Resources

• Closed Loop Partners
• Circular Services
• Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough and Michael Braungart
• Waste-Free World by Ron Gonen
• Greyparrot AI Recycling Technology
• MOLG (Robotic Electronics Disassembly)
• SolarCycle (Solar Panel Recycling)
• Ellen MacArthur Foundation - Circular Economy Resources
• EPA Facts and Figures on Materials, Waste, and Recycling
• Extended Producer Responsibility

Host and Guest

Host: Mike Toffel, Professor, Harvard Business School (LinkedIn)

Guest: Lauren Rodriguez, Circular Services, a Closed Loop Partners company (LinkedIn)

Transcript

Editor's Note: The following was prepared by a machine algorithm, and may not perfectly reflect the audio file of the interview.

Mike Toffel:

Lauren, thank you so much for joining us here on Climate Rising.

Lauren Rodriguez:

Thanks so much for having me, excited to be here.

Mike Toffel:

So, we've brought you here to talk about the circular economy. And you have a lot of experience working on the investment side and now on the operating side. So, you bring both of these lenses. So why don't we begin, if we could, with just a brief intro into your current role and how you got there.

Lauren Rodriguez:

Sure, absolutely. So, I currently work for Circular Services, a Closed Loop partners company, and we'll talk a little bit more about what Closed Loop does and what we're about. But we are focused on accelerating and advancing the circular economy. Circular economy is an economic model. It's all about keeping materials in circulation out of the environment, out of landfills, not burying these valuable materials in the ground, reusing them and introducing them back into supply chains.

I've been interested in what's called the circular economy for as long as I can remember. I was a nature kid and there's not a concept of waste in nature. using things judiciously and reusing them in new ways has always been just intuitive. So, I'm the person that saves all the gift bags, loves going to thrift stores, asks people to turn off running water in a polite, friendly way. And this way of being turned into a career when I read a book called Cradle to Cradle by Michael Braungart and William McDonough that was back in the early 2000s. And that book, which I recommend to anyone starting out in this space, made a connection between waste and environmental harm, which I care deeply about, and it highlighted both the imperative as well as the opportunities for companies, businesses, in particular, to come up with creative solutions.

So I found that incredibly inspiring and motivating and spent the majority of my career working with various companies in various sectors to understand how they operate and make decisions with the ultimate goal of doing exactly what I'm doing today, which is helping bringing solutions to life that enable a more circular and sustainable world and bridging the gap between those solutions and the major companies and industries that drive our economy and our society.

More specifically, after business school, as class of 2016, I was particularly interested in sustainable food and agriculture systems. And I joined the corporate venture group of AB InBev called ZX Ventures. There we were investing in and building incubating early-stage companies at the future of food and beverage

Now with Closed Loop Partners for over two and a half years, I have been working with Closed Loop's ecosystem of corporate partners, who are funders, or LPs, in many of our investment funds, and are also partners of the new operating company that I now work for, Circular Services, where we are helping to close the loop on their supply chains

Mike Toffel:

Great. Yeah. And it's always fun to see our HBS grads where they land in this business and climate world. So, it's been almost a decade since you were here. So Closed Loop Partners is an overarching firm that actually has three areas or three business lines, I might call it.

I'm going talk a little bit about the phrase Closed Loop and in the context of circular economy. Because as I recall from when I read books like Cradle to Cradle, that was also an inspirational book for me. The idea of trying to keep things out of landfills, for example, is super important from an environmental perspective and can be cost effective.

And so, it sounds to me like you're trying to figure out where are those business opportunities where we can make these opportunities cost effective. And sometimes, in my language, closed loop means keeping the products within the same value chain, whereas an open loop is still keeping them out of landfills but making them available for other value chains.

And so how is closed loop partners using that kind of stringent definition, or are they basically, as long as it's out of landfills, that's mission aligned and close enough?

Lauren Rodriguez:

That is a great distinction. We don't have the luxury of being so stringent in terms of only looking at solutions that are closed loop, because this is still an emerging space and there's so much opportunity for innovation and continued development and scaling of solutions that could enable a closed loop. So, we do take a broader view where the highest order of goal is keeping materials in circulation into their highest and best use. Right now, that may mean not going back into the same exact value chain that may be going to a secondary use, but at least it's not being buried in the ground and costing taxpayers and municipalities and the environment.

Mike Toffel:

Got it. Closed Loop is focused on this somewhat narrow focused strategy of keeping things out of landfills. And I imagine that some of the companies that you're investing in or that you're supporting or that you purchase and operate, you're competing with broader players.

So, can you talk a little bit about the advantages of that specialization?

Lauren Rodriguez:

It really touches every single sector, maybe except for some of the more extractive industries, because it's an economic model at the end of the day. And so all of the solutions that we're looking at are intended to plug into the many different sectors and types of businesses that we have.

Our expertise is in taking that lens, looking through that lens on how can we keep materials in circulation? How can we have more resilient supply chains, that don't depend on finite and extractive practices and reduce the cost., We view this very much as an opportunity for reduction if you're keeping these materials in circulation, not paying to landfill them and then paying to extract more.

So that perspective and honestly, the time that we've spent in this space, Closed Loop is over 10 years old, has worked in our favor in attracting a lot of companies who have a shared mission and vision for what they want their business to be like, and they want to be part of Closed Loop. They view us as experts in solving these circular challenges. So, we, I think, attract a lot of like-minded investors and partners and companies that are seeking to be part of the portfolio.

It also helps us think about platforms and ecosystems. So, we have in our capital management group, a private equity buyout fund looking to buy and build and help scale businesses that are enabling the circular economy in different sectors, one being in IT. So, IT asset disposition, computers, phones, servers, all of the electronics that really underpin our economy and lives today.

That group has made several investments in players in that space that can learn from one another, build on each other, have geographic density. And so, there's logistical advantages when you start stitching together these companies, there's a lot of additive benefits for having a portfolio.

where there's shared missions, and in some cases like this, of similar sectors. So, I think that is a really key strength in helping to bring more value, add value to the businesses that we invest in and work with.

Mike Toffel: (13:46.05)

Got it. So, there's a capabilities play, which is that you gain expertise and get better at it than those who are just dabbling because you're doing it kind of full time. Then there's both the attraction to investors who want to be affiliated with a specialist organization and perhaps even the portfolio companies who want partners in their case investors who really know who kind of get their DNA, get their mission.

Lauren Rodriguez: (14:10.703)

Absolutely, yes. Well summarized and maybe actually a third group that I would add to that too are, as I mentioned before, the corporate partners, right? So, these are companies think, know, large consumer facing brands who have made commitments about having you know, reduced plastics in, you know, in their products or, you know, using less virgin materials.

Many of them, if not all, have net zero commitments and other goals around circularity and waste reduction in their operations. They view us as the go-to partner for helping them figure this out. And sometimes there aren't existing solutions, and we have a group, our Center for the Circular Economy, does innovation and advisory work to address the challenges where there is no existing solution, there isn't a roadmap for how we close the loop or how do we create circularity in a certain part of a business or in a sector.

Mike Toffel:

Interesting. Great. So, let's talk about each of the business lines that Closed Loop Partners operates and we'll begin maybe just briefly talking about the Closed Loop Capital Management. Give us a brief overview if you would.

Lauren Rodriguez:

So Close Loop Capital Management, that's an investment group that manages venture capital, buyout private equity, and catalytic private credit investment strategies.

our venture group invests early-stage startups. So, this is a traditional venture capital, but companies that are all aligned to advancing the circular economy, there’s a lot of supply chain efficiency, resiliency technologies and enabling technologies for the circular economy. Our buyout private equity strategy, where we have that active builder capital, helping these businesses grow, become real facets of the circular economy, plugging into major supply chains.

And then our third group is the catalytic private credit group. That was actually the first investment fund that Closed Loop started with back in 2014. It's now called the Closed Loop Infrastructure Fund. And that fund has investors that are all corporate investors, so major retailers, big CPG companies, and technology companies. And the starting thesis was that there is not enough funding for recycling infrastructure in the US. It's not attractive for traditional capital. And it's typically viewed as risky and may not have the highest return right to attract any form of traditional capital. the premise was providing catalytic, meaning financing that is flexible. So low rate, flexible terms for payback, long-term financing that helps to de-risk investment in infrastructure. And a lot of these loans have been given to municipalities, So the solid waste authority or the waste commission of a given county or a city so that they can go and purchase the equipment that they would need to collect material from people's homes and process it, and return those materials into industrial supply chains.

So that was a really novel, innovative solution, honestly, and a lot of the corporate partners who became involved in that were excited about being able to really enable and catalyze the infrastructure for recycling in the U.S. given how much of a gap there is for access to recycling infrastructure in the US. That catalytic strategy has since grown and there are more than just that one infrastructure group today.

Mike Toffel:

Super interesting. We'll talk more about these investment opportunities in a moment. But let's talk about the other two areas as well. So, Center for the Circular Economy is another. It sounds to me a little bit like a think tank from its description online. But what does it do?

Lauren Rodriguez:

Yeah, they are an innovative and advisory firm, essentially. And they are helping companies typically in the form of consortia, So, companies that have shared challenges to address a circularity gap in their business or in their sector. Just as an example, the NextGen Consortium, that is a consortium of food service retailers and restaurants, Starbucks and McDonald's have been involved in that consortium along with a number of other partners to address the food service waste. So, think about the cup, the takeaway cup, that is ubiquitous in any fast casual or food service experience, but there isn't a good solution, whether it's reuse or alternative materials or just enabling recycling of that. If you get a hot coffee cup, you've got the cup itself, the sleeve, the top, and people don't know what to do with that. It can't be recycled, and then a lot of it ends up in the trash because people don't know. So, this was something that these big companies came to us with, and we formed a consortium around that and have done in-market pilots and tests of different types of solutions.

Most recently last year, there was the largest in-market reuse pilot done in Petaluma, California for cups. So, it was the default option that every single restaurant in this town had a purple cup and people that came received the purple cup and they dropped it off in a bin. It was an incredibly successful company. through these consortia, the Center for the Circular Economy is identifying and testing potential solutions and then coming up with a roadmap where there could become investment or investable opportunities to scale these solutions.

Mike Toffel:

So, in a way, it provides a little bit of earlier R&D access to ideas, as well as some consortium building and running. Very interesting. Okay, and then the third, Closed Loop builders, that's the group that includes circular services, which is where you currently sit. You have a thumbnail sketch of that organization.

Lauren Rodriguez:

Yes, So Closed Loop Builders is an operating group of Closed Loop Partners. The first operating company that it built was Circular Services, which was at the end of 2022. And that started out as a roll-up of regional recycling players, these best-in-class recycling operations in the Northeast, Southeast, and in the West to form what is now the largest private recycling company in circular economy infrastructure company in the US, Circular Services. So, think of household recyclables as well as materials from businesses and industrial operations as well for cities and companies throughout the East Coast, the Midwest and across the South into the Southwest. So, if anyone listening here lives in New York City or Austin, Phoenix, San Antonio, Sarasota, Florida we process all your recycling. the vision is to not just be a kind pure play recycling as we typically understand it, but to have the infrastructure and the capabilities to process all sorts of materials, typical packaging material, organics meaning food waste and green waste, and textiles, electronics.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, so I took students with a colleague to Europe to see decarbonization up close and energy transition. We go to Denmark and the Netherlands and this recent year we went to Belgium as well. And you can't help noticing, for example, in Denmark, they have like 15 bins. We have maybe three or two and they have 15 bins. So, the idea that they can sort so much and that those are all recovered as distinct recovery streams is just mind blowing.

Lauren Rodriguez:

Yes. Europe is absolutely a model in that, in a sense, but also just a different reality than the United States in terms of what we're used to. And so, I think that that's very far, probably never going to be the case where we're sorting our own things, but it does highlight that there's value in all of those materials.

in the US. Most people are putting everything into a single bin. And then it goes to what's called a material recovery facility where they're using, this is one of the core businesses of Circular Services, uses advanced technologies to sort all of those materials by material composition into piles of high value commodities.

So, in Europe, the consumer is essentially doing part of that first step of sortation. Whereas here we're tending to consolidate it at these recovery facilities.

Mike Toffel:

Right. So, let's talk just for one minute about this organization that you're most closely aligned with, Circular Services. What's the business advantage of consolidation of these very geographically disparate collection companies? Like what's the value proposition to bring them all under the same ownership?

Lauren Rodriguez:

Right. So, there are a few things. One is that there's a lot of technology and expertise in how to take this mixed bin of materials and get the highest value commodities out of them. And so, we are a group of best-in-class operators, who have been doing this for decades and there's a lot of cross pollination in terms of technology use and operating best practices.

There's also a factor in density in a given market, So the circular economy ideally is one that is localized, where you're better able to match supply and demand and keep materials in circulation and closer, tighter loops for recovery, remanufacturing, reuse, et cetera. And so, as we build out our infrastructure and our footprint, we're looking for opportunities to have density where we can create the fundamental infrastructure to do that, and to amass sufficient volume of these commodities that they can really be used at scale, So if you think about isolated operations, small towns and communities, one of their challenges is that the volume of material that they're producing are typically too small for any major manufacturer to be able to use right away. They have to be aggregated,

So that's another key benefit of that density. And we have the ability to pull in more material regionally and be able to amass those large quantities, right, to be able to feed back into large scale supply chains.

Mike Toffel:

Got it. It's so interesting because as a consumer or even maybe as a commercial customer of yours, most of that story is hidden to them. Right? If you're a resident like me who has curbside recycling and the truck comes down the street and it picks it up and whether it's a private sector truck or a local government truck, it's the same truck. It's just painted differently. So, you don't really know what the difference is except that one works for the government, and one doesn't. And it's very interesting to hear that the value-add really is in the sorting and in the what economists I think would call agglomeration economy and also economies of scale, like all of these pieces that help you make better use of the materials and actually get them back out into the marketplace in some manner as a feedstock for something else. Interesting, great.

Lauren Rodriguez:

Yes, absolutely.

Mike Toffel:

Okay, great. Well, that was a terrific tour of the organization. Let's talk about the financing side. So, if we're putting on the hat of the investor of closed loop opportunities, how do you sort through them? So, you must get pitches of all sorts, or you might see news articles and think that's an interesting organization. How do you separate opportunities that seem particularly promising from those that you'll take a pass on? What do the criteria use? What excites you? What are some common mistakes people make? Let us into your world of the investment side.

Lauren Rodriguez:

Yeah, so I think this is one of the benefits of having been in this space for over a decade and having had exposure to so many different types of companies, startups and solutions, as well as the major corporate partners that we have, because it allows us to zero in on where the gaps really are and what solutions are needed so that when we see companies come across our desk, we can actually relate them to a problem that we've talked about with a corporate partner or that we've seen.

That is a fundamental part of our screening, does this solve a problem that we've witnessed or identified in that linear to circular transition.

One example there is around having more visibility into what is in the waste stream itself so that we can identify what commodities are valuable and be able to extract more value from the waste stream. We made an investment in a company called Grey Parrot that uses AI vision software to identify the materials that are coming across these incredibly fast-moving conveyor belts of material with precision. And it's helping to identify materials that may not even be historically recovered because there might not have been data to know that this particular subset of a material was even in enough quantity to be a valuable commodity. So that is an example where we had our insights around operating material recovery facilities, and we had

demand from the end markets for certain specific commodities to say, let's look for solutions. Another set of opportunity areas is around the age of AI and computing right now. There's a tremendous amount of electronic waste that exists today and it's going to only grow as server farms continue to expand to keep up with computing needs. The venture group made an investment into a company called MOLG that does autonomous robotic disassembly of complex components of computers, So they could take a laptop or a phone or a server and disassemble it with incredible speed and precision and extract the valuable components of it that can be reused and ensuring the highest and best use of these components, that we don't need to be throwing this away when we can be reusing these finite, high-value components that are oftentimes coming from strained supply chains .

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, so let's dive in a little bit to the idea of these electronics. Because I think people have some vague sense that when you are done with the computer and you throw it into a recycling bin or throw it into the trash, there's some probably nagging sense that that's not the best use of it to send it to a landfill or to an incinerator or something like that. And I was maybe 25 years ago in an HP recycling facility in California and was just mesmerized by the process they used to disassemble and harvest some components for reuse, like disk drives sometimes, if they were new enough, they could use them as spare parts. And then sending the rest into some crushing machine and then these, as you mentioned, fast-moving conveyor belts with magnets that would take out the ferrous materials and then some spinning gizmos that would separate by density, metals, glass, and plastics.

And I was just blown away by technology. And that was 25 years ago, I'm sure, the pre-AI and pre-machine vision and all sorts of stuff. What is a modern facility like the ones you've invested in? What do those look like? And what's the process?

Lauren Rodriguez:

I find these facilities incredibly fascinating. They're like a Rube Goldberg machine because they have to be able to take, as we've talked about this, either complex components or complex devices in the case of electronics or the opposite end of the spectrum, the mixed bin of things that people throw into their recycling and extract from those high value metals and plastics and other components.

There are a number of technologies that have been around for a long time, some magnets for ferrous and eddy currents for non-ferrous materials. There are optical near-infrared sensors that are used for identifying material composition.

And we've talked about AI vision systems that really are taking the next step in allowing more precise identification of material types. Robotics is also one of the newer aspects of technological development in this space. MOLG, our portfolio company in the Venture Group, is applying this for the disassembly of electronics components. We also have company in the portfolio, SolarCycle, that recycles solar panels. Robotics are starting to become more useful in ensuring that we're capturing those materials that are of high value. So, there's a lot of excitement around the use of technology that can help recover more of what's coming into the door.

One challenge fundamentally in this space is there's a lot of interest and investment in how we optimize, how do we extract the most value out of the materials that are coming in so that we can enable them to be used for their highest and best use? We're still constrained by what's coming in the front door, how do we get more of the material to us so that we can do this advanced sortation and recovery.

Our investment group, the capital management group, has focused on that access and infrastructure point mostly, providing low-cost loans to municipalities for over 10 years to ensure that residents have bins to put things in so that it can get to the facility, we know that one of the best ways to increase the volume coming through is by just increasing the size of someone's bin at home. If you think about it, and this is also supported by EPA studies on the waste generated in the US. Far more of our waste stream should be recycled than it is today. So, you should be able to recover 60 to 80 % of the material of what's considered waste that anyone, a business or an individual household generates.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, and I think the infrastructure is a little bit of a chicken or egg problem with infrastructure and policy, I would imagine. So, for example, Massachusetts, where I am, recent state law prohibits the disposal of textiles in trash. And so that's saying like, OK, you used to put on your old jeans, if you couldn't donate them to Goodwill or whatever, you would just throw them in the trash or sneakers or whatever. But now, because of this policy, you can’t legally do that anymore, which then triggers municipalities to say, okay, we've got to figure out a way to collect this material because of this mandate we have from the state. And so, then all of a sudden, there's an incentive to try and figure out the infrastructure, whether they do it again with a municipal service or do it with private sector contracting. And so, there's this chicken or egg, like, can you build the infrastructure if you don't have the mandate from the policymakers?

Lauren Rodriguez:

Yes, yeah, policy can be incredibly helpful. Those being excellent examples where there are restrictions put on what can go into landfills. we've taken the approach of focusing on how we make it easier for individuals and businesses to recycle or reuse and recover these materials rather than using the stick approach. But it is helpful, absolutely. There are different policy levers at different levels of government, And the local level, are policies, as you were talking about, bans of certain materials. There's also what's very helpful is when municipalities enact ordinances or requirements for businesses to use to do composting or to recycle their materials. Many places that that isn't the case and it's an option for businesses to do that and it's just easier typically right to just send it all to landfill and they pay a bill which is far too high. We're on a mission to prove that if you introduce recycling and composting, it's a lot less expensive, actually, because you're not paying to bury things, you're paying to recover things that are valuable, and you can get some of that value back. the policy locally, I think is most influential on businesses and individuals. There's also a policy at a state level, that's called extended producer responsibility, which is really about ensuring that there's funding for the infrastructure to recover and recycle and return materials that are put into the marketplace. The extended producer responsibility is putting the responsibility on the producers, the manufacturers, the brands, to contribute to the financing of the infrastructure needed to recover those materials and have them go to a responsible end market, essentially. that exists in five states in different ways. So, it's still very early days and it's taken a very long time to come up even to being in and we're not there yet, We're still in the very early stages of the implementation. We’ll see how that gets implemented, but the fact that it does exist in a few states is very motivating to companies who have national footprints. Because they're not going to just think about a strategy for California when it comes to their supply chain. They're supplying either the region or the country in terms of how they're structured. And so, it has forced a lot of companies to think about their supply chains more broadly.

Mike Toffel:

Right. I wrote about this one of my first academic studies was about extended producer responsibility, which is at the time, and it sounds like even now 25 or 30 years ago is still predominantly in the European context where Germany had this and then the EU now has this, which is as you described, it's a fee on producers for the use by municipalities to or perhaps the state, to recover the materials at their end of life.

And the idea there is to provide, as you mentioned, a funding stream besides the taxpayers. And that funding stream is tied to the cost of the product, because if you impose this fee on the producers, and they're going to put an additional cost on the product, but in a way, you pay the cost as opposed to as a taxpayer, you pay it as a consumer, related to the purchases you make. So, it's a really nice example of the polluter pays concept of providing that fee.

Now, one thing that seemed to me with an economic lens that breaks down in that is the fees of the systems that I looked at a long time ago were the same across different companies. And it seemed to me that was a problem because for example, you're a laptop producer, and you use recovered materials and you make it easy to disassemble your laptop and harvest its good parts versus someone who doesn't make any of those investments, you're nonetheless, in these old schemes at least, charged the same fee. Or if you sell your packaging in some crazy hybrid of technical materials like metal foil laid on top of cardboard, which makes it very difficult to either recover the foil as a metal or recover the cardboard as an organic, you fuse them together and it's a mess. Or someone who has a pure play, let's just use cardboard or maybe let's use aluminum, which is much easier to recover. And again, they were charged the same fee. And so, it didn't really incentivize, it had the opportunity to, but at least at the time, it didn't really incentivize the behavior to facilitate the higher value recovery that one would hope.

Lauren Rodriguez:

That has evolved. And it is more specific to the material type now. So that's how I think all of the policies have been designed so far in the US, which is tied to the cost of processing those materials. So, it does link the costs and the value of a material to the fees, essentially. That is actually an example where the policy will necessitate more advanced technologies because we have to be able to really identify exactly what materials are coming in the door and think about the costs per material basis rather than that mixed bag.

That's another example where policy is steering an investment strategy in terms of the types of technologies that will be used in order to keep up with the policy.

Mike Toffel:

Great, great. Which brings me to my two final questions. So, first one is, as we look forward, what are some of the technologies or policies or business models that you think are particularly promising that we should keep our eye on in terms of facilitating the promise of business models that use circular economy in their core?

Lauren Rodriguez:

So, I think that we're going to continue to see a few things. There's one is we've talked a little bit about using technology for better data and visibility to know what is actually coming, to know what's being thrown away, discard or what is in the waste stream so that we can extract what's most valuable in there. Robotics for disassembly and AI for identification of the components and composite materials that will continue to develop. I think they'll continue to be opportunities for applications to scale those types of technologies. There's also a lot of sectors that haven't even started thinking about circularity. Historically, it's been, packaged food and beverage companies that have gotten a lot of public attention around their waste, Because it's visible, it's out there, electronic waste has become more visible, as people's drawers at home fill up with phones and computers. We're just starting to look into opportunities in food and agriculture around how do you use more circular inputs. How do you take what would be waste streams or byproducts and reuse those, you know, in the manufacturing of food? How do you use biotechnology? We have a company called Capra Biosciences in the venture portfolio. How do you use biotechnology to manufacture Raw materials that are unsustainably

produced today, Another broad trend that I think we'll continue to see and are excited about is this increasing localization of recovery and remanufacturing and creating these more localized modular supply chains. There's value in that from a supply chain resiliency standpoint. So, this is very much aligned to domestic policies around trying to bring more manufacturing and shorten our supply chains and bring them closer to home. That is very, very well aligned with the circular economy and keeping resources in circulation, So, there'll need to be more advancements really in manufacturing technologies that allow for those modular operations that still make economic sense, This is a departure from the classic economies of scale and having offshore manufacturing at large scale and very cheap inputs and all that. We're turning that on its head. And we very much believe that that's feasible, but it will require some innovation in the technologies that are used for manufacturing and continued investment in scaling of material recovery.

Mike Toffel:

Got it. And my last question is what advice you have for those who are intrigued by this conversation and think I want to be the next Lauren, and I want to follow her route and being an investor or an operator of a company that's really focusing on circular economy. What do you recommend for the next steps for those folks?

Lauren Rodriguez:

Well, I'll first say please join us. we need more people thinking in this way, in their own roles and in their own companies and as policymakers.

Because it's cross-cutting, this should apply to every sector, I think that it would be great to have more innovators thinking about their particular sector and how can we close the loop more, and their own supply chains.

Lauren Rodriguez:

In terms of useful resources, I'll put a plug for the Closed Loop Partners website. We have a tremendous amount of research and reports that have been done by the Center for the Circular Economy, a lot of thought pieces from the capital management group around the opportunities and solutions for advancing circular economy. So, I think that is a great place to start and see some of the things that we've talked about today and more.

Another plug actually, because I do think that this is a great one is Ron Gonen, the CEO and founder of Closed Loop Partners has a book called Waste Free World, which is a helpful storytelling of this linear to circular transition, and what we need for that transition. And he's a great storyteller. It's a good read.

There are also other organizations that are really active in this space, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in the UK has done tremendous work in the circular economy. if anyone's interested in digging into data, the EPA actually has a good amount of data around the waste that we're generating and what opportunities there could be in recovering its value.

Mike Toffel:

Well, Lauren, it's been a real pleasure to see you again after a decade since you left our campus. Well, we've seen each other since, because you've been generous with your time in helping our students get a sense of the career world out there. So, thank you for that. And thank you for today's conversation as well.

Lauren Rodriguez:

Thank you so much. It has been wonderful talking with you.