Reconnai

In Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia, waste management system is still lacking and EPR system not functioning enough to be able to charge to FMCG companies. Leading as for Indonesia to be the 3rd largest plastic polluters in the world by releasing around 3.2 billion of kilogram of plastic in the ocean every year. 72% of these waste are said to be coming from rural areas where formal waste management are not available but where some communities have started to make profit on their waste they are disposing with a concept called “waste bank”. The waste banks are community-led waste management system, where household of a village brings their waste that is cleaned and sorted to the waste bank and get money in their “waste bank account” based on the value of the recyclables. The waste bank collect and aggregate these waste to be baled and sell them to recycling companies that sell to plastic producers, to finally become a plastic container again to be used for product for FMCG companies. However, among the 16,000 waste banks in Indonesia, only half are said to be active because of the waste value chain to be unbalanced privileging actors on the top of the chain. The top of the waste value chain are the sole actors who are able to know the true market price of the recyclates and are said to take 70-80% of the profit along the chain. The problem that we are tackling is that selling waste at the true market price is challenging for buyers and sellers across the value chain because they don't have clear information on what it's worth. This hinders fair and adequate remuneration for sellers throughout the waste value chain. The root causes include (1) lack of price transparency, which leads to a mismatch between supply and demand; (2) lack of waste supply chain coordination preventing the creation of integrated economic rationalization of waste material sources.

Our solution is a C2B2B digital waste-commerce marketplace to optimize supply/demand transactions between all parties. It is a marketplace where all the actors are verified and can sell their waste at a price on one-universal platform and that is made transparent to all registered actors. We will limit the actors to registered actors that can provide a proof-of-identity to minimize the unnecessary middleman and optimization of actors transactions and make the market formal. Reconnai will also advice to the sellers a recommended price to the waste they are selling based on the location (transportation fee), type (plastics polymers, metals, wood, etc…), quantity (weights) and quality (cleanliness, sorted accuracy) based on the current market price of the recyclates. The quality will be assessed through a mobile application with an AI smart camera that can detect the type of the waste and assessing its quality. By doing so, we standardized the waste quality so to streamline and match recyclates need and recycling projection accordingly to the buyers. As for the waste bank who are the collecting points of waste from household, we are going to provide an AI smart camera scale system so that household can register their waste on a digital registry and get rewarded accordingly to the final sold price. The scale system will also play the role of an Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) system for waste collection to be authenticated, and the waste to be tracked from the entry point associated to a blockchain system to make it credibly neutral.

Our solution being a C2B2B solution, the target population is the whole waste value chain actors which goes from households, waste banks , recycling companies, plastic producers and FMCG companies. However, our primary goal is to change household behaviors to contribute to the waste value chain, and accelerate the implementation of a circular economy in Indonesia. In addition, we are currently focusing on waste management of rural areas that are not able to do so. Therefore, our target population is the rural population of Indonesia that account for 116 million people accounting for 42% of the total population that we aim to mobilize to contribute to the circular economy. Household who are the source of waste, hence of the value but are the one that earn the less value from the whole value chain. Taking the example of price of PET polymer plastic waste, households only earn 0.2 USD per kilogram of rigid PET sold to the waste banks, while the recycler gains 0.37 USD and sometimes going up to 0.57 USD per kilogram. The solution aims to fix this disparities by providing to every stakeholders a platform to sell their waste in a transparent manners and optimize transactions between buyers and sellers. It is expected to improve the substantial Profit Margin Improvement of at least 10% at each level of the waste value chain based on 10% of increased output recyclable materials price and 20% of reduction in overhead costs. The platform would play the role of quality control third-party as well as a market price mechanism since the price being determined by the demand (buyers) and supply (sellers) of the recyclates available in the market. Therefore providing to household a fair and optimize market price for the sell of their waste.

• We envision a world where everyone is fully informed on the impact of their lifestyle on the society, environment, economy and human well-being. Our solution as a C2B2B platform is to start from the consumers, namely the household who the most vulnerable actors of the waste value chain while also being the most important as being the source of the value itself.
• Although the management team is based in Japan, the Indonesian project is led by an Indonesian project manager with waste management policy expertise to guide us on the coordination with waste banks and its community. The project manager has prior experience with the Jakarta Governor's Policy Planning and Implementation Team and has worked as Policy Officer at the World Resources Institute. She has worked with local communities in order to implement waste management initiatives all along her career. We also have an Indonesia team where one staff is working with the waste bank and interviewing household to understand correctly their needs.
• We are currently doing 2 PoC in Indonesia, one with Sentra Kelola Sampah (SEKOLA) leaded by Greeneration Foundation (NGO) in Banyuwangi; and Bank Sampah Ciamis (BSC) being the second largest waste bank in Indonesia and is governed-owned by the local government of Ciamis. We worked with several layers of the actors in order to validate our market and have a holistic product-market-fit towards every actors including the household. The village of Ciamis where our scale has been implemented is looking forward for the mobile application to come out and we are also expecting to collaborate further with them by addressing their most pressing issues or needs in waste management.

• We are currently doing 2 PoC in Indonesia, one with Sentra Kelola Sampah (SEKOLA) leaded by Greeneration Foundation (NGO) in Banyuwangi; and Bank Sampah Ciamis (BSC) being the second largest waste bank in Indonesia and is governed-owned by the local government of Ciamis. We have introduced our AI camera scale system to each community. As for SEKOLA we are serving a village of around 2,000 households, and for BSC which is a central waste bank having 200 unit waste banks under its leadership but we are only providing one scale for the moment, so the total estimate of beneficiaries would be realistically around 4,000 households for the moment. The scale system is still on a prototype phase and we have currently accumulated 15,000 (as of 2024/03/23) waste images to be used to train the AI for quality assessment. We have come up to an accuracy of more than 80% with partial data and plan to come up with a Beta version by May.
• As for the C2B2B digital waste management platform, we are currently partnering with Smash ID which is one of the prominent waste management startup in Indonesia delivering to other waste bank a waste reporting system that is designated by the central government. The scale system’ software is made based on the Smash ID system and, if the AI being successful, plan to be implemented on the main software as well.

• Our solution is in the between of for-profit and impact. While we understand that these two dimensions can be combined, we are having difficulties in finding the right partners to advance for the long-term goal that we have, and we are looking from SOLVE for partners that would welcome the idea of zebra and phoenix companies that is more aligned with the idea of stewardship exit.
• Our solution being deeply rooted in the success of the community to be open and bright towards waste management. We are looking for partners that can advise us in domain of community building, system implementation and nudging and incentivization design.
• Our technology although not being a deep-tech complex system, will depends on the development of a wide selections of disruptive technologies such as AI, blockchain and IoT. We would like to seek technology support from SOLVE as well on this domain, in order to create a system that is fair, neutral, credible and incentivized for everyone.

full-time staff: 3

part-time staff: 3

contractors: 2

We have been working on the solution for around one-year, started the PoC in February and have come up with the business model in the beginning of April.

We are trying to be as diverse as possible in terms of cultural background, domain of expertise and gender. We respect any ethnicity, religion, beliefs and our identities shall works as testimonials of our openess:

- Asuka Ishii (CEO): Male. Born and raised in France, moved to Japan from university in 2013; fluent in English, Japanese, French. M.A. International Contribution (Social computational Science) from UTokyo.Sales & business consultant (F&S), humanitarian aid project manager (AAR), data scientist (Treasure Data), director of non-profit foundation (REAPRA, PoliPoli).Expert in strategy planning and biz.dev.

- Wilson Kien Ho Ko (CTO): Male. Born and raised in Netherlands, moved to Japan with PFN in 2017; fluent in English, Dutch, Chinese. MSc. Robotics, Systems & Control from ETH Zurich. Engineering Project Manager of robotics dev. for startups in the Netherlands (FIZYR) and Japan (PFN).Expert in directing engineering software and hardware technologies development

- Stephanie Sakume (COO): Female. Born and raised in Singapore, moved to Japan from university in 2013; fluent in English, Japanese, Chinese. BA Int./Global Studies from UTokyo. HR Generalist and Engineering Resource Specialist at space tech startup (Astroscale) and Engineer Experience Specialist at e-commerce startup (Mercari). Expert in project development, operations and HR Strategy Planning.

- Nabilah Kushaflyki (project manager): Born and raised in Indonesia; move to Japan in 2021 in Japan; Languages: English and Indonesian. BE Environmental Engineering (Waste Management Research in Indonesia) from the Bandung Institute of Technology. Jakarta Governor's Policy Planning and Implementation Team, Policy Officer at the World Resources Institute, Founder of a second-hand clothing C2C distribution platform NGO. Sustainability policy specialist in charge of the project in Indonesia.