E097 - Nick Rawkins from Reconome

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Nick, welcome to the Green Element Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. Nick, you work for a company called Reconomy. And would it be possible if you tell us a bit about you and the organization you work for?

Got it. It's a pleasure to be on, Will. So I think the easiest way to describe Reconomy is we work mainly with businesses. We also work with households, but our focus at the moment is on businesses, and we help them manage the lifecycle of their IT equipment. in a very sustainable way. And then we help them measure and report on this positive impact. How I got started was I used to work for a bank. And I mean, the amount of IT equipment, you know, just the sheer amount of kit that I had probably used in the 8 years that I had that I was working there, you know, could fill a truck or something. It was just, you know, oh, this doesn't work. Here's a new keyboard. You know, there's a new PC out, so we're going to replace it. I mean, you know, there's no real even awareness of what was going on until you take a step back. Obviously, now I'm not in that industry, it's a lot easier. But so there was this kind of idea of e-waste. Now, obviously, I think it's quite timely. I think we all, you know, as soon as you hear e-waste, you've probably got some kind of an image of like, you know, a junk pile and a burning pile of cables, you know, in some African country where it does so often end up. So that's always been the driving purpose to build a business, build a commercial model around solving Global e-waste, but I think what has always been intriguing as part of that is creating the right system with the right incentives so that we permanently change our behavior for the better. Just another point I think worth mentioning is like so many of our problems, you know where. there is an acute shortage or there are a group of people who are missing out, and in this case it would be technological poverty. And I think what's been unfortunate but also pretty eye-opening during the COVID crisis is that actually even within the UK, there are so many people who actually lack connectivity, be it smartphone or even just having a computer in the household. And obviously, you know, students have been forced to work, you know, study from home. They can't communicate with their teachers. So I think there are various initiatives to try and resolve that, but a lot of it is kind of a bandage-type solution where obviously you can resolve some of the acute shortages, but ultimately you're still relying on the inherent system which has caused these, you know, a mismanagement. if you will, or the imbalance. So we are trying to resolve the surplus of good quality working equipment that businesses so often have and they're readily getting rid of, but then that most of the time gets treated as waste. And then on the other hand, we're trying to solve the shortage of equipment for small businesses, households, schools, those sorts of groups of people. who can't really afford the newest and best equipment.

And correct me if I'm wrong, that's largely refurbished, what people class as refurbished items, isn't it?

Yes, yes. So I mean, it's the most sustainable way that you can manage this equipment. So we refurbish equipment that we collect from businesses and make sure that it is in a reusable, like close to like-new state, and then we resell it or donate it.

Okay, and I really want to carry on this discussion about refurbishing, but I'm really curious to find out how a person who worked in a bank ended up in the IT industry. You must have had some kind of interest in IT, or was it literally, wow, I've gone through loads of kit, I'm gonna, you know, what made you change?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I always get asked that question. Yeah, I mean, I wasn't that kid, you know, who grew up with, you know, getting a strange tan from screen radiation, you know, being holed up writing code or anything. I kind of knowing the success of so many people who did do that, I probably, you know, would do things differently. But, um, I, I think that the main parallel to what I was doing previously is, you know, being very close to a market. Yeah, I was a trader in the bank, and, you know, you're buying and selling, and you have— every time a transaction happens, you have one party that thinks something's overvalued, so they want to get rid of it. You have another party that thinks it's undervalued, and then you have a transaction. So it's obviously slightly different, but you have a middleman, which is what Reconomy is trying to become, to facilitate the efficient functioning of this kind of market to resolve shortages and surpluses. So I think that's really the parallel. I think The reason why there's so much focus on electronics is because there's really no effective solution. You know, this is a very valuable or potentially really valuable waste stream that is treated as waste and not as an asset. So I think that's really our particular— my particular fascination and really the trigger for focusing on electronics.

And people talk about— you're talking about the value in it. People talk about gold and minerals being inside the— on the motherboards, or— you can tell I'm not massively techie within this, but is that true?

So there was a big report published last year by I think it was the UN. And there's a working group that's obviously looking at all these climate issues. And it was pretty— it was a pretty landmark report and it's super widely quoted. And so there's a figure in there of about, I think the material value of e-waste is $50 billion a year, which is obviously pretty massive. But my point to that is actually that's literally a minute fraction of the amount of value that could be had if you were reusing this equipment. And I think there's really— we are creating, we are sowing the seeds for the problems that exist today by calling it waste, when in fact it should be treated more like an asset.

Yeah. Yeah, it's funny you say that. We— I have argued quite a lot in the past with environmental auditors, because they come into our organizations and they look at what we have managed to do with the, say, IT department and managed to get them to not send their waste to landfill, but get it to be refurbished and send it off to different organizations, of which, of course, you'll be one of them now. These auditors still wanted to call it waste because it was easier for them to classify it as waste from a legal point of view and from an auditing point of view than to see us selling it, even though we were selling it. And because the legal definition is fairly ambiguous, Absolutely. And pretty subjective. We got into sometimes quite, quite good arguments about that, and I would always stand by, no, we don't need a waste carrier's licence, we don't need to have a consignment note because we're not— it's not waste. We are not classing it as waste. What you class it as, totally up to you, Mr. Auditor, but you ain't us. We are the company. And it really annoyed me, that whole classification. And I think— and I've never thought about it before, but you've just hit the nail on the head, the fact that it's called e-waste.

Yeah, yeah. And I'm very, very familiar with the arguments that you've just mentioned. And we're absolutely on the same side as you on this. And I think it really doesn't help that there isn't clearer guidance. I understand that there are many unscrupulous players and that the law is probably trying to avoid any unintended negative consequences, but equally it's preventing the possible upside here.

Because I mean, where do you draw the line? Because the consignment note adds bureaucracy to a potentially very easy situation to solve. And the minute you start to put that kind of barrier in place, you take the driver away and the company is there to perform that particular business. And if you start to put financial barriers in place, because they do become financial barriers by putting a consignment note into it, the company is less likely to do good and is actually less likely to want to get rid of their secondhand products to have them refurbished.

Yeah, agreed. I think so much of— I think this idea of friction is always on my mind. And I think, like we were speaking about earlier, but so much of successful business is about removing friction for the people that you want to do business with. And ultimately, I think there's so much pressure these days to perform. There are so many competing priorities that as soon as, you know, something doesn't fit into your, you know, direct focus business line, then, you know, you're taking away resources from what, you know, so often your shareholders or other stakeholders are demanding, and it becomes a distraction. So I think there's real value if you're going to You know, offer a service to somebody, then to make sure that it removes those hurdles so that they can most easily do what you want them to, which is, you know, hopefully in line with something with positive impact.

What do you do in situations like that?

Where, for example, an auditor gets in between?

Yeah, I mean, how do you— I'm interested because I know a lot of people listening to this podcast will be really interested in probably this discussion because it is fairly appropriate to pretty much any company that has ISO 14001, 50001, or any type of auditive management system.

We can only be as explicit as we can about our process, and I think, you know, we've tried very hard to be extremely detailed in our reporting. So it literally goes to the device level when we record What, you know, what we have received, what condition it was in, what happened to it. And so there's a lot of traceability, which I think, you know, provides a lot of evidence. And, you know, so much of this is evidence-based. So it's very easy for us to argue that our process is entirely focused on reuse. There is a very small amount of waste that we produce, and even that is recycled.

Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. What would you say your— kind of completely changing the subject, but what would you say your business superpower was at Rickonomy?

Well, I mean, you know, we're still very much at the beginning of our journey, right? We're still constantly iterating, we're constantly learning, and the impact that we have set out to make is still Of course, we've worked with great businesses and we continue to expand on that. But I think so much of it is ahead of where we are today. But I think we've always— and it does tie into what I was speaking about before about friction. But I think it is admitting to ourselves that e-waste is a concern, and given the option, everybody would want to do good. But it's all about removing barriers like additional costs, an additional burden in terms of people's time, you know, the potential risk to management of taking— doing something that isn't second nature and maybe screwing up and then having that negatively reflect on them. So we've really tried to make our service as end-to-end as possible. And I think what's unique about our approach is that we also include the measuring, so the evaluation, the assessment component of the sustainability of what we're doing. It's very transparent and we show the positive impact that we've had. And then it's also a bit of a roadmap so that we can have subsequent actions and build a sort of longer-term relationship out of that.

And one of the reasons why we've ended up talking to each other is you've recently become a B Corp. So congratulations on that. That's really, really, really good news. And moving on from there, I just want to find out how you engage your staff, suppliers, customers with your mission and purpose? And if you've got any tips on that, please.

Our team is amazing. And I think, of course, the idea was mine in the beginning, but realistically, none of this would have happened without them. It's really encouraging to see everybody really motivated by the cause. So it's not I don't think of it as anything that we have to sort of hammer in or instill or really work hard to make people appreciate. I think it's quite clear from the get-go, potentially, you know, the employment would have never even happened had we not had our purpose. So I think that so much of who we are sits on top of that. I think in terms of building a team, what we naturally focus on is finding or surrounding ourselves with people with integrity. And I think the attitude of wanting to improve is a, you know, is a fantastic one. And everybody who's part of the team, I think, has those 2 basic things. And I think in terms of how we structure roles, we try to be attentive to where, you know, people's individual roadmaps and where they see themselves going and just making sure the content of the work is consistent and that it's going to get everybody to where they want to be in, you know, 5 years or 10 years or wherever, whether that's at Rokonomy or somewhere else.

And when it comes to running an ethical and sustainable business, what would you say has been the biggest struggle so far? And can you tell us a bit about how you've overcome it?

Yeah, I think it's definitely knowledge. I didn't come into this business or I didn't start this business from an extensive background in sustainability. So filling that knowledge gap, there's always your ambition versus what you know. And I wanted to fill that gap as quickly as possible. I've been doing along with the team, you know, a ton of research. It's a lot of conversations, a lot of rejection, a lot of rethinking, going back to the board. And through that process, I think we've really come up with a service that does go a long way towards solving this problem in a sort of systemically important way. At least it creates the sort of framework or foundation for that. And we find ourselves at a stage when we can really scale, or our focus is on scaling what we've come up with.

Hmm.

You know, we ultimately need businesses to be motivated to work with us on this journey. I think the other thing is, you know, like so many things, and this is clearly not just limited to sustainable business, but how do you get maximum output with the limited resources that you have. And I think that comes down to focus. An interesting— I don't know where it came from, to be honest, but an interesting insight is, you know, if we could think hard about the top 3 things that we should be doing today and then do them, and we repeated that every day, then I really do feel like we'd be much better off as a species and we'd probably be a lot happier as well. I think we're so prone to distraction. We've almost created a society where entertainment and a lot of these things are created to literally distract us. And it's quite hard sometimes to stay grounded.

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with that. And I do— I wonder if And at this very moment in time, more people are feeling more grounded in some ways because they've not needed to travel as much and not needed to disappear as much. Yeah.

Well, I think it's really encouraging that we are seeing, you know, it is a moment with a lot of suffering, both emotional, you know, I guess, uh, Obviously, a lot of people have had people that they know, friends, family suffering from, you know, this disease. And equally, there's a lot of economic damage. And I think it's encouraging that despite all of that damage, we are still able to focus on positive outcomes and positive direction. And this talk of having economic stimulus tied to green initiatives and, you know, a lot of kind of outcry against traffic and having cars polluting and encouraging bicycle commuting. And there are a lot of positive signs that I wouldn't necessarily have expected to emerge so quickly. And I think Yeah, it does seem, for better or worse, to be a massive time for change and upheaval.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And could you, when it comes to reducing your economy's environmental impact and carbon footprint, what would you say has been your biggest challenge or Yeah, I think gathering data, understanding where we are on everything, every part of the process, it's a pretty big ordeal.

But without that holistic view, I think it's difficult to— you're Mitch, our sustainability manager, said, if you're not assessing, you're just guessing. I'm not sure where he got that from, but I think it's quite good. So I think, you know, and it helps to be a B Corp and having certain frameworks. I don't want to say imposed, but I think, you know, it doesn't necessarily naturally come to you to have these frameworks in place. And obviously having a framework helps you understand all of the different aspects where you might be having, you know, there might be an externality that you're not thinking about. So, you know, I think we're reasonably on top of all these things. Obviously, we kind of have to be to claim and preach as we do. But, you know, it's also a constant improving process. I think, you know, there's so much technology available that measuring and gathering data shouldn't necessarily be a problem, but I think doing it in a way where you can gain valuable insights and not just having stockpiles of random numbers in a spreadsheet, you know, I think that's kind of the key.

And how would you say you approach this environmental management and carbon footprints?

So we've identified a couple of priorities for our business, and obviously that ties in quite closely to the service that we're offering. So I'm not going to say waste management, I'm going to say resource management. And Carbon emissions are the 2 priority areas, and our service goes to directly reduce those for clients. And so a lot of our measurement focuses directly on the actions that we're performing as part of that service on the equipment that we're receiving, the actual refurbishing, the inherent emissions in those devices, and the potential positive effects of our actions. And just to maybe highlight that, so for example, the MacBook Pro has about 400 kilograms of embedded emissions. And most of that, so 75%, 300 kilograms comes from the manufacturing stage. And a lot of this is understood through lifecycle analysis. Obviously, to a large extent, we do have to rely on, you know, other resources to measure this. I would love to have a sort of a laboratory that was doing all of this in-house, you know, but I think that's sort of beyond what we're capable of just yet. And so we gather this information, and through refurbishment, we're able to avoid you know, you make a choice as a business to buy a refurbished laptop, then you've taken advantage of the original manufacturing emissions. So you're avoiding that entire process. And because you haven't bought a new one, you've actually got the emissions benefit of the original, avoiding the entire manufacturing process. And then I think as a business, we've, you know, instilled this attitude of don't label it as waste when it's a resource. Um, you know, we're always trying to buy, uh, refurbished or used, or, you know, we have a huge inventory of components that we've extracted from various, uh, equipment that we've received, and we reuse it. Um, you know, even if the act— you know, for example, if it's a laptop, even if the laptop itself isn't functioning, or, you know, we can't get it back to a functioning state economically, then there's always, you know, valuable reusable components inside.

And out of curiosity, there are some laptops which are better than others to refurbish, aren't there? And I'm actually looking at I've got a Surface Pro, and I believe they're actually one of the worst ones because I think it was Apple that started to glue everything together, wasn't it? And there's now been a trend to do the same, and I think Microsoft followed suit. Is that true? Can you refurbish those? And I'm putting my hands up in the air. in inverted commas, glued together laptops? Or is that just a myth and actually you can refurbish any laptop?

Well, yeah, you can refurbish any laptop. I think where there is a movement called right to repair, which I'm sure many of your listeners will be familiar with, and that is exactly against this I think the manufacturers will argue that consumers are demanding miniaturization or ease of transport, making things smaller and lighter. They cannot do that if everything's very modular because modularity requires engineering and parts do bulk up. I think there's a certain amount of truth, but I think it's also— there is a dark secret in there that, you know, they don't— it's in the manufacturer's interest to not have too many people digging inside these devices.

Hmm.

And quite frankly, you know, they're set up to— all of these manufacturers are set up, geared to have new versions of their products come out every year, whether there is a significant technological advancement inside or not. You know, there's sort of a cosmetic upgrade so often these days. And I think that is kind of frustrating for a lot of people. For a specialized remanufacturer, it should not be a hindrance. But obviously we see— I think our main frustration is actually in a— I think, well, it's in cheap consumer electronics, which are built not to last at all. You know, it's a very thin plastic. It's very difficult. The layout of components is not thought out in a way that anybody can easily access. You know, you have a simple, you know, you spilled a little bit of water and it went behind one of your keys, or you've got some breadcrumbs or something. And then literally it's going to take you several hours to pull the thing apart. And you have to, you know, things are assembled in a way where you literally have to rip things out. That is just completely poor engineering. Equally, to produce something incredibly inexpensive, you probably are just going to have to cut corners. So I think that's ultimately what we're trying to displace. I think this movement is gathering momentum about repairability and I, you know, I don't know which is going to change first. It's really hard to argue that we're going to see, you know, extreme amounts of modularity being built into, you know, the new version of the iPhone, for example. I think, you know, there just is too much technology being required to be packed into a very, very small space. But I do think that there are going to be some improvements.

Okay, interesting. Brilliant. Well, that's a lot of food for thought there, Nick. Thank you so much for discussing this with us. How do we find out more about Reconomy and what you do and where can we buy from you?

So yeah, very easy. Our website is recono.me. Very happy to chat to anybody over email, nick@reconomy. And we would be very happy to run free sustainability reports for anybody, any business or organization that's interested to sort of assess where your business currently stands in the way that you're managing assets. And, you know, We'd love to have a conversation about how we can improve on that.

Brilliant. Brilliant. Thanks, Nick. Thank you so much for today. It's been brilliant having you on.

Thanks, Will. It's been a pleasure.

Today we've got Nick on from Rekonomy. What a brilliant, brilliant name stroke website and amalgamating the two. And it gets better with what they do, ensuring people buy good quality equipment, IT equipment that is accessible to many. And they do it through refurbished— refurbishing laptops and phones, etc. And it's something that we should all be doing a lot more. I hope you enjoy the podcast.