PLASTICS AND RELATED Co-founders of TrashIn are betting on the awareness of big brands to increase the Brazilian recycling rate today by 3%. (Credit: Disclosure)
When strolling through the seas of Bali or the Caribbean, the tourist can have the paradisiacal experience that he has dated so much in frustrated photos. The guilt? From plastic. Hundreds of bottles, cups and bags floating in the sea or stuck on beaches. In deep waters are 14 million tons, according to the Australian scientific agency CSIRO’s. In fact, it’s the man’s fault with his ingrained behavior of throwing garbage everywhere. In Brazil alone, there are 80 million tons of waste per month. Bad for tourism, bad for the planet. With the increasing awareness that it is necessary to quickly reverse the landfill that the Earth is turning into, governments are starting to invest in circular economy, recycling and plants to generate energy through waste. Here, the effort to build this chain is more up to the private sector, such as the startup TrashIn, which wants to earn BRL 8.5 million a year from garbage.
Although well defined by partners Gustavo Finger, Rafael Dutra, Renan Vargas and Sérgio Finger, the goal is a challenge for the company that was born in 2012 from a hackathon (event to create innovative solutions using technology), gained strength after the partners to leave their executive career to dedicate themselves to the business in 2015, but which until today has not brought the expected profit. According to Renan Vargas, the high costs of recycling proved to be an unmapped obstacle. “We made a mathematical mistake.” It was then that they rethought the business and began to offer waste management services — collection and disposal of waste generated by customers, whether organic or recyclable — and reverse logistics. In this model, the startup creates and installs waste collection points, treats the material, sends it to cooperatives and delivers a structured data framework on waste to customers.
80 million tons is the volume of waste generated in Brazil per month
Without profit, the way to capitalize and grow was to go to the market. There were three funding rounds totaling R$ 2.2 million. The first, in the early stage and the last two in the crowdfunding model with CapTable. Now prepare the third. “It’s the way for us to grow, because with our own cash, the process to gain scale would be very long,” said Vargas. A sustainability company takes time to traction, but the co-founder ensures that the results appear. In 2021 alone, the 22 partner cooperatives received BRL 600,000 in waste. Customers such as Havaianas, iFood and Unimed now have a waste manager to comply with the best ESG practices and TrashIn celebrates its 29 employees, presence in ten states and works to reach the millions promised to shareholders.
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