Turning trash into cash

by Alicia Marseille
Director, RISN Incubator

The amount of garbage and solid waste humans throw away is rising fast and won’t peak this century without transformational changes unless we reduce, reuse, and redesign materials.

In the 2012 World Bank report What a Waste: A Global Review of Solid Waste Management the trajectory of global solid waste was estimated. In 2010, there was roughly 3.5 million tons of waste produced per day globally. They estimate that there will be more than 6 million tons per day produced by 2025.

Circular Economy, coined by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, looks to innovation to force change beyond the current linear model of ‘take, make, and waste’ to create a model that is regenerative and restorative. A report released last year, The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the future of plastics by the World Economic Forum, Ellen MacArthur Foundation and McKinsey and Co., discovered that today only 14% of plastic packaging is collected for recycling globally. This means that the rest is either incinerated, landfilled or ends up littering the ocean. If production and consumption continues and follows the same trends, by 2050 our oceans could contain more plastics than fish, by weight.

These figures are daunting. Two large community stakeholders, Arizona State University and the City of Phoenix, decided to collaborate to actively create change in this space. One of these areas of change includes the Resource Innovation Solutions Network (RISN) Incubator that is based on circular economy. The RISN Incubator works with early stage ventures through a customized program to scale their ventures.

The RISN Incubator is part of ASU’s larger RISN umbrella. RISN’s role is to bring together university, regional government, business and non-governmental partners to transform the relationship between resources, the environment, people and the economy. The goal is to implement sustainable solutions that create a resource-focused circular economy platform that makes urban areas healthier, more livable, resilient and efficient.

I first came to ASU in May 2017 as the Director of the RISN Incubator, and I’ve never been so excited to come to work every day. The ventures we are working with have tapped into a growing market opportunity of turning waste into resources as there is a tremendous amount of value in the waste stream. These ventures are literally turning ‘trash into cash’ as Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton would say. On top of the work with the ventures we are working university wide with faculty and staff, students, and with stakeholders like the City of Phoenix, and we are collaborating to catalyze change that can be repeated and scaled in solving these global challenges.