(Source: john / stock.adobe.com; generated with AI)
Based on an interview with Mikey Pasciuto
Despite numerous public service campaigns and policy improvement initiatives, meeting waste management goals remains a significant challenge. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) asserts that from 1990 to 2015, US-recycled municipal solid waste rose from 14 percent to 26 percent of total solid waste.[1] Current estimates put that number at 33 percent—still well short of EPA’s 50 percent goal.[2]
After so much effort, what else can communities do to get over the recycling hump and reduce the harmful materials they put into the environment? Mikey Pasciuto, engineer and co-founder of zero-waste platform Scrapp, offers a practical approach. “Managing waste and educating communities on the topic of sustainability is not about doing everything right,” he explains. “It’s about acknowledging what might be wasteful, reducing where you can, and improving the things that are easiest to change.” This philosophy is the guiding principle for Scrapp, a start-up creating data-driven sustainable waste programs as it advocates for the circular economy.[3]
Mikey Pasciuto is the co-founder and Chief Sustainability Officer at Scrapp. He specializes in product and packaging recyclability, zero-waste programs, and sustainable packaging. Mikey presented to His Majesty the King at COP28 as part of Scotland’s delegation. He also serves as President of CSWS, a New Hampshire non-profit promoting sustainable waste management. Born and raised in Massachusetts, he graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 2021 with a dual degree in Mechanical Engineering and Sustainability.
While growing up in blue-collar manufacturing family in northern Massachusetts, Pasciuto displayed a natural talent in engineering and developed a passion for sustainability. This led him to pursue a dual degree in mechanical engineering and sustainability at the University of New Hampshire.
During that time, fellow student Evan Gwynne Davies urged Pasciuto to join him in entering an on-campus sustainability idea competition. “At the time, the university was struggling with recycling despite being one of the top five sustainable universities in the country,” remembers Pasciuto. Their initial idea employed smart bins to scan discarded trash at the university and identify high-quality recyclable materials the university could deliver to recycling centers. Unfortunately, they discovered that providing a smart meter for the university’s dozens of trash bins would be prohibitively expensive. Therefore, they pivoted to an idea for an app that would teach people what they could and could not recycle.
“Our tagline was ‘Recycle your crap with our app,’” he laughs. “Very elegant.”
After the idea failed to win the competition, Pasciuto and Gwynne Davies were not deterred, and they decided to enter it at EPA’s America Recycles Innovation Fair. They were invited to Washington, D.C. to present the innovation alongside Fortune 500 companies. At the fair, the EPA director encouraged them to keep pursuing the idea. This encouragement provided added momentum to their efforts and proved to be a pivotal point for their eventual company.
With that, Pasciuto, Gwynne Davies, and their co-founders devoted themselves full-time to developing their idea into what Scrapp would become.
At first, Pasciuto’s team focused on improving the app to allow people to scan product bar codes and receive product- and location-specific recycling guidance. “We took the premise of the smart bin but made it as low-tech as possible so that average people could use the app not only to simplify their recycling efforts but also to reduce significantly the number of materials going into recycling bins that shouldn’t be there,” he remarks.
Among the materials incorrectly being placed in recycling bins were plastic shopping bags that get tangled and damage recycling equipment, as well as certain food packaging that cannot be recycled due to mixed paper, plastic, and metal content. Even more concerning, Pasciuto identified electronics with lithium batteries as items adding to recycling woes, since these can cause explosions and fires in garbage trucks and recycling facilities.
However, Pasciuto and his team were also determined to create a web portal where waste management businesses, from city dumps to materials recovery facilities, could use data to track and manage their solid waste programs. This was partially in response to new legislation for extended producer responsibility (EPR).[4] To shift the burden of waste management to producers themselves, ERP requires businesses to take operational and financial responsibility for the whole lifecycle of their products, including the recycling and disposal of the products and packaging as their useful life ends.
The Scrapp team envisioned a software platform that would address this challenge by automatically assembling relevant data from procurement, recycling machines, invoices, purchase orders, and other sources to provide a complete view of waste materials coming in and out of businesses’ operations. In turn, businesses could easily and accurately account for these materials, stay compliant with new laws, and qualify for government funding.
The software allows Scrapp to act as waste accountants. Scrapp helps businesses see how much material they bring in, what it’s made of, what it’s used for, and how it leaves the premises, and then identify opportunities to reduce costs across waste management and tax burdens.
Pasciuto remembers that getting this platform to work properly required a lot of trial and error. They brought in the precision of manufacturing with a very complex back-end system while building a simple user experience on the front end. They tested several hypotheses. They talked with customers to polish the software into something people would actually want to use. Now, Scrapp is proud to count companies like Microsoft, DHL, and KPMG among its customers. Pasciuto rejoices, “With our app for everyday people, our software platform, and our other products, we are making a real difference.”
When asked about opportunities for more science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professionals like him in the field of waste management, Pasciuto responds, “I see a problem with creating technology for the sake of creating technology, which only creates more waste. Instead, bringing STEM disciplines and practices to waste management actually reduces waste and solves this problem. I welcome engineers and other STEM people to come to waste management, do things as lean as possible first to prove the technology, and then validate that technology with the right people until they arrive at a proven minimum viable product.”
“Many big problems need to be solved, and important work needs to be done in this field,” he concludes. “Everybody has trash, and everybody’s trash is unique to them and has unique problems just waiting to be solved.”
Sources
[1] https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/national-overview-facts-and-figures-materials [2] https://www.epa.gov/circulareconomy/us-national-recycling-goal [3] https://www.scrappzero.com [4] https://epr.sustainablepackaging.org/
Mouser Electronics, founded in 1964, is a globally authorized distributor of semiconductors and electronic components for over 1,200 industry-leading manufacturer brands. This year marks the company's 60th anniversary. We specialize in the rapid introduction of the newest products and technologies targeting the design engineer and buyer communities. Mouser has 28 offices located around the globe. We conduct business in 23 different languages and 34 currencies. Our global distribution center is equipped with state-of-the-art wireless warehouse management systems that enable us to process orders 24/7, and deliver nearly perfect pick-and-ship operations.