Emmanual Tay, CEO/Co-Founder, Circular Unite
Following its participation in the UOB FinLab’s GreenTech Accelerator 2024 programme, Circular Unite has secured pilot projects with UOB and its corporate partners. According to Emmanual Tay, CEO/Co-Founder at Circular Unite, this helps to validate the company’s solutions.
“For green tech in general, there is going to be a huge, rapid growth, especially in Southeast Asia (SEA) as more regulations trickled down from Europe and the US,” he tells e27.
“Many of these companies operating within SEA are part of the supply chain of larger entities from Europe and the US; that is where we will see more demand for solutions like ours.”
With a team based mostly in Singapore, Circular Unite helps businesses transition towards sustainability by focusing on the waste and recyclables they generate.
In this interview, Tay explains the unique challenges faced by the company in promoting its green tech solutions and how it is tackling them.
Also Read: Funding the green transition: Southeast Asia’s climate tech leaders of 2024
The following is an edited excerpt of the conversation.
What is the problem that your company aims to tackle with your solution, and why is your solution better than your alternative?
Our vision is to accelerate businesses’ transition towards profitable sustainability. We do that by empowering them with a data-driven solution that helps transform their waste and recycling activities into profitable and sustainable practices.
So, the problem that we are tackling in this space is that we address the lack of digitalisation in the waste management and recycling space, basically the fermented nature of the recycling processes and operations across various industries and various countries and regions as well.
Traditionally, waste and recycling processes are very manual and low-tech in nature. They are prone to human error and lack transparency and traceability, making it very difficult for businesses to track and report their waste streams accurately. It becomes increasingly evident that no such data needs to be transparent and that there needs to be a trust process in these predominantly traditional activities.
As a green tech startup operating in SEA, what challenges do you face in promoting this solution and convincing businesses that it is something they should be using?
Green tech, in general, is a relatively new space. In the past, there was not much focus on this area. But now, more than ever, there are many solutions [available in the market] because of regulations and compliance, as well as push from consumers and stakeholders.
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In our context in the waste management and recycling business, many companies are still relying on traditional and manual processes, and some of them may be hesitant to adopt new technologies. So, what we do is that for a lot of the companies, when we first started, we had to come up with proof-of-concepts (POCs) and pilot projects.
The POC and pilot projects demonstrate to them the actual ROI and the efficiency gained through all these data.
The next [challenge] will be, again, with waste and recycling being a very traditional business, there is not much data available for us to analyse. So, when I say my platform helps analyse waste data, we need data to begin with, right? We overcome this by helping our clients integrate some of these sensors into their activities.
This is a modular and scalable platform that can be easily connected to various equipment and systems already in place. Whatever infrastructure they have, our platform sits on top of it to help sensorise and provide that layer of data collection and analysis.
Lastly, there needs to be a lot of education and awareness so that people can understand this concept of waste digitalisation.
What are the barriers to your clients’ adoption of this technology?
ROI and cost-benefit analysis are things that they look at very often. So, with a new technology like this, it is very hard for them to compare and see, “Oh, how would adopting a solution like this help me save money or increase my manpower?”
Yes, there are companies that want to be the first to move, the first to try new things, but those are rare.
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What kind of organisations most of your clients are?
Currently, most of my clients are in the hospitality space: hotels, shopping malls, retail spaces, and manufacturers.
All industries generate waste and recyclables, so the question is which industry has the most problems managing them.
We also have a lot of inquiries from the healthcare and cultural industry as well.
What are your big plans for next year?
Partnerships will be the centre of our growth strategy.
We do have ongoing projects regarding scalability, and our plan is to scale our services and solutions not just in Singapore but also in Malaysia and Thailand.
In Malaysia, we will work with property owners like Sunway to help scale up our solution. In Thailand, we will work with the Central Group as well as some key manufacturers within the country. Then, in Singapore, we will continue to work with our hospitality stakeholders and onboard more hotel chains into this space.
We also have three ongoing projects with UOB FinLab GTA and are with the BSI Innovation Accelerator.
We are also building what we call the Circular Knowledge Library. It basically aggregates benchmarks, data, best practices, and industry know-how from various sectors and countries across different companies and industries.
Currently, there is no unified platform that helps share or aggregate this information across various companies and industries, and we want to be the first in the market to have this.
Together with our AI capability, we will harness information from this Knowledge Library to provide alerts and customisable recommendations for different clients. This will allow them to benchmark their current performance.
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Image Credit: Circular Unite
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