The podcast by project managers for project managers. This episode we share an environmental project story about CIRT, a startup company working on a solution to share recycling information to reduce waste. Kat Shayne and her team built a database to answer your recycling questions. Hear about the complex challenges encountered on this project.

Table of Contents

01:37 … Meet Kat04:37 … The Origin of CIRT08:17 … Accessing CIRT08:55 … Building a Database11:19 … What is GiGi?12:42 … Identifying What Can be Recycled13:59 … Keeping the Data Current15:40 … Skills or Passion?17:51 … Satisfying Stakeholders20:00 … Tackling Obstacles22:44 … Lessons Learned Building CIRT24:48 … Measuring the Impact of CIRT26:14 … I Wish I had Known!27:53 … Advice to Project Managers29:49 … Get in Touch with Kat31:12 … Closing

Kat Shayne: ...making sure that the people that are in place are doing the things that are their strengths, and providing access to resources and tools that help them work on their weaknesses.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Hello, and welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Thank you for joining us today.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates.  We like to bring you stories about projects.  And today we are bringing you a story about Katherine Shayne.  She worked in environmental sustainability focused on global materials management and marine plastic litter for the Jambeck Research Group and UGA New Materials Institute.  Kat has a passion for bridging science and technology with business and mitigation strategies in communities especially in terms of waste management and new materials.

BILL YATES:  Wendy, have you ever been holding something in your hand, or you’re about to throw it in the trash, and you’re like, wait a minute, maybe I could recycle this.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Yes, yes, many a time.

BILL YATES:  So this is the question.  This is the problem that Kat and her team have been addressing.  At the University of Georgia Kat is the co-founder and president of Can I Recycle This.  It’s a startup company which is working on a solution to help people, people like me and you, governments, and businesses figure out what products or packaging are locally recyclable and how to get them to where they need to go.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Kat.  It’s great to have you on the podcast.  Thank you for joining us today.

KAT SHAYNE:  Thanks for having me.  I’m really excited to be here.

Meet Kat

WENDY GROUNDS:  I want to hear a little bit about your background before we start.  You have a master’s degree in environmental engineering from the University of Georgia.

BILL YATES:  Go Dawgs.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah.

KAT SHAYNE:  Go Dawgs.

WENDY GROUNDS:  What sparked your interest in environmental sustainability?  How did it all begin?

KAT SHAYNE:  Actually, I did not plan on becoming an engineer at all.  I was an English major when I started at UGA.  And I was going pre-law because I’d already looked up one of the highest-passing degrees for the LSAT was English.  So I started off in English.  I was really passionate about writing.  And I had a class that was an elective science class.  It was with Dr. Knox.  He’s a climatologist at UGA.  And he had me in his class, and he asked me to come in for office hours one day.  He was like, what is your major?  And I told him I wanted to do pre-law. I really had a passion for policy and law.

And he says, “Well, you really have a knack for this,” because it was a climate course.  He said, you know, “Have you explored engineering, applied sciences?”  I said, “No, I didn’t even know UGA had engineering.”    So I went and checked it out, and at the same time I was trying to find a little bit more purpose in my degree, you know, what kind of law did I want to go into if I was going to do that.

Because my significant other at the time had been diagnosed with cancer.  And he was 20, and he had colon cancer.  So I was, how can this happen?  Why is this a reality?  Like I didn’t understand how that could happen, you know.  My stepdad had been getting a colonoscopy when he was 50, that’s when you start to check for those things.  So I was trying to find something where I could do good and do the least amount of harm, right, or trying to fix systems.

And so I looked at engineering, and I said, okay.  I can either be reactive, go into law and try and fix it from something already happening, or I can look at systems and try to fix them before they happen, like design better systems, design more efficient systems, design systems that do no harm.  And so my significant other ended up passing away when he was 21 of colon cancer.  So that made it a mission to use the skills that I had and create better systems through engineering.  And that’s how I got into my sustainability path is because I was looking to create better products or better services that could do the least amount of harm, be the least toxic.

BILL YATES:  So sorry to hear about that loss.  And what an impact on you at that age, to have someone that close pass away.  So sorry for that.  And it makes sense, too, you know, I can see how that would lead you to these bigger questions that many times, you know, it’s much later in life that we start to ask these questions of ourselves.  Okay, what am I going to do?  What is my purpose in life?  And how can I make a difference?  I love that, “So do good and fix systems.”  That’s a good mantra. 

The Origin of CIRT

That turns us to CIRT, or CIRT.  You developed CIRT because you saw a problem.  Tell us what CIRT stands for, and through that I think you’ll describe the problem.

KAT SHAYNE:  In 2018 myself and Jenna Jambeck, Dr. Jenna Jambeck at the University of Georgia, started CIRT to answer the question Can I Recycle This?  So it’s an acronym.  We’ve shortened it now because we answer many, many more questions like can I reuse this, can I recover this, can I refill this.  So we map out materials recovery systems, mostly in North America.  But we are looking to expand elsewhere.  After I graduated from undergrad in engineering, I went on to work with Jenna in grad school because she was the only one doing research on plastic pollution, and I was really, really fascinated by it because when that leaks into our environment it’s really harmful to people and animals and our ecosystems alike.  So I wanted to make an impact in that area.

So I started working with Jenna.  We were studying plastic inputs into the ocean.  So if you’ve ever heard that there’s going to be more plastic than fish in the sea, someone took a stat from our research and turned it into that other statistic.  And so we were getting a lot of attention, her group was, for that research.  That also meant we were getting questions about plastics and recycling and waste management from people all across the globe, really.  So we would get questions like what do I do with the No. 1 plastic that I have?  What do I do with my chip bag?  Or why is my recycling truck going to the landfill?

We would get all these questions from people across the country and across the world about recycling and waste management.  So we decided to put together a way to find that out really easily.  So we built a database to answer what to do with a product wherever you are.  That was kind of the thesis for it.  How do we tell people exactly what to do with their products, after they buy them and after they use them?  So we initially came up with an artificial intelligence bot, and it was on Twitter, and it was on Facebook Messenger, so anyone could ask without having to download a new app; right?  Like I’ve got a thousand apps on my phone.  We wanted people to be able to use that with the apps they already had.

And we were trying to sell it to cities.  Well, city timelines and budgets were just not in line with the startup, unfortunately.  So we pivoted, and we started to offer this information to companies, and it quickly caught on.  And so now we work directly with CPGs and large multiunit institutions to help procure, purchase, and use the right materials for recoverability.

BILL YATES:  And what does CPG stand for?

KAT SHAYNE:  Consumer Package Goods companies.  So you can think of like consumables to decking material, like all sorts of things that we use as consumers can be put into that category.  And so one other thing I wanted to mention was another reason we did this is because many recovery systems are very localized.  So when you think about your waste management, it’s usually based on your city or your county.  And so they’re very different as you move around the U.S. and into Canada.  So they can change mile by mile.  I mean, I’m in Athens, Georgia.  What I can recycle is not necessarily what you can recycle in Atlanta.  So they do change.  And they also are in flux.  So they also have changes per month.  So they might accept glass this month and not next month, and so we keep track of all that information.

Accessing CIRT

KAT SHAYNE:  We have a web application that is online, so you can access it through your browser.  The reason we didn’t go down the app road, we did have that on our product roadmap at one point, was the hurdle to adoption.  We wanted people to get this information as quickly as they could.  So the way that we’ve done that is we’ve created integrations for apps, for websites, for different types of ecommerce, so that this information can be used by the brand and the company or the organization to, A, get that information out to their consumers, or use it to purchase better products.

Building a Database

BILL YATES:  I don’t want to go too nerdy with you, but the idea of building out this database of information is just so intriguing to me.  I’m thinking of all the data science and the computer design that goes into that.