rheaply and why should that matter to them?
Garry Cooper: Yeah, so the pitch is like hey, we tend to lead with financial because the great thing about the circular economy as a business mo- circularity, excuse me, as a business model is that it is net bottom line positive, so it's not an investment as I think some people... I don't actually like that word, but some people would call general sustainability projects. When you're adopting a circular business operation model, what you're saying is there's some way that we can squeeze out more margin while also squeezing away things like waste or carbon.
So our pitch typically to customers like, "Hey, you wanna make more money and be more green?" I mean quite frankly, that's it. That's literally our mission statement, to help empower employees to save money and be more sustainable. That's literally our mission statement. So the way we kind of break that down is we ask like a procurement leader or sustainability leader, "Hey, do you have... how many different locations do you have?" Or, "Do you have storage warehouses?" Great, and the answer typically is yes to that, "Great, so if I was an employee in one of those, how would I make an informed purchase not knowing what's in, from a material perspective, not knowing what's in the other?"
And there's a normal back and forth there, and then kind of we can also do a spin analysis and so we can kind of get it and say, "Hey, what if you were able to save two or three percent from a certain category?" That helps us also get to an ROI in the business case, but there are other things that we do financially as a part, non financially to say, as a part of the pitch that are important. So one is all of these organizations will have some type of net zero to win goal initiative strategy, so we help them get to their stated net zero goals, either by in body carbon reduction, either by net zero waste.
Third is employee engagement. So employees, they want to work for organizations who care about sustainability and they want to be engaged in such. So that's another thing that we do, we actually gamified the whole platform so as employees do things that are more sustainable, that help the organization save money, we give them points and each month we issue out like a $500 visa gift card to the top performing employee. So you get green for being green.
And then the fourth is engaging the community. So when items are no longer needed within an organization on our platform, we connect to schools and nonprofits and other small businesses within the community that our client is in, so that material cannot flow to the landfill, cannot flow to a recycler at first, but flow to another organization who can actually reuse it. And so that kind of CSR is also typically a part of some type of DEI initiative that our organizations will be enabling or trying to scale. So we help organizations beyond sustainability and beyond kind of financial value props and I just wanna kind of bring a little bit of clarity to that as well.
Jason Jacobs: Mm-hmm [affirmative]. And do you find if you look across organizations within sectors and or across sectors as well, are the fertile areas for improvement consistent across companies and across industries or is it all over the map?
Garry Cooper: It's so consistent. It's one of the things I would have never bet going into starting this company as a fr- especially as a first time founder, that some of the problems that Google, who we help Google with are some of the same problems that we're helping Yale University with, are some of the same problems that we're helping the NIH with. It would sound strange because you're like does Google have labs and does Yale carry, or does NIH carry anything more than chemicals and things to do research? The answer is yes.
Every organization has to have chairs and computers and every organization that manufactures something as a set of things that all of them have to manufacture. And so as you start to put the puzzle piece together, we actually don't, we don't bucket our industries by traditional sorts, like big industrial, big tech, bio pharma, we say those in the public so people know what we're talking about, but we actually just think about use cases. So when a, when an organization asks, they're like, "Hey Gary, we have a hundred million dollars of furniture, help us reuse that," it's the same rules and use cases as any other client when it comes to furniture reuse. Same with IT reuse, same with chemical reuse, same with equipment reuse. It's really not by vertical. It's actually by use case.
And so that's the really, really cool thing that we figured out is launching our technology per use case allows us to help many, many organizations all at the same platform.
Jason Jacobs: And when you think about more centralized offices where there tend to be less of them and bigger versus smaller and more distributed and then same question when you think about remote work versus in person work, are there certain types of customers that you're better equipped to serve today and then same question for ultimately?
Garry Cooper: Yes, so one of the things that kind of laid in our lap was, and I always speak very softly and carefully about COVID and the realities of it, but for Rheaply, it was an accelerant to our business and one of the reasons it is, was, is because, uh, I say was because hopefully people are getting vaccinated who are listening, but the flexible remote work kind of paradigm that we're all operating in is great, but what it does for an operating company, let's say like a Microsoft, is it makes it one day I had, you know, 100 locations and so maybe one could argue I had 100 different silos that technology like Rheaply could help remove. Now well, their workforce of about 55,000 employees in the United States goes remote, presumable no one of them knows what's in the other person's house, right?
So you've only increased the amount of invisibility of assets, of sharing for people who would be on prim to do so. So a technology like Rheaply, and I hope, hey, more competitors please come into market, but a technology like Rheaply is super helpful to drive or use even when you're outside of kind of that HQ or that HQ two and which I know a lot of people are, are familiar with.
And so as more organizations go more to remote or a permanent flex model, it does mean that technology like Rheaply would be even more valuable, notwithstanding the idea of net zero waste, which of course is, uh, kind of calls into our solution as well.
Jason Jacobs: And when you think about either objections or criteria that make companies now as positive a prospect or, or even just barriers in, in general, what are the biggest things that do hold back wider adoption and correspondingly more reuse in these organizations?
Garry Cooper: Yeah, so two observations. So the first observation is although circular economy is kind of new, but industrial ecology is very old as a concept and reuse is very old as a concept, I mean, I was taught it in grade school, companies are very, very, very at the beginnings of their kind of reuse and circular journey. There are very few companies I would say are mature, have 100% circular operations, in fact I can't even think of one and I, and I think I know a lot of [laughs] the people in this space and operating. We're trying to get there as an industry.
So I would say one it is na- being nascent, like not knowing what to know, not knowing what solution to de- develop, so we've actually found that being informative, pooling insights, aggregating data, aggregating solutions is something that even beyond our technology, that we can help just the general market and I don't know, we can talk a little bit about the reuse initiative but that's exactly what the reuse initiative was was to really spotlight reuse to give a 20 plus page deck about how an organization could go from nothing to reuse [inaudible 00:26:28] without Rheaply, without Rheaply, just in general.
So that's one, just general knowledge and really a focus in my mind on recycling and not a focus completely around circularity.
The other is, and I say this kindly, our forebears in the asset management and inventory management space have made a mess of things. There are clients, and I won't name because I'm under certain NDAs that have 15 different asset management systems. Right, so when you go in and ask a question like I start at the beginning, how would an employee know if something existed here, you get 15 different answers. And so for an organization like us, that means that we have to first coalesce all that data, coalesce all the headaches potentially around change management into one tool so everyone can be on one platform. So I would say the two kind of things that I, I lay awake trying to think about how to make faster are more education to the market and then second, just knowing that for some companies, the owners are worst, actually, they have scare tissue around change management and as well as their, their current technology infrastructure around resource and asset management is lacking.
Jason Jacobs: Mm-hmm [affirmative]. And you talked a little bit about the buckets of ROI, but when you go to set expectations regarding quantifying that ROI and timelines, what kind of expectations do you set and, and deliver against to the extent that you have any case studies to share and talk about?
Garry Cooper: Yeah, so we have four published case studies on our website, Rheaply.com and we've actually won two awards based on two of those case studies, actually 2019 and this past year 2020, we took home the sustainable purchasing leadership counsel or SPLC's circular economy leadership award for work that we did both with the mayor here in Chicago, but also with Northwestern, one of our first customers and MIT.
So what we typically so though is, you know, returning your investment from Rheaply, you can see within the first three to six months. So the way that we power our partnership agreements is that we power them so that the customer is, from a dollar perspective, is getting a return on investment within their first two quarters after we launch there. From an impact perspective, we actually hope to have that before we actually launch. So we, we do kind of like what we call a pre launch, so we have our own criteria before we're able to launch at an organization. Again, that's, that's their own nascency and that's us kind of coming in and being a thought leader and saying, "Hey, we think the platform should look like this."
So we actually get to how much waste we can divert or at least what we say in our business proposals within the first week or two after we launch. Just to give an example, at the University of Chicago, we launched in September of 2019, which sounds so strange. I had to think about that because of COVID, 2019 and in the first three days, we'd saved them almost a million dollars and, and spend, and diverted I think something like 1.2 metric tons of waste from landfill, in three days.
So, you know, it, you don't get that, I mean, I used to install at IBM, Maximo, SAPs, tooling, Oracle Tooling when I was at Ernst and Young, you don't get that kind of ROI in case studies with those tools, so we're really, really proud of that and we work very, very hard the first couple of quarters once we launch a client for that to be so.
Jason Jacobs: Mm-hmm [affirmative]. And I, I feel like there's a lot of talk about decarbonization. Maybe less talk about reuse and circular economy and then the talk that there is, it feels like it's, it's almost like it's a separate and distinct group of people that talk about that versus climate change and it, it's almost like, like the energy efficiency problem where, where it's like well, it's just efficiency. We need like nuclear, we need long duration storage, we need, you know, we need electric planes, we need like tangible big equipment and plants and right, it's like you're just gonna like put some installation in these buildings?
Garry Cooper: [laughs]
Jason Jacobs: You know, like, uh, come on, really?
Garry Cooper: Yeah.
Jason Jacobs: And, and so, I guess what would you say to, to people that maybe would say something like well, reuse feels good and I'm glad that it's out there, but it's really not gonna move the needle on addressing climate change in the way that we need to.
Garry Cooper: Yeah. First of all, I wanna talk to those people. You're my people and I wanna convince you. I want to preach to you, get you into my, my perish of believing and convert you. But two things, the first is according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, these aren't mutually exclusive solutions that we have to bring to market and fast. Right? So if we completely made our entire energy grid world wide green, according to Ellen MacArthur Foundation and Google's white paper I think in 2019, they showed that you only get to abating the effects of climate change by about 55%.
So the other portion of that, the other 45% comes from scaling of circular economy, globally. And again, our take at Rheaply is you can't do that unless you know where everything is. If you don't know where everything is, you can't make things circular, right? So that's one. The leaders in the field just disagree scientifically with that thinking. But the second thing is, it's quite obvious, we just got, we have a good club at Rheaply, we just got done reading Bill Gates' book of how to avoid a climate disaster. Good book for, for people to read, I would say and one of the things that I think was stark to know from the people who work at Rheaply was how much manufacturing stuff contributes to our global emissions, our global green house emissions, our carbon equivalent emissions.
And as it turns out, I forget the stat now, but if something like eight of the fortune 50 companies were to meet their 2050 goals, it reduces like global greenhouse emissions by like 20%. So, the real take home here is that actually material reuse and recycling are part and partial of the actual way that we globally get to zero. You cannot create electric planes and plant like cows and you know, everything is green but keep manufacturing things at the same clip that we're currently and expect us to kind of get to any state that we all wish we want to be.
So it's just a part of the solution and one of the things I'm super excited about, Jason, to that point, is Rheaply is gonna be working with Microsoft and a couple others to bring to market the first kind of calculator to calculate how much my reuse is helping me reduce carbon, right? At least body carbon. And so one of these things that we always talk about from a state of impact perspective is waste to landfill and reduce that and that's a very traditional metric, but we want to get closer to the sheet of music that everyone else is on, right? Which is reducing global emissions, mostly CO2.
And, so, we're gonna actually put that in our tool for our customers. And so as they look to report from a [inaudible 00:34:09] perspective, or just for their own perspective, as employees look to think about how their work is affecting the, the company's goal, they'll be able to see it right in line with our tool.
Jason Jacobs: Now I think I know the answer to this question, but I'm gonna ask it anyways to, to make sure, so it sounds like Rheaply is focused on helping companies understand what stuff is already in their possession so that they can either reuse it or find it a home that, where it can continue to be utilized versus ending up in the landfill. How important is buying better stuff to begin with from a, you know, from an ingredients standpoint and packaging standpoint and, and also, how important is it that you're buying from companies who also clean up their own footprints and that of their supply chains? And are those areas that Rheaply focuses on or is that somebody else's lane?
Garry Cooper: Yeah, so, so important. So the canonical definition of the circular economy is three legged. So the first part is to design materials that last a long time, right? To keep those materials in use as long as possible, that's the reuse part that we talked about before, and then the third is to regenerate natural systems.
I've actually posited and written an opinion piece of we need to add a fourth bullet to the definition of circular economy which is to connect the value chains, which gets into some of the work that we're doing at Rheaply, but it is so important that OEMs, manufacturers develop products that can actually be reused. Again, one of the things that will come from Rheaply in the out years is we'll start to collect data about which products can be reused, which pr- how many times they can be reused, how many different types of, you know, jobs can they be reused at, and that data might be very, very interesting for both a product designer at a company but also a procurement leader who might be toggling between two different brands on something.
So more to come on that in the coming years, but I think it's centrally important that... I'll give you an example, like Ikea. Furniture makers make things more modular so that when I get done using the couch this way, I can use these pieces to make a chair, right? Or it's easier to put blocks together as opposed to having them recycle. So I think it's central.
As it comes to regenerating natural systems, hey, we only have one. I always say it, until Elon figures it out, the only rock that I know that we can live on is this one and its hard to recreate natural systems when you've exhausted them all. So I think those two legs are as important as keeping things in use. I just don't think any of it can exist unless you're actually connecting the economy.
So what I said back in verge at [inaudible 00:36:58] is again, light years ago, but actually a year ago, right before COVID was before we build a circular economy, we need to build a connected economy. We need to think about the economy like a, the circular economy like a brain, like a closed loop system and then the great thing about the brain, it's pretty connected. That's how it stays conserved. It's not just like it's in a, in a box somewhere. Its actually, just, it's super connected and we need to do that with our economy, uh, as it comes to circularity.
Jason Jacobs: So when I think about incentives, 'cause if there's one thing I've learned in the few years that I've been trying to learn about climate change, it's just ha- how much things like incentives matter beyond just which solutions are better or worse, and I think about Apple, just as one example and the, in changing the power cord around on a new device such that when I get that new device, I need a new power cord or changing the shape so that I need new accessories or, or things like that. I mean, they want to sell more product and they want to sell product at fast returns, so they want obsolescence, they want their stuff to become outdated, their business depends on it.
And so, how big an issue are the incentives as it relates to the stuff makers? 'Cause I can't imagine they like the Rheaplys of the world given that it means slower turns and more reuse and less new product purchases and, and then subsequently since I seem to always ask my questions in twos, where else are the blockers like that, if you look across the landscape of stakeholders that matter that might be creating some friction around this type of reuse happening more broadly?
Garry Cooper: Yeah, so makers love us and if they don't love us, they quite frankly, I should... reach out to me, I'm Gary@rheaply.com. I'll tell you why you should love us and the central reason is-
Jason Jacobs: I can't believe you're actually a PHD because you are the consummate salesman-
Garry Cooper: [laughs]
Jason Jacobs: No matter how much time I spend with you, that's reinforced for me again and again and again. Like I don't think that's a common thing for PHDs.
Garry Cooper: No.
Jason Jacobs: You are a true unicorn, Gary.
Garry Cooper: [laughs] Oh thank you, no, but, uh, let me tell you, in the annuals of trying to talk about a drug for Parkinson's disease, you gotta, you gotta sell your research. You gotta, you gotta pitch it. So I, I've learned to try to be somewhat convincing if not at the expense of just being ignorant. But I think that those people who think that the makers, this is what they should focus in on. It's a much, much business business model to take back your things and to do something with them.
I shouldn't have... anyone who's in supply chain or procurement shouldn't even need an explanation as to why that is the case. Every single electronic manufacture that I've talked to from Intel to Amazon to Logitech to Google are all thinking about, if not already have on market some type of product as a service, device as a service, take back program that's not super great but they're trying to make it better. Dell's another one I've recently spoken with, so their entire market is moving towards give me back what I sold to you, I'm going to, like, reuse part of it because why? It's cheaper and more efficient manufacturing and I feel better and my customer feels better about their whole experience.
So one, it's just a better business model, 100%, 1000%, I'm happy to argue with anyone on that. Now, the pe- where we find friction is who wants trash? That would be the recyclers and I put that in air quotes, that would be the haulers, and in some cases, they're friends and partners of that, that's from the liquidators. So there are very entrenched people who, and I don't wanna say their names here, but who literally own trash, who have contracts to say your trash is mine.
Jason Jacobs: If you can't say their names can you at least say their address and social security number?
Garry Cooper: Well [laughs] what I can tell you... what, what-
Jason Jacobs: [laughs]
Garry Cooper: I can say is in most cases, their names are two part or one part. [laughs] So they're in the business of having people chuck stuff in a pin to never see it again, to charge people for that, to charge people to buy the recycled materials that they shuffled them with. So yes, if there was a system that created less waste, really, seems to me that those organizations wouldn't really like that.
Jason Jacobs: So ha- how do they create that friction?
Garry Cooper: They create that friction by having long term contracts with folks where they... oh, you mean the friction with Rheaply?
Jason Jacobs: Yeah.
Garry Cooper: Yeah, oh boy. There are many ways that they can create that friction. One I should say is today, right, it's still super, super fricken easy to throw something away. Let's just be honest with ourselves. Everyone listening to this has thrown something away and thought, "Can I recycle that? Can I reuse that?" But you just wanna get it out of place, out of mind. And so, they create friction for Rheaply the more efficient that is. Like at a very high level, the more efficient it is for you just to ditch something and not think about it, the more efficient, the more efficiently it, it affects Rheaply's reuse business.
So, what we gotta do and what our jobs is is to make it as slick and easy and I would say don't have to think about it, a process to reusing something, right? And so that's what I'm saying is like we're really at a nascent journey for some organizations. I'll give you a really great example about the world bank that I know of. They did a study, they were trying to figure out, you know, they have about 10,000 people working in their DC office. So in this office building of 10,000 bankers, they thought, you know, could we create better recycling metrics with less waste? So what they did is they went and they removed all of the at desk trash bins from every single desk of all the floors and they just had one big bin in the middle of each floor where everyone had to throw stuff away at.
And they were able to, in three months, divert 90% of new waste. And when they did a survey and looked at it, it was just one, it wasn't as convenient, right? There weren't waste receptacles by, by your feet, and two, there was a little bit of like negative fomo, like I gotta go throw something away, I'm in the middle of the room, ah, I don't wanna do that.
So me, to answer your higher level question, we've made the linear economy of take, make and dispose so fricken easy. And so any time a business tries to make that even easier, Amazon having a purchase now button or waste companies having a bigger bin outside your apartment building our outside your workplace, yes, that makes it a little harder on us people who are trying to work upstream around reuse, but I would say that market is changing and good luck to our competitors.
Jason Jacobs: Mm-hmm [affirmative]. And when you think about things outside of your control or Rheaply's control, what's the most impactful thing outside of your control that if changed would be the greatest boon to reuse and circular economy and so what would you change and how would you change it if you had a magic wand?
Garry Cooper: I think a lot of people talk about carbon tax and I don't wanna take our time talking about that. Obviously that would affect us in a very positive way. I wanna get a little bit more granular. I think that... we've seen it in Europe, I think if the governments... and I'm not actually sure if this is federal or state, you know? I'm not a lawyer and my federalism is still at a, is at a junior school level of knowledge, but my thinking would be a government in the United States could-
Jason Jacobs: You're a PHD and a consummate salesman, you could just be a lawyer like in your-
Garry Cooper: [laughs] I've had to learn contract law-
Jason Jacobs: You can moonlight. [laughs]
Garry Cooper: I've had to learn contract law in this shop. I, I've never seen as many commas in sentences until I started this shop, but I would say, you know, it has different names for different people but extended producers responsibility or extended manufactures responsibility law, right, so if I produce something, I have a responsibility to its end life. If laws or policies go into effect that require people who produce things to think about where they go after the intended user is done, that's gonna very, very, very positively affect Rheaply's business from a policy perspective.
Again, the big manufactures already know this and they're doing it because it's a better business model to take back their bottles, to take back their packaging, to take back the [inaudible 00:45:45] their product. They're doing it, in my mind, sloppily and they need better technology and so we amongst other companies are trying to help with that, but when a government start requiring that of producers and manufactures, it will be a new day when it comes to reverse logistics and, and return and all these things that are kind of still kind of like not super efficient right now.
So that would be one, but obviously, I would also say that government itself being a buyer of green things. The government has a massive buying power, it can actually erect whole markets a la Space X by itself and so to me the government also just starting to buy more green products, greening solutions within the operations of a government to me is also something I would love to see, but I think from a policy perspective, having people who create things have a responsibility to their end life is something that I think would be game changing, and again, there are already markets that already are doing this and so I'm excited about that moving to the north american market more quickly.
Jason Jacobs: It reminds me of like the voluntary versus compliance off set markets.
Garry Cooper: Yes, exactly, exactly, exactly. And so if you wanna be behind that game and just wait for the government to do something, okay, but then like you're gonna be behind in a way that we might not have seen since the last revolution because if you have a pretty smooth reverse logistics kind of work flow throughout the entire value chain, not just to the end customer, but to your supplier, right, people who do the business to business transactions, you're going to be so ahead of the game. And so I, I spend my days talking to supply chain leaders, sustainability, procurement leaders, and they're all thinking about how do I do this and lead as opposed to wait 'till a government writes a policy doc and me to follow. That's not creating business value, that is skirting the lines and just trying to stay, stay up, right?
People are trying to figure out how do we use this green movement to be better and to make a better business model and so I encourage... and we write a lot about that at Rheaply so we write a lot about... and you asked another question I didn't respond fully to, we write a lot about issues even outside of reuse and outside of kind of circular economy so we have a blog that we, that we publish monthly on LinkedIn called The Sustainable Business and you know, has about 45,000 subscribers and we just write about business issues, about creating more sustainable business.
It's hard, it's necessary, it's hard. And so we just try to create topics and just have people have open discussions about what they're doing, what they're seeing, share best practices, and just kind of continue to march towards net zero.
Jason Jacobs: Key Rheaply priorities in the next 12 months. What are they?
Garry Cooper: So internal to the company, hiring, so we have, we have not raised a lot of money. We've historically had some issues with that, quite frankly and we did a successful series A this past February and so we are hiring to kind of support the business that the company's trying to do. The third would be we have a million, a million goal every [inaudible 00:49:00] so in the next 12 months, we want to have a million assets that are in circulation on our platform. That would... there's no company that's every done that and so we're, I'm not sure if we can get there, but we're gonna fricken, fricken try.
So our million dollar goal, or our million IM goal rather, internal operations, and then third, what I'm really, really interested in is a potential project to kind of help us get to the consumer level.
So there's a, there's a couple of companies that we're working with, we're traditionally just a B to B or... so we help business to business create circularity but we have an opportunity to work with a, a big electronic manufacture around return reuse for the customers and we're super excited about exploring that, so those are two or three of the, the biggest priorities.
The other is quite frankly, and I say this not just in jest, but to smile and to keep learning. I think one of the things I'm super attentive of at the company is just making sure that people really enjoy this journey. This is really, really hard work. There's lots of questions that are unanswered, we're creating a market that doesn't exist and the people who we work with are at the very beginning of their own knowledge set. And that can be sometimes frustrating for even the most energetic person.
So, you know, for us, it's all about not being boring, about smiling, but also being impactful and so that's another thing that I always try to keep as a priority is keeping the, the energy high, for sure.
Jason Jacobs: So in addition to moonlighting as a lawyer, you could also moonlight as a coach, I'm finding-
Garry Cooper: [laughs]
Jason Jacobs: 'Cause I'm getting pumped up as you're talking to me here.
Garry Cooper: You should be pumped up. I tell people-
Jason Jacobs: [laughs]
Garry Cooper: Hey, when you join Rheaply, hey, by the way, if anyone is out there thinking about joining Rheaply, rheaply.com/careers, we're looking for you, whoever you are. Hey, we're building technology to save the working world. That's something to be pumped up about. It might not work, but if it works, you can tell your grandmother about that versus the job that you did at the hotdog stand, you know? You know, senior year of high school so I take very seriously the people who come to work here for a day, for interim, for a year, for five years and that give a little bit of their working life to a big harry problem that I think is trackable. It needs technology, it needs patience and passion.
And you know, if I have breath and if I'm leading Rheaply, we'll have at least those things.
Jason Jacobs: So, our last two questions, one is if Rheaply is successful beyond your wildest dreams, what have you achieved?
Garry Cooper: A pause to just buffer on that, 'cause I could go on forever. There is more equity with materials in the world. We didn't talk about climate justice, but I think it's a direct impact of what we're doing and a direct impact from circular economy. So I think there's more people doing things. I think there is zero waste. The word waste, I would love to design out of our lexicon. I hate seeing it on receptacles. Waste. Why not recycle? Why not reuse? This is the reuse bucket. So I would say yeah, we have some crazy goals when it comes to like diverting waste, tonnage, how much money we want to save customers, but to bring it out of a KPI, would love to just see that people are thinking about reuse as their first option versus procuring and versus disposing. That would be an outcome that I'd, that I'd be proud to have had a helping hand in.
Jason Jacobs: I'd love to double click on that. Can you talk a little bit more about the connection between reuse and justice?
Garry Cooper: Absolutely. So also I, I've written a, a great blog on this in Sustainable Business, so please-
Jason Jacobs: We can link to all of these-
Garry Cooper: Yeah.
Jason Jacobs: By the way, in the show notes, so just make we have those links.
Garry Cooper: Yeah, please go and, well please go and add some comments, it, it's an open discussion. But so one of the things that's pretty apparent is that the linear economy has gotten us to vast wealth of discrepancies. I live in Chicago, I come to you here in Chicago today and the difference between a person living on the north side of Chicago where I am and one living on the south side could not be any bigger, whether it be health outcomes, whether it be life expectancy and yes, whether it be their average income. And if you look and trace and I'm doing this with the mayor's office, if you look and trace where all the landfills are, guess where they are? South side. And when you think about-
Jason Jacobs: Were you waiting for me to answer by the way?
Garry Cooper: [laughs]
Jason Jacobs: I didn't want to inject, but I feel like I left you hanging there.
Garry Cooper: So if you have all of the economic problems on one side, if you have all of the waste and toxicity going to one side and then just genetically if there are some things that African Americans are predisposed to, like things like asthma, you start to get to a place where it's like, ah, what if we didn't have these landfills, for one, but two, what if things weren't moving to this community because they were end of life and needed to be land filled, what if they were moving to this community for them to use them as stock to create new businesses? Right? For them to have things from a university that they don't need anymore that they can use for their small barber shop or they can use for their small beautician shop or whatever it may be.
And so to me, and there's, again, there's a more learned and fuller description of this on the Sustainable Business but it is very apparent that the circular economy can actually be a more equitable one, both from an income perspective but also from a health outcomes perspective and, and I keep saying the green movement can't actually be green, right? It has to be white and black and yellow and of all, everyone has to be involved or it doesn't work.
This is one of the central premises in Bill Gates's book. We can't just develop all these solutions in the most developed worlds or just on the north sides of Chicago. It has to be implemented in the developing countries and in the parts of the neighborhoods that have been left behind in the current economy. And so I think climate, the climate movement is a way to bring more justice to the economy, not just to make our planet a little bit more sustainable to live on.
Jason Jacobs: I'm curious, that's such an important point. How much does that come up when you talk to financial investors and how much does that come up when you talk to customers, if at all?
Garry Cooper: Customers it comes up all the time. We had a call with an organization who's name rhymes with oodle that literally said to us, "Hey, we wanna do this other part, but we only care about how we can use stuff that we can't use through the community, that's literally our only value prop right at this moment." Financially people, I think, and I, I say this because I have to deal with them obviously, you know, I am always in fundraising mode, but I think there is a, a fascination with transaction fees because obviously what's happening, when I move value from one organization to another, a platform like Rheaply is going to take some type of, like, servicing fee, that is true. And that part of the business in the illustrative B to B market place has still never been built and every investor who's in market places wants one. We think we have a way to do that.
But what I will say is that that's not what the special sauce is for me. The special sauce is the data. So, I always say like, you know, to my financier and investment types yes, you know, having transactional revenue or just transactions is so interesting and so cool and yeah, it might be easier than a SASS solution to sell, but the more interesting thing is not what money we're taking from or what money's being exchanged, the more interesting thing is who needs what and when and why and where is it and what condition was it in. That data in itself was more monitizable in my mind than an eBay like transaction.
So, I have a little bit of more convincing to do on the, on the kind of founder or financier side, but for customers, no. I mean, every customer that we talk to have some type of CSR goal but even beyond a goal, it just feels right. Right now there are millions of kids who don't have the right computers and right monitors to do at home learning and I can send through hundreds of articles that talk about all the E waste that we create just in the United States. So, it's the same thing at Northwestern when I started the company, it's the same thing for every client. You have this juxtaposition of surplus and scarcity, right? How can that happen?
And so, you do need technology to kind of level that out and spread the love, spread the materials to where they can be best used and away from landfill.
Jason Jacobs: And given the diverse audience who listens to the show, different functions, different industries, different stages, different geographies, where do you need help and what kinds of people might you wanna hear from?
Garry Cooper: Oh boy, so we're, we're always interesting to meet customers who are in their reuse journey or who recycling is not working for them or they need something better than recycling. So you know, customers, the more that we have, right, the more that we can power the network to work. So that would be one. But beyond that, we're always looking for thought partners, if not actual operational partners. So sometimes that look like people who are third party logistics companies who can help us move things from one customer to another. Sometimes that looks like data companies who have data about certain products that we can pipe in and help our customers make informed procurement decisions.
Sometimes that looks like people who have contacts in certain governments or people in the pe- in the public sector. You know, for a company our size, it's super hard to penetrate fortune 1000 companies and it's super hard to sometimes penetrate the public sector. So any time people have relationships that we can leverage and just tell our story, you know, if you don't buy our story that's fine. We would love those partners. So anyone who has any knowledge about reuse, carbon accounting when it comes to reuse, circular economy, we love to hear from you. You can reach us at circularity@rheaply.com. That comes to all the founders, or if you are a company that makes stuff, we probably could help you, so we would love to hear from you as well.
Jason Jacobs: Gary, anything I didn't ask you that I should have or any parting words for listeners?
Garry Cooper: I say this straightforwardly without a smile, reuse is better than recycling. They're both and, not either or. We need to put more energy into having material use within companies and between companies as we've put through to storing things in a bin and hoping someone recycles them, which almost never happens. So, my challenge, my parting challenge would be for any person here working at a company to ask do you guys have reuse? How are you doing that? And if those answers are I don't know, please go to rheaply.com/reuse, we literally have a free action plan that you can download, it's colorful and smart.
But if you wanna have, ask more questions, hit us up at circularity@rheaply.com. We would love to chat.
Jason Jacobs: Well thanks os much, Gary, I really enjoyed this discussion. I'm so proud to be involved with you and the company through a fund and wishing you and the Rheaply team every success in your important work.
Garry Cooper: We'll take all the wishes, thank you Jason.
Jason Jacobs: Hey everyone, Jason here. Thanks again for joining me on My Climate Journey. If you'd like to learn more about the journey, you can visit us at myclimatejourney.co. Note, that is dot C-O, not dot com. Someday we'll get the dot com, but right now, dot C-O. You can also find me on Twitter at J Jacobs 22 where I would encourage you to share your feedback on the episode or suggestions for future guests you'd like to hear. And before I let you go, if you enjoyed the show, please share an episode with a friend or consider leaving a review on iTunes. The lawyers made me say that. Thank you.
