Renie, leading environmental solutions provider, has partnered with food packing and processing company Tetra Pak in a collaboration that seeks to place Smart Bins at the forefront of efforts to develop efficient waste management systems in the UAE.
The companies entered the partnership ahead of the Gulfood Manufacturing event at the Dubai World Trade Centre, where Renie Smart Bins were showcased to thousands of local, regional and global attendees at the Tetra Pak stand.
These Smart Bins are equipped with technology tools, including special sensors that collect data from waste, which is then processed into the Renie Software Solutions application to uncover new revenue opportunities. The Smart Bins are capable of tracking, monitoring and monetising the waste collection in real time.
Tetra Pak have also recently progressed in their efforts to develop recycling solutions in the UAE, with the installation of the first of its kind carton packages recycling line in partnership with Union Paper Mills in Dubai.
“Together with Renie, we are driving a concerted effort towards enabling recycling of Tetra Pak carton packages to be far more accessible in the UAE, and look forward to a wide adoption of Smart Bin solutions across the Emirates, thus supporting our sustainability and circularity goals and enabling us to ‘protect what’s good”, said Marcelo Piva, Sustainability Director, Middle East and Africa of Tetra Pak.
ESG Mena interviewed Sander Van Waes, CEO of Renie, to find out more about how the Smart Bins are contributing to effective monetised waste management, and how the company’s aims line up with ESG efforts in the UAE.
Can you give us an overview of what Renie does? What is the purpose of the company?
Renie is a technology company that has hardware and software solutions, an ecosystem, in order to make waste more valuable than it is right now. By making waste more valuable, it also makes it way more interesting for companies to deal with right away.
We started running a year ago, operationally, and have over 2000 active areas in the UAE. We’re moving to Qatar and Saudi Arabia very fast, and also Europe. In a nutshell, our system is able to monetise data coming out of waste and make it way more valuable than it is now.
Could you expand on why waste management ecosystems are needed in the UAE? What are some of the waste management issues you’re hoping to tackle?
It became clear to me that waste management and sustainability is a cost for a company, and because of the fact it is pure cost and won’t generate any income, by average, only one and a half per cent of the revenue goes to sustainability. If you need to cut costs in a company, you (sustainability) are the first one to go.
We are not in the cost sector. We are on the income part of the charts. So as a company, we will be much more interesting to deal with. If there is a system that continuously needs to be subsidised by a company, they will do it for a year, but lose interest over time, because it is a pure cost.
If you can incorporate a system that gives them money for their waste data by monetisation, it becomes way more interesting than the first option. That’s the reason why I’ve built this, I want to transform proper sustainable waste management and recycling from a cost to a company to an income for a company.
Can you provide more detail about how the Smart Bins work?
We install the Smart Bins (manufactured in Renie’s own facility) in a certain area, let’s say, your office. From then on, the Bin has two possible identifiers – one is the barcode, as every commercial product has a barcode, every bottle has a barcode. But if the waste you want to recycle does not have a barcode, you still have the camera phone to identify the waste and make the Bin open up.
The Bin is closed by default and it only opens for the right waste that can go into that specific bin. So if you have plastic waste, the bin will stay closed until it identifies the waste as plastic, and then it will open up.
We have data that is attached to the waste that enables us to extract and monetise. For example, if a consumer drops a bottle of Pepsi in a school, we understand demographics of an audience, so based on waste patterns, we are able to identify consumer habits.
The hardware solution extracts data and feeds it into three different platforms right now, those platforms are built by us to monetise data coming out of waste: one is consumer data, the second is plastic credits, and the third is carbon credits.
These platforms are monetising data coming out of waste, and a piece of that value goes back to the company that has placed the bins with one big term. The algorithm works as such that you can withdraw money from the account that moment the waste reaches the recycling facility.
So now you are incentivised to make sure the waste is recycled, because you can earn money out of it. If the waste goes to landfill, you don’t make any money from it. So that’s how the ecosystem works, it’s an ecosystem of hardware and software solutions.
How is Renie contributing to broader ESG goals in the UAE?
Waste segregation at the source is the best environmental thing to do, it is the cheapest way to collect and recycle it. Our system is self-subsidising, so it generates its own money, this incentivises consumers because you don’t need to rely on government subsidies.
Our global drive is really to create an ecosystem of self-sustaining systems to segregate waste at the source and incentivise every stakeholder in the whole chain.
In the UAE already, we have over 2000 locations where we went from zero segregation at the source, to segregating at a much bigger scale. Every residential entity, every commercial entity needs to have a Bin with full monitoring where you can see where the waste is going, this is where we can make a very big impact.
Of course, normally it’s always relying on companies to pay for recycling, and in this way, whenever they do the right thing, the ecosystem incentivises them, rewards them with the fact they can withdraw money.
In Europe, people are used to it, having grown up with recycling. A lot of people here (UAE) don’t understand why the plastic bottle cannot go in the general waste. But if you tell them, ‘hey, if you throw this bottle in the right bin, I’ll give you money’, that’s something they understand. Everybody understands the language of money, right?