Stop Calling It Waste
Plus the first deal brokered live on the podcast!
Three founders, working in defence materials, industrial AI and metals recycling, have arrived at the same conclusion from three different directions. Europe is sitting on the raw materials it says it lacks, and it is pricing them far too late. Plus the first deal brokered live on the podcast!
At eight years old, Nicolas Brien spent his weekends behind a table at a flea market, selling things other people had thrown away. His mother had a genetic disease and could not work. The family lived on state support, and the market money made up the difference. Years later, raising his first round for an AI company, investors asked him where he got his entrepreneurial instincts.
“At eight years old, selling stuff on the flea market. That’s where I got my MBA,” he says.
Thirty years later the business he runs, Waste Tide, does at industrial scale what he did at that table. It looks at something a company has decided is worthless and tells them what it is actually worth. He is not alone in the trade. On this episode of The Impact Equation, he was joined by Sam Staincliffe, co-founder and chief executive of Uplift 360, which pulls high performance materials out of end-of-life composites for the defence industry, and Elisabeth Broring, managing partner of MWT, a German recycler that mills scrap down to clean copper, aluminium and precious metals. Three companies, three countries, three entry points. One shared conviction, stated most bluntly by Brien: European industry knows the price of everything it buys and almost nothing it discards.
The flea market MBA
Brien came to waste the way most people in local government do, which is to say he was handed it. Elected at municipal level around 12 years ago, he found himself with the portfolio nobody wanted. “No one wants to take care of waste, so that’s the thing you give to the young elected official,” he says. He signed his first waste management contracts there, and spent the next decade increasingly irritated by what he saw: a two trillion dollar global industry, almost entirely undigitised, leaking money and energy at every joint.
The unlock arrived in late 2023, when Google published early research on vision language models, the less glamorous relatives of the large language models everyone was talking about. Brien recognised the tool he had been imagining for years: something that could look at a picture of a pile of material and say what it was worth. He taught himself to code to build it, a decision he now calls probably the most disastrous investment he ever made, since now he mostly just reads the code Claude writes for him.
Waste Tide processes around 2,000 waste management invoices a month. That volume gives the company something closer to a survey than a database. It is the same conviction that animates a previous guest of the podcast, Mikela Druckman, whose AI firm Greyparrot raised a $27m Series B just last month. When she came on the show, Druckman made the same case these three founders make, in almost the same words: “I’d like us to stop talking about waste management and start talking about resource management.” Raw materials, she argued, are becoming scarcer and more expensive, and the countries that manage them deliberately and with data will hold an economic advantage as much as an environmental one. Waste Tide starts from the same premise and pushes it upstream, onto the factory floor, before the material is ever mixed or moved.
Where the supply chain is life or death
Staincliffe learned the same lesson in a very different setting. Her background is defence operations, with the Middle East and Afghanistan, and as she puts it, the supply chain is life or death. “One of the deepest fundamentals I learned from operations is your supply chain is everything,” she says.
Then look at whose supply chain Europe is running on. The critical materials feeding European defence come from Asia, the Middle East and North America. The continent neither owns nor controls them. What it does own is refuse. “Europe doesn’t sit on mountains of rare earths or fossil fuels, but we do have a lot of waste,” she says. Secure your supply chain by working with the feedstock you have.
The problem is that defence will not accept a downgrade. So Uplift 360 built a chemical plant that Staincliffe calls the brewery, which strips high value material out of the glue holding a composite together. Take a short virgin carbon fibre and one of theirs, and you cannot tell them apart. It means the recovered fibre can go straight back into high performance manufacturing, and in Uplift 360’s case, largely into drones and the parts that feed them.
The UK Ministry of Defence funded the technology development. The MoD understands the supply risk, but it is also sitting on the end-of-life material, and disposing of it is expensive. Much of what defence retires is attractive to terrorist and criminal organisations, which rules out the ordinary disposal routes and drives the cost up. Solving that was the commercial case. Transforming its re-use was then the added bonus.
“The fact that we get to deliver sustainability and circular economy as part of the process is amazing, because it’s the proof point,” she says. “But that’s not why our customers moved.”
Her first attempt at a materials business was less accommodating. After having a child, she found herself buried in plastic toys and discovered that around 97 per cent of them cannot be recycled, with an average useful life she puts at a little over two minutes. She spent a period developing biomaterials that could be regenerated at end of life. Her network in the toy industry, she notes drily, turned out to be thinner than her network in defence.
Diepholz, after Shanghai
Broring’s raw material was flour before it was copper. She grew up in a family business in foodstuff production and agricultural products, studied economics and law. She built a career in contract logistics, consulting industrial clients on their shop floor processes, first in Germany and then for nearly three years in China.
Her father, meanwhile, was running what he called his kindergarten project: an attempt to move milling and grinding technology out of food production and into everything else. In 2014 he built a small pilot plant where companies could book slots to test materials. They milled dried milk, soybeans, ceramics, dried apple residues. Over time the bookings changed character until almost everyone asking for a trial was a recycler.
Broring left Shanghai for Diepholz, a small town in northern Germany, and joined a company that was all engineers and production workers, with nobody to handle the invoices or answer the telephone. Her father died a few years ago and never saw where the idea went. What he left her was a question she still runs the plant by: how do you mill and grind obsolete material and get everything out of it, not 80 per cent but 100 per cent.
Walk into MWT today and it still reads as a mill. Milling, screening, sieving, line production. In come control units from carmakers, cable scrap, the residues that fall out of car shredding and household appliance recycling. Out come around 20 possible products: aluminium, several grades of steel, copper carrying silver or gold. Those granulates go to smelters, and each contract corresponds to a particular recipe, which makes matching material to smelting technology a continuous engineering problem.
When the smelter reports back, sometimes half a year after the material first arrived, MWT takes the assay data to the supplier. The carmaker learns not only what it was paid but exactly how much copper and how many parts per million of gold were sitting inside its obsolete control units. That information can travel back to compliance teams, to sustainability reporting, and to the people who design the next unit.
Too late on the conveyor belt
Brien’s central complaint is about timing, and it applies to the entire industry. Waste companies are deploying AI hard, mounting cameras above conveyor belts to sort material more finely and capture more value from it. Greyparrot and Recycleye have built serious businesses doing exactly that, and Brien admires both — on the recording he calls Greyparrot “an amazing company.” But he thinks they are arriving after the decisive moment has passed.
By the time material reaches a recycling facility it has already travelled the country several times, been mixed with other streams, and lost value that can never be recovered. So Waste Tide built its tool for the producer rather than the processor: non-intrusive software on the factory floor that tells a facility manager whether he is sitting on a million euros or on something dangerous with a negative value.
The people Brien works with, in plants at companies like Alstom, do not want to be told they own an asset. They want the money. So the product identifies the buyer as well as the value, and the transaction follows. It is also, he points out, one of the very few sustainability propositions that survived the shift in political weather, because it is one of the very few where profitability and environmental benefit are the same number.
Dead cows, carbon fibre and a deal on air
The demand side of this market turns out to be stranger and hungrier than anyone assumes. Defence companies have approached Brien looking for e-waste streams containing specific critical raw minerals they intend to extract themselves. Total came asking for slaughterhouse waste, which he found surprising until it was explained that dead cattle are excellent input for a methaniser. What they wanted from him was not the material so much as a map of where to find it.
Then, live on the recording, the market did what markets do. Staincliffe asked Brien whether he works with the companies that need feedstock rather than only those disposing of it, because Uplift 360 needs carbon fibre. Brien said yes: he has clients sitting on stocks of carbon fibre with no idea what to do with them, and he could name a supplier in northern France with 200 tonnes. Broring added that she recently turned down a job involving a copper and carbon fibre composite because MWT cannot process it, and that Germany, in her view most of Europe, lacks carbon fibre recycling capacity altogether. She offered to pass the customer to Staincliffe.
None of this was arranged in advance. It happened because three people who spend their working lives on the same problem were, for once, in the same room — and the room was this podcast! “This could be the first deal done on the Impact Equation,” Rafi said as it unfolded, and the episode closed with a promise to introduce the three of them afterwards so the conversations could continue. In the space of an hour the show had brokered two live introductions: a French supplier sitting on 200 tonnes of carbon fibre matched to a manufacturer that needs precisely that feedstock, and a German customer holding an unprocessable composite handed to the one guest equipped to process it.
Three founders, one hour, two potential transactions — and a show that, for those sixty minutes, stopped being a broadcast and became a marketplace. The market for secondary materials is not short of demand. It is short of visibility. Here, briefly, The Impact Equation supplied it.
What they ask of us
Staincliffe wants Europe to reinvest in its own industrial base. “We are outsourcing more than we should,” she says. “We need to bring heavy industries in a lot of instances back to Europe.” Circularity, in her framing, is not a virtue project. It is how a continent without ore rebuilds the capacity to make things.
Brien wants a word retired. He is exasperated by procurement teams who can quote him the price of aluminium or cardboard in under a minute and then lose all confidence the moment the same material hits the skip. “Why are you so bad at knowing the value of secondary materials?” he asks.
Stop talking about sustainability in buying meetings, Broring says. Talk instead about testing, about how life cycle assessment shapes strategy, about being paid fairly and transparently for scrap. And get the right people in the room at the same time: the strategic buyer, the circular economy team, compliance, and the head of production. Deals fail, she says, not because the case is weak but because the buyer or the production lead was never at the table.
Which returns us to a boy at a table in a French market, selling objects whose previous owners had already decided they were worth nothing. The lesson of the flea market is not that rubbish can be sold. It is that nothing is rubbish until someone prices it that way, usually in a hurry, at the gate, with no information to hand. Europe has been making that judgement badly for decades, and paying twice for the privilege: once to throw the material away, and again to buy it back from someone else’s continent.
Until next time,
Adam and Rafi
Our full conversation with Sam Staincliffe, Nicolas Brien and Elisabeth Broring is available now on The Impact Equation, as is our prior conversation with Mikela Druckman of GreyParrot.