Interview with Suwar Mert of Bower on How He Saw the Potential to Recycle at Grocery Stores

Hello and welcome to this episode of Conscious Design. I'm your host, Ian Peterman, and author of the book Conscious Design. And with me today, I have Suar Murt. He's the founder and CEO of Bower. They're a certified B Corporation rewarding people for recycling their used packaging. Welcome to the show.

Thanks a lot, Ian, and thanks for having me on the show.

Yeah, so we can all recycle our packaging a bit more, and you're working to make that something that incentivizes people to actually do that. I'd love for you to start with how did you start this company? I know we talked before, there's a little bit of an evolution to getting to where you are right now, so I'd love you to dive into that and how you came to this one.

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I mean, I usually say that we have started out 3 companies within this company since we have been pivoting a few times, but it actually started back in 2015 where I had an idea of like, how do I solve the problem with all this reusable cotton bags that I had, but I never brought them to the grocery stores. So I always forgot to bring them to the stores, so I ended up buying another one. So I was like, how, how can I actually stop buying these, uh, these reusable bags but also bring them back, all of the ones that I have bought? Because I had a bunch of them, and I think that a lot of people do have them at home, but A lot of us also forget to bring them to grocery stores with us. So with that in mind, and also that here in the Nordics, in Sweden, we actually have an awesome deposit system for PET bottles and cans. We are really great at that.

Oh, wow.

So we have these big reverse vending machines where you pay a deposit fee for your PET bottle, and when you go back to the store and put it into the machine, you receive it back. your cash. So with that in mind, I thought, why not implement or try to sell into the grocery stores a deposit system for their, um, or for a cotton, uh, for these cotton bags? And, um, I have a background as a vehicle engineering, uh, and worked 5 years as a head of sales. So I would say like in the beginning, 2015, when I ended my job, I was quite naive, very ambitious, a lot of visions and thought like I come here with a solution to these big grocery stores, they will definitely hop on. But that wasn't the case, of course. At the end of the day, I would say it comes to numbers.

Right.

And when pitching this idea of having a deposit system for you can call it returnable system, deposit system, but an incentive for the consumer to— when they buy their cotton bags, they bring it back, they get their cash back. And the thing was that here in Sweden, there— the grocery stores' best product that they sell and where they had the best margin was to sell plastic bags.

Oh.

So this was something that I didn't know about, so I was like going into the meetings being quite naive, but after a while we understood that this— for them to actually hop onto such a solution and disregard from, how do you say, from the profit that they have, that would take quite a long time.

Right. Yeah, I would never have guessed that that was a huge margin product at all either.

Yeah, I mean, they, they, the grocery stores today, they maybe have like 5%, 5% margin, uh, 5-10% margin. And imagine then where you, uh, you pay, you buy a plastic bag where it's maybe they pay it for maybe 1 cent And then they sell it for 20 cents, 25 cents. So it's a huge margin and they sell a lot of it.

Right, right. At least one to every customer.

Exactly. So I mean, so you go back as an entrepreneur, you go back and see, okay, how can this be solved? So then we came up with our first pivoting. Making a deposit system for the groceries existing bag. So there were no new cotton bag. It was more like, okay guys, you have plastic bags. Let's make sure that these plastic bags doesn't end up as litter, and also they don't end up in the trash bin. Let's have a deposit system for them so that they come back and can be recycled in a like in a more. in a flow where it's not mixed with other materials, because then it's much easier to recycle if you have a clean flow and not mixed materials.

Right, right.

So this idea worked out in sense of we managed to do a pilot with a company.

Okay.

And it worked simply as you go to your store, You, you buy your plastic bag, you pay for it, a deposit fee, but when you come back to the store, you give it to the cashier and you receive your deposit fee. So we did that for approximately 9 months, uh, and we started pitching to more and more stores. We got a lot of publication publicity here in Sweden, but what happened was that of one of Sweden's biggest pharmacy, pharmaceutical company, they just reached out saying, guys, this is a really great idea, but we don't want to handle any plastic bags at the stores because you never know if they smell, what has been in them, and so forth. So once again, as an entrepreneur, you go back and say, okay, deposit system works. They like it. How do we solve this? And that was actually at that point where we came up with this current solution, a digital solution with our app, which made it possible for us to not only give a deposit fee or a deposit value for plastic bag, but for all packages out there.

Right.

We developed our app, made it now possible for consumers to recycle their packages. It could be their ketchup bottle, their plastic bags, everything with the barcode that is dropped off wherever they should be dropped off. We give the consumers a value for doing that. So that is what we have done with Bower, and the name Bower It comes from the bowerbird, the Australian bowerbird, which is a bird that sorts trash into different colors.

Oh, awesome. That's super cool.

That is, that is like how I'll go from a deposit system for reusable cotton bags ending up now having an app that made our solution much more scalable. But also much more profitable for us as well, but also solving, taking the solution that we had for plastic bags but implemented that for all types of packages out there.

Right. So now when you're using this system, do you need buy-in from, let's say, the manufacturer? Kind of who all has to be involved to To make it so that I can take the packaging in? Is it only certain brands of products packaging that you can turn in, or are you able to say, yeah, we don't— we'll take, we'll take anybody's packaging as long as you can scan it?

Yeah, I mean, very good question. So how it works for the consumer, because we are, we are very consumer-oriented in sense of everything starts with the consumer, because if you don't have the consumer doing this action there is no value bringing for the brands. And when I mean brands, I mean it could be Heinz, it could be L'Oréal, it could be Unilever, P&G, Walmart, whoever that puts a product on the market that has a package.

Okay.

So how it works is that the consumer, they are able to scan everything with a barcode. They never need to think about, okay, who, who is connected to Bauer? They never need to think about that.

Okay.

But how the revenue streams work for us as a company is that we have connected brands, connected brands that pay us a yearly licensing fee. And these connected brands, as we have in Sweden, Nordics, are some of the brands for— sub-brands for Unilever. We have P&G, Procter Gamble, L'Oréal, Kiehl's, And so forth. So the sub-brands are paying per market, per brand, a yearly licensing fee, and in return they are getting a sustainability report where we can say to them, these are the packages that has been recycled, these are the areas that they, they have been recycled. Because the thing is that today these brands are putting a lot of money, a lot of money behind making sure that Their packages is 100% recyclable, right? But they didn't know. They don't know where they actually end up.

Yeah, they don't even know if it even gets recycled.

Exactly.

It's a mystery.

Exactly. And they are putting a lot of money behind this because they have also understood that they need to make sure that not taking responsibility for their products and packages. until the product has been sold. Because that has been the focus until today. Like making sure that, let us say, the shampoo that has been produced in one country and then the package, the bottle, the shampoo bottle, the only function that has is to make sure that it's not contaminated, making sure that these products travel from, let us say, Belgium to Sweden. So that has been the functionality of the, of the bottle. And after that, you have used all your shampoo, it goes from having a value to not having a value at all.

Right, right.

So what we at Bauer want to do is making sure that that journey of the value chain continues until the product is recycled, because it actually has a value.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So what we want to do is making sure that the consumers are getting something for doing this action, making sure that they end up in the right bin, making sure that the consumer get recycling instructions in the app. Because one of the main hassles today is also that the consumer, it's very hard for them to know how to recycle depending on where they are. Because let us be honest, it differs. It could be that in, in a certain area you should put it in the blue bin, and then 500 meters to the, to another side is now yellow bin, and it's confusing, right? And we already have a lot of things to do, right? We have already, like, you have to get the kids, you need to cook, you need to get your kids from the football practice, whatever it could be. And on top of that, you, you want to do something good as a consumer, but it's too difficult. So we at Bower, we want to bridge that, bridge that, but by making it fun and rewarding to recycle your package. So it's, it's about like giving— when the consumer scans, as I mentioned, that you get the recycling instruction depending on where you are. I mean, we don't have our own recycling bins or anything. We just pinpoint the already existing bins depending on the market. So the app senses when you are close to an approved station, you're able to scan it, the barcode of your package, and you're rewarded with Bauer points. And with these Bauer points, you're able to redeem vouchers, discount. When you have 100 points, you are able to redeem €2. And you're able to actually donate these to charities or withdraw this cash to your bank account. So it's a lot of things working around how can we incent to give the consumers the incentive to actually giving these packages a value.

Right. And so you're, so you're really providing value across the whole chain then and basically post-consumer. portion of— if we're trying to create a circular economy, we— you're closing this gap here between the consumer has used it, now the company, the businesses and brands actually know what happens to their packaging, so they can maybe even change their efforts, put different, you know, information on it, somehow guide that journey a little bit better. And you're able to reward the consumer for Finally being able to put it in the right bin at the right spot.

Exactly.

And actually recycle, because that's a huge thing in the US is nobody— a lot of people don't recycle because they're like, well, I don't know which— where it goes, which one is recyclable, which one do you put where. It's, um, yeah, very complicated.

Definitely. And it's actually— I would say it's a lot of countries out there that have even more complicated than you have in United States. So, but I think that also some of the listeners out there may think that, okay, but I, I do recycle, but what happens? Or like this, I put my package in the, uh, in the right bin today, so, but what happens, they may think, is that the package is not being recycled, it ends up in the landfills or whatever it could be.

Yeah. And That's definitely a concern.

Yeah, so, so many— maybe some of the listeners are thinking, okay, so why should I use the Bower app if the product is still not being recycled? It's a totally— it's a valid question. And, and our hypothesis here is that one of the main reasons that packages or products materials are not being recycled more than they are today is that Not enough is being collected because you have to—

It's a volume issue. Yeah.

So in order to have a buyer, let us say, let us say you have a brand out there that want to shift towards having recycled material in their products, but they are not able to shift that in their facilities because they don't have any steady flow of materials coming in.

Oh yeah, okay.

So what we want at Bauer is that it differs, of course, from country to country. There are some countries where they— the product, they have an infrastructure to make sure that they are recycled. So we have those countries to make sure that more products ends up in the right bin, so more products is being recycled. Then we have countries that they don't have any recycling infrastructure because not enough is being collected. So what we want to do is to increase these collection rates so that the facilities, the, the, the companies that exist out there, they see a value of actually making sure or changing their facility because they now see that, okay, Bauer is now actually making sure that more product is being collected. So now we can actually shift Making sure, right, products has been recycled, right?

There's enough material you can actually say, yeah, we're gonna get at least X amount of pounds of this a month and be able to turn on a recycling line, basically. And that makes sense when you think— it's not— I never thought about it that way, but it definitely makes sense if you're recycling. If you can't get enough material, it's You're just wasting a bunch of space with unused equipment and resources. But when you— and yeah, that's an interesting way to think about it. I hadn't thought about recycling as— but it is, it's the product. It's the input to another— to the recycling industry is that you need that recyclable trash to actually do your job.

Exactly. And the thing is that I would say that It's not the consumer's fault. It's not mine or your fault that we don't know about it, because the thing is that as long as it's, how do you say, more profitable for, for companies to actually buy virgin material, they will always continue doing that. And they will stop doing that either if the consumers pressure them too much, if the raw material becomes too expensive Right. Or you get either tax or—

Right, some kind of regulation.

Yeah.

Government steps in and says, no, you can't. Exactly.

And let us be honest, do we want to wait to that type of shifts? Do we want to wait until we have like the brands on one side pushing towards one side and the regulatory or tax pay—

No, that takes forever. Lobbying is just slow.

So that is what we want to make sure, like, let us give the broader mass of people, because we have enormous power as consumer, we have enormous power in order to push the brands in order to make, like, changes in making sure that they have recyclable, more recyclable material in their products. And that could be done if, if we make sure to give the consumers an incentive, start using that, have been able to, to show to the brands that, guys, millions of packages is being recycled, dropped off at the right bin. Here is the statistics, here are the data showing that. So let us move towards making sure that we, we use less virgin material and more of, of, of the material that we have already produced.

Yeah, it's created because there's not really a clean path right now, but you're creating— or sometimes there's a path, we just don't— we're just not taking it because we don't know. So it's really just saying, hey, here's the path, here's what you need to do with it, here's your— and I love the fact that you're putting value to it because it is It's not that the material becomes worthless the second you empty your shampoo bottle. It's still material. It still has value if you reuse it. But if you don't get it in the right spot, then nobody can reuse it. Nobody can recycle it.

Exactly.

This is great. This is impressive. So I'd love to Kind of wrapping things up, where do you want to go with this? Like, what is your long-term vision with this? I know you're expanding, looking to expand into more countries, of course, but kind of just what's your more grand plan for taking this forward?

I mean, we recently opened up the app for the UK, and actually end of this month, we will be launching in LA together with one of the world's biggest Kiwi product provider, Sesprit, where we're going to do a pilot in LA. And I would say these are— we want to make sure that all packages out there have a value. We want to make sure that nothing more is called trash.

Yeah.

And we started off this, our idea with packages. But we want to be able to— we want to make sure that the Bower app becomes the infrastructure, becomes the, uh, the infrastructure that makes sure that everything that can have a value, that should have a value, are able to, to be connected to our platform, uh, and make sure that more products is being recycled. So you should be able to have a deposit system for electronics, for furnitures, for textiles. We want to give all, despite the category. It could, as I mentioned, it could be everything. Everything that should have a value should be able to be connected to the Bower platform. But also on the long run, I mean, we want to make sure that it's a lot of people out there, poor people, collecting packages, and they— it's, it's a lot of middle people, middlehand people that takes most of the money. So we have kids in poor countries collecting a lot of packages, plastic, papers, whatever, and, and they are not getting the, the reward for that. It's the middlehand. So how can we, with our app, making sure that the people that does the work actually get paid for that. And that can be done through our platform, that can be done with the Bower app.

And yeah, that was a, that was a thought I had, because especially LA, there's— we're a favorite place for homeless. So, and, and if you can give a way to make money— I mean, cans used to be— cans are a thing you can collect and recycle, but that's the only thing that's worth anything. Really?

Exactly.

But expanding that makes it all of a sudden, now that it's trash gets picked up, people get paid for the work, it's— that's a pretty good, pretty good cycle there.

Yeah, I mean, get cash for trash. That, that— and the thing is, the thing is here, we— I mean, the— we people, we know what the solution is for the problems out there. Yeah, me too. But we have so much on our agenda, we have so much things to do, so we're like, ah, let someone else solve the problem. We know, for instance, that if people are able to work, they will come in and contribute to the society. But the problem with the challenge with a lot of homeless people is that no one wants to give them a chance. They may have ended up being homeless for different type of things, that is a whole nother thing, but how can we let them into the society? So imagine then if we were able to give them work with Bauer. Let us say municipalities, municipalities is today paying a lot of money to clean, to clean up the streets.

Yeah.

What if the homeless people can instead do the cleaning get not necessarily cash back because let us say people are maybe aware and afraid of they may use it for things that they shouldn't, let us say the cash back, so they could at least get using these Bauer points in order to get a free meal because they have cleaned the streets. So it's a very easy way to give people work but also making sure that it's clean. Because when a society is clean, a lot of— how do you say— investigation is showing that also a society that is clean, the— how do you say— you see less criminals, you see less— a lot of other problems that occurs on societies where it's not clean. The people don't feel themselves safe. Because if it's not—

Right.

So there are a lot of benefits that you can actually get by interacting a lot of different, let's say, the homeless people, the municipalities. So on the long run, the Bowers vision is making sure that we become a platform helping people out there, helping societies out there, making sure that we take this knowledge regarding the digitalization to also the package world or to the textile world, but making sure that all of these products ends up and being recycled when they're used.

Right.

Because I think that both me and you, Ian, we can agree that we maybe have phones that we don't use anymore that we have in our drawer, or we have some electronics that we don't use, but We don't want to, like, maybe we don't know where we should drop them off in order to be recycled. So, and the same goes for textile. We have, at least I know that I have a bunch of clothes at home which I can't use anymore for different reasons. And what if they had a value so that I can actually bring them back? And get rewarded for doing that.

Right. Yeah, this is great. I mean, this is— I definitely see a lot of long-term benefit for this, for Bower growing, which is awesome. I think it's great you've done this and you've gotten traction, which is even more important, right? It's not only do you have a good idea, but people like the idea and they're saying yes to it. And that's always a challenge.

Yeah, I mean, it has been quite a lot of work. I know that in the beginning for us to even have on board our first customer, the sales cycle was almost 1, 1.5 years. Today, yeah, today we are like closing into 200 companies being connected to our platform. We have brands such as Dove, We have Fairy Bottle, we— Kiehl's, L'Oréal, Unilever, Procter Gamble. These brands are now connected to the platform in the Nordics with the sub-brands. We have today, our users are scanning more than 2 million packages a month.

So many, so many, but so few. I know there's more. There's so much more. Exactly.

And we just like, we're just, I would say, in the beginning of our journey. And this is the small Nordic, small Sweden. So the vision is to make sure to implement and take this solution all around the world, making sure that everything has a value because it has a value.

It does. It does. Well, this has been amazing. Before we wrap up, I want to give you the operator's opportunity to share your guys' website, how people can get ahold of you, if brands want to work with you, kind of what's the best way, and any last thoughts you want to leave everyone listening?

Yeah, I mean, we are, as I said, launching in UK, we're opening up the app in United States, and the easiest way is to just visit our website, www.get bowwer.com, and Bowwer is spelled B-O-W-E-R.

Amazing.

So just visit the website, reach out to us, and we'll help out. So if you're a brand that wants to take a greater responsibility for your package, if you want to make sure that you know more about who is consuming your products, because The greatest asset that the brands today have is their brand, and that is given away to their retailers. So let's give back the power both to the brands but also to the consumers.

Amazing. Amazing. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate you taking time out of your day to talk about what you're doing and share this. And definitely anyone listening, do check them out. They're doing some amazing stuff.

Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot for a great show as well, Ian, and, uh, thanks for having me.

Yeah, appreciate it.