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Recycling start-ups say funding still challenging
With waste management considered less than a sexy industry, app developers are still struggling to attract capital for what looks like a good, and potentially profitable, idea.
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A greener future: A recycling worker separates used plastic bottles at a garbage bank in Gili Trawangan, West Nusa Tenggara. (Vyara Wurjanta/-)
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ndonesia, called out for being the second-worst offender for marine plastic pollution, only recycles about 10 percent of its plastic waste. Recycling start-ups have emerged in the country in a bid to use technology to tackle the issue, but financing is a key challenge for the budding industry.
Ernest Layman, CEO of waste management start-up Rekosistem, said that, while innovation was crucial to scale up such a business, few investors were interested in funding recycling start-ups.
“Most investors do not believe that ESG [environmental, social and governance] start-ups are the right sector to invest in right now, and that has become a challenge,” he said during a webinar hosted by the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA) on Tuesday.
“Impact [investing] in Southeast Asia is also limited, and [investors] demand more in terms of business size and other metrics than tech investors do,” Ernest added.
Founded in 2018, Rekosistem has received US$70,000 from undisclosed angel investors, according to data from tech media platform e27.
Ernest said the company was developing a “reverse vending machine” that collected plastic beverage bottles and, using machine learning, identified the brand as well as type of plastic used to make plastic waste collection more efficient.
Another waste management start-up, Gringgo, received a grant of $500,000 from Google’s nonprofit arm Google.org in 2019 to develop an app using artificial intelligence (AI) to identify recyclable waste and its sales value.
