Circonnact supports the market entry in Austria of Cyrkl – Central Europe’s largest Waste2Resource marketplace
One important element of the circular economy is the change of perspective for waste. Waste is quite often a valuable resource in the wrong place; this is one of the basic assumptions of the Cradle to Cradle concept which guides us when it comes to design of products for a circular economy. However, currently a lot of resources are treated as waste and end up in landfill or incineration, thus destroying their value. To change this we worked with Cyrkl, a Greentech startup operating the largest waste to resource marketplace in Central Europe. They combine expertise in circular waste management with artificial intelligence supported IT infrastructure to match recyclers and secondary material users to companies who have not found solutions for their excess materials yet.
Circonnact supported their market entry in Austria and German speaking region with marketing expertise and insights into the needs of companies in Austria to use the platform. Cyrkl and Circonnact share the mission to connect partners and transform waste to resources. Cyrkl analyses the companies’ current waste management, identifies better solutions to either avoid waste, find partners who upgrade the current waste materials to be reused or just identify internal optimization. It is impressive to see results – their customers achieved savings up to 450.000 Euro per year by re-valuing materials and redesigning flows, and huge amounts of CO2 emissions have been reduced as well by using secondary materials instead of new ones.
It is interesting to see that, while in Austria the recycling and incineration of waste is quite advanced, the usage of secondary material is still not very common. As the regulation with the EU Circular Economy Action Plan will require more and more usage of recycled materials a lot of companies have not thought through where they could replace or at least blend virgin material with recycled material without compromising the quality of their product. Recycling and reuse are just two out of a broad range of the circular strategies that Circonnact is looking into to identify the potential for circularity for companies.