November 5×5 Night at Start Garden
Voting Closes:
November 18, 2024 11:59 pm
Impact
Perfect Circle Recycling strives to be an enabler of the circular economy: helping our customers reduce material use and recapturing “waste” as a resource to manufacture into new materials, products, and energy.
Our customers will benefit directly because they need to know the mix of their current waste stream if they want to make meaningful long-term reductions. They’ll have access to data and a powerful story about how their otherwise unsalvageable products were depackaged and recycled. This knowledge will empower our customers to prevent unnecessary packaging from entering their supply chain in the first place, allowing them to benchmark their diversion rates yearly. With the ability to evaluate their progress, they will more easily comply with changing policies and save money by reducing what is ultimately sent to landfill.
Our customers will also gain an edge when it comes to changing consumer preferences around sustainability. Consumers want to know that they’re spending money at an establishment that’s a good steward of the environment. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals are increasingly driving long-term business strategy. With the 5 x 5 grant, Perfect Circle Recycling will be primed to capture this growing demand by the private sector for more transparent reporting.
Ultimately though, the general public is the final beneficiary of our work and the 5x5 grant. Clean air and water are limited resources that belong to everyone, and it’s our collective responsibility to ensure we live sustainably. Reducing what ends up in landfills and waste incinerators is just smart business and creates the least impact on the planet.
What I'll do with $5,000
We just finished the first phase of developing custom software that acts as a hub for our shipments, invoicing, and customer relationship management. The $5,000 5x5 grant would be used to work with our developer to fastrack phase 2: creating an online portal for our customers to access more granular data and trends. It’s currently a manual process to create reports or provide summary information for our customers, and 5x5 grant funding would help us create a first-of-its-kind platform in West Michigan.
The client-specific kind of data we hope to unlock for our customers includes things like:
- The total volume (units and weight) of all items diverted from landfill
- The most common products sent to PCR for disposal
- What commodities were generated (type and volume) from the products sent to PCR
- Month-over-month and year-over-year trends
- Relative comparisons against our industry averages
- One-click PDF’s for creating dynamic marketing materials referencing actual company information
Our system, as currently built, has the needed API endpoints to power these kinds of computations and access needs, making future development (as funding becomes available) a seamless process to resume. We’re also interested in leveraging the online portal described above for partners like universities & nonprofits who can help us further research, refine & understand the data we’re collecting.