‘Beyond recycling’: how this tech is saving companies a fortune and helping the environment

An Adelaide start-up is expanding its tech platform from disposable coffee cups to other consumables so firms can track glass bottles, kegs and even cling film in a bid to save millions.

Resuably founders Thomas Nicholls, Matt Bowie, Mary Kelly and Filip Rajec are aiming to eliminate single use containers with their app.

An Australian start-up says it can help save the environment as well as strengthen the bottom lines of businesses. How? By better looking after their equipment.

Or more precisely, encouraging reusing rather than recycling. Mary Kelly and Matt Bowie co-founded Resuably with two other friends, originally seeking to limit the use of disposable coffee cups – about 1.8 billion of which enter landfill every year.

But Mr Bowie said the company, which is based in Adelaide, has moved beyond coffee cups and to provide a tech platform that can track and reuse a variety of packaging and goods in supply chains, saving companies potentially millions of dollars a year.

“I was talking to a company that loses 50,000 pallets in a year,” Mr Bowie said. A new wooden pallet can cost about $30.

Resuably is now looking at helping breweries track kegs, beverage companies track glass bottles, while helping supermarkets replace cling film – which is wrapped around boxes on pallets – with reusable canvas.

Mr Bowie said it was a way of limiting uncontrolled consumerism, which the planet cannot sustain, and often people made choices that they thought were environmentally friendly only for it to have the opposite effect.

Just look at compostable coffee cups.

Resuably was originally founded to end disposal coffee cups but has since expanded with the aim of eliminating all single-use packaging.

“We were using stainless steel, double walled coffee cups that were made from at least 75 per cent recycled content. In the process of manufacturing those cups, there was a lot of energy, a lot of water, a lot of resources needed to make that one cup,” Mr Bowie said.

“Now to make a single compostable cup or a single plastic cup or Styrofoam cup, they also require energy, some resources and water but less on a per unit basis. But the reusable cup can be used 1000 times. And once it was used 66 times, that was better for the environment on a whole life cycle – even including the water and energy to wash it.

“It’s about designing a system to enable reuse, so that the net impact on the environment is less, and the net cost of that is less.”

If done right, it can be better for the environment than recycling, which Mr Bowie said had “failed us”.

According to the latest federal government data, 35 per cent of packaging in Australia had “good recyclability” but was not recycled in 2020-21, and if all landfill packaging had been recycled it “could have reduced national greenhouse gas emissions by about 2.2 tonnes”. This equates to removing 740,000 cars from the road per year.

“There is a difference between something that is recyclable and something that’s recycled,” Mr Bowie said.

“We know that hundreds of thousands and millions of plastic bottles that are recyclable, all the soft plastics that we saw in Australia become recyclable – but did that actually happen?

“It’s getting all those systems in place so the industry can cope with the volume of resource waste that’s coming through the system.”

Resuably has caught the attention of Korean electronics giant LG, who backed the Hatch: Taronga Accelerator Program, which provides funding to “ecopreneurs” to fast track their innovations.

Almost half of the global plastic garbage come from developing countries, including Vietnam and Thailand.

Resuably provides a system that encourage reuse and tracks packaging and goods across supply chains. Ms Kelly, who has recently moved to Melbourne, said it had become a “tech company”, developing an app to help eliminate single-use packaging.

It has partnered with South Australian dairy company Fleurieu to develop a reusable glass bottle system, which involves customers buying a one-litre bottle and being able to fill it up at stores and scan details such as use by dates and how many containers they’ve saved from ending up in land fill.

“One of the things we were really adamant on with this Fleurieu project was developing technology that would help track and underpin it but it shouldn’t be a requirement for people to participate in the reuse system.

“So we’ve got an app for them that’s part of our existing app. People can just go, fill up their glass milk bottle, scan it, refill it, and not have to use their phone, not have to download an app … because we uniquely identify every single bottle and every single scanning or every single refill location.

“Then if a consumer wishes to participate and get further information about that they can download the app. They can link the bottle to themselves, they can see their refill history, they can see the containers they’ve saved from landfill, so they can track their impact.”

Originally published as ‘Beyond recycling’: how this tech is saving companies a fortune and helping the environment