Anne-Laure FelixPascal Ritter, expert in sustainable product marketing and digital strategy, talks to us about EcoNation, the mixed-reality platform he created to help users track their eco-friendly actions.
Pascal can you give our readers a brief introduction of who you are, and what brought you to sustainability?
I am from Germany where I started working for one of the biggest recycling companies there, in a 3-years traineeship program (in Germany it’s called duales stadium) where you alternate 3 months’ work with 3 months’ study. Every time you go back to work within the company you switch to a different department. I was very lucky to have worked in this recycling company under this form as I could really get a glimpse of the full recycling progress, from sorting out the different waste to participating in the financial strategy of the company.
After that experience, I went into digital marketing strategy to do my masters and started working for one of the main fast moving consumer goods companies (FMCG) in Switzerland. It was the time where brand managers were starting to ask themselves if their product packaging was sustainable or how they could dispose of or recycle it. At that stage, I realized that I had been working on the two ends of the same process: producing goods and their packaging on one side, and dispose of it as waste on the other. It was like seeing the problem and the solution! As FMCGs are one of the biggest producers of plastic on the planet right?
This is where I came to the idea in 2019 of using my knowledge from those two sides, marketing and recycling, and bring them together to act against the global waste problem. And that was the concept of the Fortunate Planet, the company behind the EcoNation platform. Now 3 years later I’m fully focused on the digital marketing strategy with the ambition to bring the digital perspective and data to make eco-friendly activities such as clean ups more traceable and transparent, and used by companies in their ESG reporting.
What drives me is circularity.
What is EcoNation and how did you come with the idea of creating it?
EcoNation is a mixed-reality platform and a tracking tool in one solution. Available online and in an app, it helps users track their eco-friendly actions like clean up, recycling, etc… The app spots recycling stations and waste disposals and calculates how much CO2 was avoided in removing waste from nature/misplaced deposits. What we value above all is the transparency and traceability the platform offers, as every impact activity is tracked and visible in the app dashboards which can not only show the impact on the environment but also help brands and organizations offset their plastic footprint in a transparent manner.
I love traveling and I had the idea of the Fortunate Planet during one trip to Panama in 2019. I was walking on the beach in San Carlos on the pacific coast and participated in a clean up operation there. It was great seeing such an action being organized, with everyone collecting waste, except that at the end of the operation, everything that was collected was put into one single bag, and went to the general waste. There is one rule that is essential when it comes to recycling: if in a given amount of collected waste, there is less than 80% purity rate of one type of material, it is not deemed recyclable as the effort to separate this material from the rest is too high to have a profitable business case. Recycling is only possible when there are segregated routes for the different materials, and of course recycling stations. I thought, what a waste (!), despite the clean up operation, all will probably be found on the beach again in two weeks… That’s the idea of the EcoNation platform: to indicate where to find collecting and recycling points to dispose of waste, and to measure the amount of kilograms of waste removed from nature and the impact on the CO2 emissions.
You mentioned circular economy earlier. In an ideal circular economy cycle, there would not be any or very little waste, right? Don’t we say that good waste is waste that has not been generated?
That’s the idea of circularity absolutely! When we achieve circularity, all resources that are now put in landfills to be incinerated would be recycled, with a huge positive impact for the planet overall: reduction of CO2 emissions, and avoidance of new plastic for instance. At the moment, all products that we create become waste in the final stage of their lifecycle. We need to sort the end of this lifecycle first to be able to achieve circularity. According to the 2023 circularity gap report, the global economy is now only 7.2% circular; and it’s getting worse year on year—driven by rising material extraction and use. According to the World Bank, the world generates 2.01 billion tonnes of municipal solid waste annually, with at least 33 percent of that—extremely conservatively—not managed in an environmentally safe manner. When looking forward, global waste is expected to grow to 3.40 billion tonnes by 2050, more than double population growth over the same period. If we only consider plastic, according to the OECD Global Plastics Outlook, the world is producing twice as much plastic waste as two decades ago, with the bulk of it ending up in landfill, incinerated or leaking into the environment and only 9% successfully recycled. Almost half of all plastic waste is generated in OECD countries.
What do you think we need to scale up in order to solve the problem of misplaced waste?
At the time, Panama had just launched a National Waste Management Plan, as none of the municipalities had separated collection routes for recyclable waste. And no recycling stations either. The prerequisite is to have an infrastructure in place, i.e. segregation channels for the different materials and recycling stations. EcoNation at its core is a tracking platform which lists every recycling station around you allowing to measure the impact of the waste collection, provided those recycling stations exist. Also the impact on the environment on waste removal does not come from the removal itself, because if the waste is not recycled or properly disposed after collection, it is not really removed from the environment. The impact will come from the recycling phase after collection.
I had witnessed the same issue in Jordan where in 2021 they didn’t have glass recycling due to the lack of infrastructure.
Basically, the necessary underlying is to have a recycling infrastructure, but it also depends on what part of the world we are talking about and the maturity of the waste management system there. Take Switzerland for instance. The recycling infrastructure is very good, yet waste incineration is still in use and is not necessarily a bad thing when you consider it has been transformed to generate energy. On a global level, especially developing countries, the start is definitely to have recycling streams, in order to be able to remove waste from nature. Once you have this level of infrastructure, you can think of developing all other topics like upcycling, second hand etc… from there.
It sounds like many stakeholders are playing a role in waste management: governments with a political will to create the necessary infrastructure, manufacturing companies at the design phase of products creation, individuals spotting waste, be it in Switzerland or Panama. Who is EcoNation made for?
At its core EcoNation is a traceability tool for individuals and companies who want to make a positive impact on circularity and track that impact transparently. The platform tracks removal of waste from nature, helps to digitize recycling infrastructure and calculates the CO2 reduction of each activity. There we operate on two different levels: international projects and company engagement.
When we launch international projects, we get in contact with local people already involved in waste management initiatives on the ground, and lacking resources to implement them. EcoNation will help them to track the amount of waste they remove from nature.
EcoNation will also be used for a corporation to foster company engagement in offering its employees a fun way to measure their impact in volunteering activities like clean ups. With ESG reportings now becoming a requirement, with CSRD and the likes, corporations are quite happy to find in EcoNation a measurement tool which help them include data in their sustainability strategies and reportings.
It’s for us at Econation a combination of having a look at the global environment picture with the international projects, and at specific company engagement projects at corporate level. It’s very exciting to see our impact on the environment through those two lenses.
EcoNation is also at the crossroads of the two as it allows local people in international projects to find sponsors within interested companies on our side of the world who would want to offset their plastic footprint. One great example of this was our project in Bhutan. Despite being the world’s first carbon-negative country, the recycling rate there is of just 10%, making waste management a real issue. We met Gyambo there, a tour guide by profession, who has basically been doing clean ups every Saturday since 2022, which made him a EcoHero! The first milestone of the project was to remove waste from nature. Equipped with the EcoNation app, Gyambo transparently tracked each cleanup and environmental impact and enabled EcoNation to emerge as a catalyst for Bhutan’s circular economy transition. At the time the platform was not as developed as it is today and we basically took this opportunity to develop it together, especially the tracking functionality. Thanks to Gyambo’s tracking activity on the platform, we found him a sponsor willing to offset their plastic footprint with Gyambo’s real impact on the ground, which will generate additional income for Gyambo. And we developed the platform even further as it now offers certifications in addition to the tracing and tracking.
As socio-environmental issues, particularly climate change, pushed consumers, investors, civil society and now regulators to place closer attention to the environmental and sustainability credentials of corporations, greenwashing risk is on the rise.
Exactly. This is why we believe traceability and transparency are adamant and have developed the B2B capacity of EcoNation. Not only the sponsoring is a source of income for local people, it is also backed by the tracking of the impact of the project on the ground and injecting funds to that specific project, in a non-disputable, transparent manner. We find it’s a good business case to avoid greenwashing risk.
If you had one inspirational take away from your experience in building EcoNation to share with us, what would this be?
For me it is fascinating to see how our ecosystem is growing every day. By ecosystem I mean on the one hand our software ecosystem which is, after 3.5 years of development, now at a point which is coming closer to the vision we had when we started the platform.
On the other hand I mean by ecosystem our people ecosystem: if somebody would have told me 4 years ago that we will help establish a recycling system in Bhutan I don’t think I would’ve believed it at all. Now we are excited to take that project on the next level and start many more!
More info:
https://econation.me/esg-tracking/
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/environment/data/global-plastic-outlook_c0821f81-en