The Surpluss is the worlds’ first symbiotic digital community for businesses that allows climate action with a few clicks. The platform allows companies to reduce their costs by leasing/renting/selling resources that are idle, or no longer needed, whilst actively contributing to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by making better, more collaborative business decisions that can drive value for all their stakeholders. We hope by creating visibility for their resources that are not currently used, we can create an incentive for businesses to think more holistically towards sustainability whilst benefitting financially. Companies can optimize their operations, whilst decreasing their waste management costs, and have more control of their scope 3 emissions.
Globally, there is $163 billion of surplus production material and inventory that is thrown away due to oversupply and expiry – that is more than the combined GDPs of Iceland, Costa Rica and Croatia. We are trying to address this gap in the circular economy space to help shift the sustainability paradigm by influencing daily business decisions to replace resource-intensive imported raw materials with local, secondary materials. Our platform also helps companies map their impact against the UN Sustainable Development goals and track insights on their resource exchanges – such as KGs diverted from landfill, and knowledge hours towards capacity building, and innovation of new products and services through collaboration with businesses from other industries.
A little bit about the Founder/ story of how you started out?
My background is quite diverse – I have experience working in the biomarine research industry, legal, and more recently, petrochemicals manufacturing. I wanted to gain as much professional exposure to understand the systemic problems that underpin barriers to sustainability on a societal level.
During my 10+ years work experience and several degrees later, I started to realize things are not so simple. I had several running projects that helped create incremental shifts in the companies I was working with and in their immediate supply chain – from repurposing packaging waste, making furniture out of oil drums, and then finally, an air pollution capture unit.
However, I realized that the only way to really make an impact is creating a new paradigm that could make it easy for companies to adopt more conscious practices that spanned beyond carbon reporting and CSR. There was currently no feasible way that could get businesses focused on taking climate action through collaboration. Working in resource-intensive fields such as petrochemicals was critical for understanding what materials can be substituted, and what currently cannot, leaving space for innovation, which got me thinking.
What impact is The Surpluss trying to make?
The Surpluss is trying to redefine the fragmented and inconsistent nature of sustainability standards, whilst making it easy, accessible, and affordable for SMEs make a substantial impact. It is common knowledge that smaller businesses do not have the same level of resources as larger organisations to respond effectively to climate change – be it infrastructure, capital or access to sufficient knowledge. We want to allow a collective intelligence platform help businesses solve these problems profitably and efficiently, in real time.
What sets The Surpluss apart?
The way our proprietary methodology and platform was designed is deeply rooted in natures’ systems. We do get a few raised eyebrows when we mention this, but we closely examined slime-mold networks that inspired the design of a platform that could efficiently get businesses to their destination fast, and reliably.
Nature has over 3.8 billion years of research and innovation – we would be quite wise to tap into that knowledge, translating it into solutions towards anthropogenic problems, such as climate change. Our learnings were that nature does not waste, only cycles resources and unlikely pairings form mutualistic relationships to thrive in volatile conditions. So, in a business context, this can look like a business leasing out their extra warehouse space in exchange for some by-products to use as a secondary resource from a company that could mutually benefit.
More fundamentally, what differentiates us is that we have no direct competitors – we truly believe that to make a change we must work as collaboratively as possible, allowing for as many solutions as possible. We don’t claim to have the best and only solution for businesses – but what we do is deepen engagement and lower barriers to entry for SMEs to play a bigger role in the post-sustainability era.
As a new company, where do you aspire to be in 5 years?
Since we are a digital-tech company, scaling up as an international platform is what our end-goal is. We also hope to make more substantive impacts in developing economies, where informal workers make up a significant, but invisible part of the business ecosystem. We hope that by driving transparency and allowing companies to speak a common language through a simplified platform, can help companies create communities both locally and internationally. We will also be launching our sustainability standards by the end of the year, which we hope can help drive an effective and communicable internationally accredited standard for secondary materials and challenge the status quo in-depth.
Our financial goals are to help companies access the $4 trillion circular economy market and allow them to overcome barriers towards their zero-waste goals. We also hope that we can collectively embark on a journey where we can instigate a paradigm shift in industrial psychology – where collaboration will be seen as an effective means to climate mitigation, and the word waste no longer carries the same meaning.