Episode 30: Recycling made simple - with Dan Marek, Co Founder of climate tech start-up Scrapp

“When it comes to recycling, it’s tricky for us as consumers to do the right thing - even if we have the right intentions.” In this episode, we speak to Dan Marek, co-founder of Scrapp, a climate tech start-up - helping people and businesses to reduce waste by recycling correctly. . Scrapp is more than an innovative app, supporting consumers and businesses with how to recycle efficiently, as you’ll hear in this interview, it’s a recycling movement determined to drive meaningful impact, and whilst their focus is on recycling, they fully respect the waste hierarchy; reduce what you use, reuse what you have and recycle the rest - and ideally, to the best of your ability, and as effectively as possible, which is where Scrapp steps in. From a practical perspective, Scrapp’s app will tell you whether or not the packaging / or components of the packaging are recyclable helping you to organise and segment your packaging and syncs with different local authority infrastructures, enabling consumers to be far more efficient. One of the biggest challenges surrounding recycling is ‘contamination’ - people putting things into the wrong bin. Dan shares the startling stats around contamination - and how if more than 5% of items in your recycling bin are contaminated, by default, it automatically gets sent to landfill. Not only devastating for the planet on a number of levels, but of course, commercially, as it costs more to send waste to landfill than to recycle. Whilst the focus of the discussion is around recycling, there’s a LOT to unpack from this conversation - we discuss data, and the crowdsourced insights and observations that Scrapp is collecting around packaging. Useful data that can support innovation and how packaging can be improved in response to how consumers are actually recycling. Scrapp is clearly passionate about driving meaningful impact and have many avenues to explore, such as the carbon impact analysis of packaging - how much CO2 can be saved by recycling efforts, building intelligence that can support wider initiatives. We also cover the role of marketing in supporting education and behavioural change, and the balance of ‘overloading’ consumers with messaging and the challenge of eco-labelling and how Scrapp is acting as the Trip Advisor of recycling when it comes to accountability and authenticity. It’s an inspirational and highly practical discussion, covering an innovative solution to a significant problem, so I urge you to tune in. You’ll also find more about Scrapp here - and of course, you can start to play with the app - free download via Android and the App Store. Instagram @scrapprecycling - for latest updates. Our podcasts are currently being recorded purely via online conferencing platforms, we apologise for any minor sound quality issues.