(L-R) Waste Labs co-founders Dr. Elias Willemse (CTO) and Vladimir Chuchkin (CEO)
Waste management — an unromantic topic — is often a neglected but critical environmental service.
Organisations and smart cities collect and analyse waste and recycling data to improve their service performance and profitability. Many of them have invested million of dollars in waste management technologies, such as sensor technologies, radio frequency identification (RFID) and software systems, which help in collecting operational data.
However, there still remains a gap in analysing and extracting actionable insights from this data and using it to improve waste collection, recycling, pricing, performance and sustainability.
Two Singapore-based entrepreneurs Vladimir Chuchkin and Dr. Elias Willemse are determined to bridge this gap using new-age tech tools.
“Waste Labs runs a proprietary Artificial Intelligence platform that helps waste management companies and cities to build and operate sustainable waste collection and recycling,” said Chuchkin.
Both Chuchkin and Willemse have many years of working experience in the waste management industry.
Willemse spent 12 years doing his R&D in advanced analytical methods (Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Optimisation Modelling) to improve waste management. Chuchkin, on the other hand, had hands-on experience structuring and implementing complex energy projects including waste-to-energy plants.
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The two met at Entrepreneurs First, a programme that helps entrepreneurs find co-founders, in Singapore. They spent hours discussing how their experience could be turned into a scalable and sustainable business, and eventually conceptualised Waste Labs.
How Waste Labs works
The startup uses data and AI to address the four main elements of waste collection:
- Identifying and analysing new customers (waste producers),
- Selecting optimal resources and scenarios to collect their waste,
- Analysing performance and profitability of existing waste collection operations,
- Improving resources and routes to gain maximum cost efficiency for the collection business.
“We start with building a ‘Digital Twin’ of the area. In a sense, it is a digital map of all the city’s waste and waste infrastructure. You can use it for visualising and modelling many different activities around waste management and recycling,” Chuchkin explained.
For instance, in Singapore, the startup combined over 20 different datasets to identify and map all the waste and recyclable producers, population attributes, infrastructure relevant to the waste management, road networks, etc.
“The next step is that we run our AI to calculate what we will need to collect the waste or recyclables in a new area. Our platform will advise on the number of routes, type of trucks and number of crew to service that particular area in a cost-effective manner,” he added.
Chuchkin further said it takes only a few minutes for Waste Labs to generate a collection scenario for more than 100,000 service points. “Such speed allows us to generate and test over 100 collection scenarios within a week. The Digital Twin is helpful to imagine how the future system will perform in real time.”
Waste Labs’s planning, he went on, is “13x faster” in comparison to the traditional pen-and-paper routing and typically allows you to use at least 10 per cent less resources.
Once the collection of waste and recyclables commence, the collector can further use the online platform to analyse and improve the collection performance. The collector is not required to install any special devices, but rely on their GPS records which are already available.
“We use AI again to decode and visualise how exactly they collect the waste, build the benchmarks and spot early operational inefficiencies. With these insights, the waste management or recycling company may opt to fine-tune their collection plan with the help of our platform and improve their efficiency and profits,” he elucidated.
Since its inception in May 2020, Waste Labs has implemented projects with a few major industry players in Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia. One of its first clients was ALBA W&H Smart City — a joint venture of the German ALBA Group that provides waste collection and recycling services around the world.
As per Chuchkin, over 40 per cent of the world’s waste and recyclables are not collected, and it ends up polluting environment. Besides, the increasing scale and complexity of collection operations are slashing profit margins of the service providers. Waste management companies and cities strive to build data-driven operations but are limited in tools to extract actionable insight from their data.
Waste Labs’s services can be used by governments, municipalities and private companies, or anyone looking to understand their waste infrastructure better, analyse their performance, innovate and improve their waste processes, minimise carbon footprint, or reduce costs associated with waste collection.
“Today”, he maintained, “it goes beyond the traditional waste management companies; even businesses and manufacturers are forced to focus on end-of-life of their goods.”
Globally, the total addressable market (TAM) for waste management is US$4.7 billion. The Southeast Asian portion of it is approximately US$2 billion.
When quizzed about the company’s geographical expansion plans, he remarked that it aims to take the business to other parts of Southeast Asia.
“Of course, since Waste Labs was founded in Singapore, we are focusing on the markets that surround us. But the best part about our solution is that it can work anywhere. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the world’s most advanced economy, or one of the poorest/remote provinces of Southeast Asia, our platform can produce equally great results for any part of the world,” he said.
It also works for different types of waste — plastic, food, electronic or the most common municipal waste. What matters is the focus of the client on operational efficiency and sustainability.
“One of our aspirations is to be able to help countries, which are struggling to establish proper waste collection systems, plan comprehensive full-cycle projects where waste is collected and recycled or turned into electricity. From our experience, for this to happen, it’s not the technology but is the Data that is the Holy Grail,” he shared.
A lean team, Waste Labs currently employs only four people, including the founders.
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Although the company was founded in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, the pandemic had no impact on the startup’s initial growth. However, several challenges remain, one being the long sales cycle.
As for the revenue models, the company banks on several streams, including subscription and one-time fee. The fees range depending on the territory covered and the fleet size.
“We believe we have a robust technology, so we received positive reactions from the market very early in the journey, which resulted in our ability to generate revenues starting from the third month of our operations. Currently, the scope of our initial contracts keeps expanding, and we are looking to get the funding to further accelerate that trend,” he said.
A bootstrapped venture, Waste Labs is now working to close its seed round to fuel its product and sales growth. Chuchkin revealed that the startup has already received commitments from some investors and is looking for one or two more.
“Meanwhile, we are always looking for like-minded data scientists and software engineers to join us on a mission to shape a sustainable environment and make the smart cities’ waste management systems more efficient,” he concluded.
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Image Credit: Waste Labs
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