Today we are on part 2 of our conversation with Dhwani Mehta., co-founder of Ecovia. who are a packaging as a service company that helps e-commerce & hyperlocal players switch to returnable reusable packaging.

In the previous episode we discussed how their business model came into being? We dived deeper into how they managed to pool in resources and stakeholders with high consumer touch points to support their pilot run in Surat amidst the pandemic. We busted some myths around compostable bags available online and also discuss the product design. 

Show Notes:

It is no surprise that today single-use packaging has dominated our supply chains..and this single use family of convenience comes at a cost of depleting forest reserves and choking marine lives.

With the rise in popularity of e-commerce and doorstep deliveries in India, the use of paper as well as plastic packaging in boxes has gone up significantly- a trend that organizations like Ecovia are trying to arrest. Therefore they deserve all of our support and encouragement.

Reach out to Ecovia on Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/thinkecovia/

If you are aware of similar groundbreaking technologies in India, then please share it with us on [email protected]

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Keyword : What is a circular economy?

Close your eyes and Imagine a world where you order products online and they are delivered to you safely without card-board or plastic packaging. Does this vision seem too good to be true? Well you’ll be happy to know that there are a handful of start-ups across the the globe who are working their way through current supply chains to make this vision a reality.

Hello & welcome to CBP a series where we look into circular economy from the Indian context. I’m your host and dost Sreepriya Sridharan, and today we have with us Dhwani Mehta co-founder of Ecovia who are a packaging as a service company that helps e-commerce & hyperlocal players switch to returnable reusable packaging.

This interview is a 2 part series. Please join me in part 1 of conversation with Dhwani.

Show Notes:

In this episode we cover the following points;

I see a huge potential in Packaging as a service model, do you?

Reach out to Ecovia on Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/thinkecovia/

If you are aware of similar groundbreaking technologies in India, then please share it with us on [email protected]

Reach out to me on LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter 

Keyword : What is a circular economy?

Hello & welcome to Circular Business Podcast’s special edition of weekly gupshup with the Circular collective, I’m your host and dost Sreepriya Sridharan and today we are going to board the train into the history of repair & reuse fashion of India whose artisans are popularly known as Rafoogars.

And to take that discussion forward, aaj humare saath hain Vikas Dargan from The Circular Collective who is an Architect ,a cultural professional and Anant fellow, who is passionately working towards craft revival and rural livelihood generation.

Today fast fashion is trending not only in people’s wardrobes but also in the news. The reason for it to make space in people’s wardrobes is because it enables companies to mass market, it enables manufacturers to mass produce high end designs and provokes consumers to buy latest trends for cheap.

The SALE culture triggers shoppers to buy more and it also creates a false abundance, which is why clothes today last less due to poor quality & wear n tear that compensates for cheapness.

It has tuned users to buy new instead of repairing the old one, kyuki jab kapade ki quality hi kharab ho toh koi usse repair kyu karein?

That’s where Vikas talks to us about Rafoogari, the age old art of repairing clothes and how reviving it will be beneficial for tackling the havoc created by fast fashion and also aid in enhancing a circular economy.

Keyword : What is a circular economy?

Appliance as a service is an extension of product as a service model where a customer pays for the service instead of owning the equipment.

If your home requires air conditioning only in summer, then you pay for cool air only in summer. That ways customer has the option to save on capital cost of the goods, have more space at home when the equipment is not needed, opt for newer models or upgrade to your preferred models when you want to without having to worry about owning the goods, worry less about the wear & tear and repairs needed for the equipment (bcoz now the onus of equipment maintenance is on the service provider who leases the equipment to you).

If you are thinking whether this model is environmentally sustainable? You’ll be happy to know that

Fortunately today we have a good number of businesses that follow products as a service. Some popular examples here are : Ola / Uber / Zoom Car / AirBnB / Furlenco etc. However there is this one Netherland’s based organization that grabbed my attention which goes by the name Homie.

The idea for Homie started on a kitchen table and they have been in business since 2018.

You know how I’m a sucker for a good marketing pitch, and that’s exactly where I found Homie doing a good job. Their website is so crisp on messaging right from product & service offering to pricing to how they are helping consumers reduce their carbon footprint.

Their business model may not be different than most product-as-a-service company but to me it's their mission i.e. “to strive for a cleaner world” makes a big difference.

How are they contributing to the circular economy?

Tune in to learn more.

Reach out to me on LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter & also write me an email on [email protected]

Keyword : What is a circular economy?

33% of the earth’s surface is land.

Only 71% of that land is habitable. Of which 50% is used for agriculture.

And guess what over 75% of that agricultural land is used for livestock production i.e domesticated animals for meat, milk & eggs.

This land only produces 33% of our global protein supply.

Do you see why this data is alarming?

The scale & intensity of animal production today is threatening our planetary boundaries of land use, freshwater use & non-renewable phosphate rock..which is still an underestimated aspect of the fertilizer problem.

That’s why it is said that the biological loops in aquaculture & agriculture need to be closed efficiently.

Most of the meat that we easily buy from grocery marts and all the junk delicacies that we love for eg. KFC / Mac’Donald’s / Venkey’s / Liscious e.t.c are all from factory farms. Breeding animals is an incredibly inefficient way to try to feed the world's growing population.

Most meat in the West is now produced in factory farms which, as the name implies, are production lines for animals. To meet the large demand for meat, billions of animals are kept in cramped, filthy conditions, often unable to move properly and not allowed fresh air or even natural light.

Most animal farms are unable to feed outdoors naturally, they are fed grain, oilseeds, soy, fish meal and sometimes the remains of other animals. High-quality land is used to grow grains and soybeans - land that could be used to grow crops for humans.

Are you able to visualize how unsustainable this whole cycle is!

We are heavily compromising the available landmass by growing crops that can feed the livestock. The choice of these crops is not always in sync with nature, therefore unsustainable because they do not encourage bio-diversity.

Due to this process, soil on existing agricultural land degrades, therefore now we need more land…but where are you going to get that land from? 

You may have also learnt about fishmeal being used as animal feed? Fish meal, are coarsely ground powder made from the cooked flesh of fish …mostly anchovy, menhaden or herring. Fish meal is a commercial product mostly made from fish that are not used for human consumption;

That’s a bloody unsustainable meal …and this number looks even worse when you multiply it with a significant meat-eating population.

So what can be the possible solutions?

These solutions are important, however, because it is heavily dependent on individual behaviour it may not have an immediate scalable impact.

That’s where solution no. 3 fascinates me...Here we make use of household organic waste as a platform to invite Black Soldier Flies popularly known as BSF who naturally break down the waste into compost… each fly produces hundreds of protein-rich larvae which can then be harvested and used to feed livestock.

Tune in to learn more.

Reach out to me on LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter & also write me an email on [email protected]

Keyword : What is a circular economy?

India is bustling with the festival season at this time of the year and Piyush noticed a dilemma recently when his family exchanged gift cards instead of sweets because each of those gift cards is single-use in nature and are made out of plastic.

Just imagine the pace at which most humans have evolved their buying habits..transaction habits from exchanging cash, three decades ago to credit/debit cards and now mobile wallets/g-pay/Paytm / QR codes etc.

For many people, using credit cards has been a convenient way of payment until recently. But the new-age consumer, following the penetration of mobile technology into almost every market, views cards as plastic clutter that makes the wallet bulky.

6 billion payment cards are manufactured every year around the world; Very few of which are recycled cards! The amount of plastic used to produce banking cards every year is equivalent to the weight of 150 Boeing 747s.

These cards are replaced every few years, and the 5.7 million tons of plastic, in the form of these cards, end up in landfills.

It is commonly forgotten ..maybe at times ignored knowledge that our payment cards, debit or credit cards, loyalty cards, gift cards, shopping cards or any other, are made of non-degradable synthetic plastic, which uses raw material from the oil & gas industry.

This is why developing a life cycle strategy for an eco-friendly card or cardless transaction involves a global approach in which banks have to choose the right raw materials, technology, processes, and products to achieve a substantial reduction in negative environmental impacts such as energy consumption, carbon footprint, and plastic waste.

So what are the solutions here: Recycled plastic cards, Bioplastic cards etc. are an option, however till the time we have a hard product in our hand, its end of life will always be a point of concern.

That’s where a recent report by Infosys authored by Gururaj Deshpande caught my attention because it highlights numerous options that are available today to make the world cardless!! Are you ready... Here we go

Follow our page- (Circular Business Podcast | The Circular Collective)

In case you have any further queries, you can DM me on LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter & also write me an email on [email protected]

For keeping up to date on our #100DaysChallenge; Follow our page- Circular Business Podcast

Keyword : What is a circular economy?

Allow me to introduce you to RainBeer, a Netherland’s based organization that coordinates with Dutch breweries to turn excess rain into beer. 

Freshwater seems abundant, but when accounting for all the water on Earth, it's in limited supply.

To put that into perspective, envision this carefully...

3 % is fresh water, but even in that 3%, about 2 % is locked in glaciers, ice caps, and groundwater.

That leaves about 1 % of the freshwater on Earth that is accessible and usable by humans.

Just imagine, if the world's water supply were only 100 litres (26 gallons), our usable water supply of fresh water would be only about 0.003 litres (one-half teaspoon).

In actuality, that amounts to an average of 8.4 million litres (2.2 million gallons) for each person on earth.

This supply is continually collected, purified, and distributed in the natural hydrologic (water) cycle.

Now that we understand the case of fresh water, we can gauge its impact on Beer production. According to Sabmiller‘s report, approximately 102,5 litres of water is consumed for every litre of beer produced… woah just knowing these stats has made the act of bottoms up uncool for me.

Similar to Mumbai city, in recent years, Amsterdam too started experiencing heavy rainfall,

To him, every rainfall was equivalent to beer falling from the sky!

Amsterdam being a sustainable city, its infrastructure has transformed city spaces into a sponge for excess rainwater. A crucial sponge. Surrounded by water on four sides, this delta city of some 600,000 people can't flush the sudden stormwater away. Instead, it has embarked on a climate change adaptation strategy that turns every conceivable area into water storage.

How does it work?

The brewery they work with collects the rainwater from the roof of the brewery and with a heavy rain shower, they collect a thousand litres of rainwater. That water goes through the filter and is completely purified by a microfilter, an activated carbon filter, a membrane filter and a UV filter. With this purified rainwater, the brewer brews a delicious fresh rain beer.

Rainwater is softer than tap water and contains fewer minerals. These are ideal characteristics for making beer. Some recipes are requiring 30% fewer hops for the same flavour creation compared to tap water. According to experts, the softness also ensures that the bitterness of the beer comes into its own.

Tune into the episode to learn more;

Follow our page- (Circular Business Podcast | The Circular Collective)

In case you have any further queries, you can DM me on LinkedIn & Facebook & also write me an email on [email protected]

For keeping up to date on our #100DaysChallenge; Follow our page- Circular Business Podcast

Keyword : What is a circular economy?

If you have been following my podcast , by now you have a fair idea how I gravitated towards Environmental sustainability ..and how circular economy grabbed my attention.

Even on topics of sustainability, there are so many courses ..many were free..many were paid..in today’s world there is so much of information around but curation is a skill and I used it to help me narrow down by specialization course.

I am clear that I want to learn circular economy from real time practitioners

I am clear that I want to build and grow a strong network within this sector

I am clear that I want to work on actionable projects while taking this course..

Considering these parameters…I kept surfing through so many sustainability courses online and to my good fortune the online climate school Terra.do. came in to my rescue as they have a course starting Sept 2nd which goes by the name “Circular Economy: Principals & Applications” and I had the opportunity to interview the course facilitator Jannis Kempkens himself.

If you haven’t checked out those episodes, make sure to tune into Ep. 52 - 54 - 56

So after 7 years of working in the corporate world I figured out what specialization to dive deeper into..

All in all to summarize today’s discussion..I’d say

On that note it is a wrap on this episode, thank you so much for tuning in.

If you wanna join me in the Circular Economy course starting September, then why don’t you leverage the special benefit that Terra.do has offered YOU. It’s a 25% discount that they have offered to all our listeners.

You can use the code CircularPodcast to avail that offer and in case you have any further queries, you can DM me on LinkedIn & Facebook & also write me an email on [email protected]

For keeping up to date on our #100DaysChallenge; Follow our page- Circular Business Podcast

Keyword : What is a circular economy?

https://spinnovagroup.com/Shoes have a large environmental impact; every year we produce 21 billion pair of shoes worldwide and 95% of those ends up in the landfill. Such massive production of shoes is linked with high CO2 emissions, enormous water consumption and the use of highly toxic products. A vast shift towards sustainability is a must. Yet, most fashion houses tend to focus on formal developments, rather than on process and material innovation, giving sustainable solutions the cold shoulder.

While fast fashion has glamorously taken all the negative publicity around sustainability, the new age shoe industry’s havoc rarely gets mentioned.

Is it really possible to design zero waste fashion products..well it is possible nahi toh hum yeh episode shayad record nahi karte hai na :D

Kristel Peters has laid down the following 3 steps for zero waste design,

1. The design of the shoe should be modular and ready made for disassembly and reduce the components of a shoe vastly.

2. The materialisation of the shoe must be zero waste.

3. The shoe is to be looked at as a service, not as a product.

Beautiful isn’t it?

Leather and different variants of leather form an important part of the shoe industry and I believe each one of us are aware of the environmental & sustainability harms that the leather industry brings in..yet because shoes are a basic necessity ..its flaws rarely get the spotlight. But we are here to discuss solution.

A fabulous solution brought in by textile innovators Spinnova.

Spinnova are a Finland based company who are transforming the way textiles are made globally.

It all started in 2009 at Technical Research Centre of Finland’s (VTT) cellulose expert Juha Salmela was researching nanocellulose. He attended a conference in Oxford university and heard a presentation from a leading spider researcher, who explained the similarities between spiderweb’s protein and nanocellulose.

That’s when an idea came to Juha: what if wood fibre could be spun into textile fibre in a similar way to this natural process? The professor immediately thought it was something Juha should look into and develop.

Since then they have been on a mission to create a more sustainable textile industry. One where cellulose-based materials are a cost-efficient, environmentally friendly and preferred option for brands.

Their innovation, if absorbed and adopted well, has a massive potential to transform the world of fashion. And while we were on the topic of shoes, Spinnova and their partnership with ECCO leather partner KT Tradings have together disrupted old ways and closed the loop on leather materials. They have innovated a fabric that is made out of leather wastes. This natural leather fabric is made from leather waste without harmful chemicals.

Follow our page- (Circular Business Podcast | The Circular Collective)

Keyword : What is a circular economy?

Its Day 24 of my #100DaysChallenge. If you are new to this challenge check out --> this link.

Data suggests that there are about 120million #cigarette #smokers in India.

If that is true, it is worthwhile to consider sustainable practices around this habit of smoking, because once someone chooses to smoke, they are this industry's customers for life!

Pack of cigarettes , its butts and tobacco production practices all have been scrutinized across media every year for reasons ranging from health to environment.

But in my view, the process of lighting a cigarette has conveniently been ignored.. don't you think so?

Cheap , single use plastic lighters have been making its way into the landfills for quite sometime now, and it is time we start thinking about it from the lens of #environment #sustainability

So share this episode with a smoker friend / colleague of yours and help me spark that thought!

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Keyword : What is a circular economy?