AI transcript
0:00:10 pushkin this is an iheart podcast
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0:00:33 844-844-iheart the medal of honor is the highest military decoration in the united states
0:00:39 recipients have done the improbable the unexpected showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name
0:00:46 of something much bigger than themselves this medal is for the man who went down that day on
0:00:51 medal of honor stories of courage you’ll hear about these heroes and what their stories tell
0:00:57 us about the nature of bravery listen to medal of honor on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or
0:01:04 wherever you get your podcasts imagine you’re running a factory you’ve got to put out a consistent
0:01:11 high quality product that your customers will buy but you have no control over the raw materials that
0:01:19 come into your factory every day one day half of what comes in is literal garbage the next mixed in
0:01:26 with your usual inputs is some random lithium ion battery it’s a fire hazard and also a surfboard
0:01:33 weird and you have to deal with all this stuff and still keep getting your product out the door
0:01:41 this is literally the way the recycling business works recycling plants take in a largely random
0:01:47 occasionally hazardous stream of stuff a stream of stuff that changes in a pretty unpredictable way from
0:01:54 day to day from hour to hour and then recycling plants have to turn that random stream of inputs into
0:02:03 aluminum and plastic and cardboard that other companies will buy and use to make new stuff this is why my
0:02:10 guest today calls recycling the most demented form of manufacturing on the planet and it’s why she and her
0:02:14 colleagues are trying to use technology to bring some order to the recycling chaos
0:02:25 i’m jacob goldstein and this is what’s your problem the show where i talk to people who are trying to make
0:02:33 technological progress my guest today is rebecca who troms she’s the co-founder and ceo of a company called
0:02:40 glacier rebecca’s problem is this how do you use ai and robotics to make recycling a somewhat less
0:02:46 demented business if rebecca and her colleagues are successful they’ll not only help recycling plants work
0:02:51 better they’ll help companies figure out how to recycle more of the stuff that they’re sending out into
0:02:56 the world in the first place our conversation started with rebecca talking about the moment around
0:03:04 five years ago when she and her co-founder decided to start the company i was you know even at the time
0:03:10 obsessed with trash just obsessed with where does all of our stuff go and it’s one of those i call it
0:03:15 like a matrix moment or a red pill moment where once you realize that you’ve never thought about where all
0:03:23 all of your garbage goes after you put your bins on the curb you can’t unsee that right and so this was
0:03:27 also around the time where there was a lot of change happening in the recycling industry so we’re
0:03:34 rewinding to roughly 2018 2019 one cataclysmic shift for the industry is that china who had previously been
0:03:42 the world’s largest buyer of recycled uh feedstock to make into new things they basically said very rapidly
0:03:47 you know what we’re taking in the world’s recycling but most of this is trash people are not sorting it
0:03:52 well enough we’re getting a ton of contamination and we don’t want to end up as the planet’s landfill
0:03:58 or incinerator so we’re going to drastically increase the bar on quality of what we’re accepting
0:04:03 and then that caused shock waves throughout the globe and certainly for the us where suddenly recyclers
0:04:09 for the first time in a long time were like the game is not to just crank through all this recycled
0:04:16 material bail it and ship it overseas we actually need to invest a lot more uh in increasing the bar
0:04:22 on quality and on purity rate and what’s even more challenging is that a lot of the backbone historically
0:04:28 and even to this day is still just people standing next to conveyor belts sifting through our recycling
0:04:33 and our trash and of course that’s not only very dangerous uh it’s not a very well compensated job
0:04:38 there’s a lot of hazards there but also there’s this massive sort of labor shortage yes it seems
0:04:43 like a robot friendly moment a robot friendly environment so like what’s your move what’s your
0:04:49 first move so my my co-founder had already at the time he wasn’t my co-founder he was just a friend of
0:04:55 a friend um he was already pretty intent on this idea that hey you know automation ai all of these
0:05:03 technologies are so good now that for the first time we could feasibly rapidly commercialize a purpose-built
0:05:09 industrial robot specifically for recycling sortation huh and it’s not going to cost us massive amounts of
0:05:15 capital and we can actually do it in a matter of like a couple of years so this idea that oh now is
0:05:21 the moment is it computer vision like what is the underlying technology that made five years ago
0:05:26 or whatever the moment when oh we can do this in a way that hasn’t been done before yeah honestly it’s
0:05:31 the confluence of a lot of things so i’ll break it down into sort of the computer vision piece and then
0:05:38 also the the hardware or the robotics yes when you think about where industrial automation has come from
0:05:45 even to this day a lot of those technologies are operating in really well-defined truly repetitive
0:05:51 rote environments so think about a robot at a warehouse and it’s literally just palletizing
0:05:57 identical boxes over and over again and so to hearken back to this idea of recycling plants as being this
0:06:04 extremely volatile manufacturing environment even if you have automation that’s just sorting let’s say
0:06:09 aluminum cans right yeah you’re talking about aluminum cans that your computer vision needs to
0:06:15 detect in infinite varieties not just thinking about the wide variety of cans that are on the market and
0:06:21 all of their you know colors and designs but also the fact that they show up not as pristine cans but
0:06:28 crinkled in various ways stuffed into bags like there’s so much heterogeneity that even just identifying
0:06:34 that item on a conveyor belt that by the way has you know dozens of other types of items on it is
0:06:40 already a massive challenge that only recently has been something that we can adapt to in a cost-effective
0:06:46 way and then you can layer on to that the fact that now you’re not only seeing those items with this
0:06:52 computer vision system but you also need to find a way to actually go and grab that material and sort it
0:06:58 into the right location so when we talk about advances in sort of off the shelf parts that you use to
0:07:04 design and make your robot or even like the gripping technology that’s available a lot of that even a
0:07:10 decade ago would have required an immense amount of r&d with a much bigger team and a much higher price tag
0:07:15 to get to the same point that we’ve gotten to after just a couple of years tell me about the first one you
0:07:20 built tell me about building a prototype and putting it in the world oh man so there are a lot of uh
0:07:25 different stages to our prototyping the first prototype if you want to go way back was when i
0:07:30 hadn’t even decided to start this company with my co-founder yet but i did tell him i would help him
0:07:36 learn about the industry see if there was some sort of a business to be had and we uh met in his kitchen
0:07:42 in san francisco where he had a little you know corner set up so like very very simple um i think that it
0:07:48 actually involved a used yogurt tub as like this rotating wheel with a piece of string tied around it
0:07:54 like that’s how janky we were talking but it worked we were like okay there’s something here the first
0:07:59 piece of equipment we actually installed into a recycling facility also tells you a lot about the
0:08:05 constraints that these facilities are under i was kind of thinking we had to have this super built out
0:08:12 sophisticated polished thing that we’ve proven out to the nines in the lab and we actually called up a
0:08:16 number of recycling facility operators nearby and one of them was like you know what when you got
0:08:22 something just like bring it in here and and try it out because literally i remember him saying if
0:08:28 your robot can pick one more can than i would have gotten otherwise like it’s already worth it to me
0:08:34 just try it was there a rat moment tell me more did you see a rat when you were putting in the first
0:08:42 literally i was like what what is not a metaphor not a metaphor a rodent i i have seen many rats um
0:08:47 literally even on that first install there was a moment where i was like literally army crawling under
0:08:53 a conveyor belt to fasten one of the legs of the robot and i i came eye to eye with a rat who then of
0:08:57 course grabbed a piece of food that was on the floor and then scurried away right there are many uh
0:09:02 friendly critters uh running around some of these facilities was there any part of you that kind of
0:09:08 loved it oh a hundred percent so let’s talk about where you are today both on a kind of micro level
0:09:13 like what your robot or robots look like and then also a little more macro of like the scope of the
0:09:19 business do you have like one basic robot what’s it look like or you got a bunch of them yeah so we
0:09:26 have uh one base model of robot we actually are already working with several dozen customers across
0:09:32 the country but if you imagine any sort of conveyor belt in an industrial facility our robot think of
0:09:38 it almost like a table right so it’s got four legs and it kind of sits over that belt and then the the
0:09:44 guts of the robot or the mechanisms doing the picking are kind of over the top of that conveyor system so
0:09:50 you’ve got these arms that are going back and forth um they can pick up something from the belt and then
0:09:54 they carry it off to one of those sides of the belt where they actually drop it into the right location
0:09:59 okay so that that’s the robot and now one other thing we haven’t really talked about is this computer
0:10:05 vision system so that’s yeah imagine basically like a camera with some lights to illuminate the belt
0:10:10 sitting on this little rig that’s a little bit uh upstream of the robot so the material passes under
0:10:16 the camera the camera has a second to process uh or shall i say a couple milliseconds to process what
0:10:21 it’s seeing and then not only does it tell the robot you know hey there’s a can coming in this
0:10:27 location pick it and then put it into this other spot but what we’re also finding is that that data
0:10:34 as a standalone is also able to massively advance these operators abilities to understand and optimize
0:10:40 their facilities so that’s opened up a whole new world of use cases because they weren’t gathering
0:10:46 data in that kind of way before they they only sort of knew what was coming through in a very gross macro
0:10:53 way right and and this gets back to you know recycling facility operators i have so much admiration for how
0:10:57 they have gotten really resourceful with trying to understand their operations but you know to give
0:11:03 you a sense of things the state of the art in the industry to this day is still mostly manual audits and
0:11:08 when i say that i mean imagine taking a half ton of material off your line and then literally having
0:11:15 two to four people hand sort and categorize and weigh each item to understand what’s coming through
0:11:19 and then assuming that that half ton is representative of like the thousands of tons
0:11:24 coming through your facility on a yearly basis i often tell the story of one of our early data customers
0:11:30 uh this gentleman who runs a recycling facility in california when he met me he was telling me that
0:11:36 he had mounted a gopro camera above his conveyor belt the one that was basically supposed to be all
0:11:41 trash leaving the facility but he knew he was missing some good stuff and he would spend an hour a day
0:11:48 after work going frame by frame through some random snippet and manually tallying how many cans and bottles
0:11:54 uh were on that line and then using that to back into what he would try and change in his operation
0:11:59 the next day and then he would check that day to see if it changed anything and so imagine his delight
0:12:03 when i told him hey actually we can mount our own camera on there and suddenly we’ll just give you
0:12:09 access to a dashboard a machine will literally count everything that goes literally literally in real
0:12:13 time so we’re seeing that you know the robot is this incredible foot in the door with a lot of our
0:12:19 facility uh partners but that everyone’s starting to realize that hey actually this data can also help
0:12:25 us understand the entire world not just the location where the robot is sitting either so at this point is
0:12:32 it kind of a robot business on the front but really you’re like a computer vision data ai business
0:12:38 so a lot of customers come to us saying you know i literally had a gentleman tell me a couple months
0:12:42 ago like i would never pay you to tell me what i already know about my trash and i’m like i’m not
0:12:46 going to convince you that you don’t already know everything about your trash but you know you want
0:12:51 a robot let’s get you a robot and that has since evolved the conversation where we’re just sort of
0:12:55 starting to show him this data and he’s like oh actually i didn’t realize that this was the case
0:12:59 the flip side is also true where someone’s like i don’t know if i need a robot yet but i’m really
0:13:03 interested to see what i’m losing on the back end we install that camera and then suddenly
0:13:07 lo and behold that data makes the case that holy cow i’m losing so much stuff i don’t just need one
0:13:13 robot i maybe need two or even three robots right so it’s kind of this mutually reinforcing flywheel
0:13:18 that’s been really integral to the success of our business so far tell me about your work with amazon
0:13:26 and with colgate palm olive what are you doing for them with them yeah so to start maybe just i’d love
0:13:30 to explore this idea of what is a circular economy because it’s a buzzword that gets thrown out a lot
0:13:35 but um it’s really important to understand why amazon and colgate and their peers matter here
0:13:41 right now we are living in mostly a linear economy in other words someone makes a thing we consume a
0:13:46 thing and then we dispose of it right a circular economy tries to turn that process into a circle so
0:13:51 instead of throwing it out in a landfill forever or incinerating it that material gets brought back
0:13:56 to the front end and reused somehow to make new stuff that we can then consume and the ideal is
0:14:02 to make this go on forever so that we limit our resource consumption yeah so now that we have this
0:14:06 growing base of recycling facilities that are you know gathering data that are getting a better
0:14:11 understanding of what’s coming into their facilities what’s actually being bailed and sent out to the end
0:14:18 markets we’re working with companies like amazon and colgate on a number of fronts you know the first
0:14:24 is even just to understand where is all of that packaging going to their credit uh they and
0:14:30 several of their peers have realized that there’s a paradigm shift possible now from we have designed
0:14:35 a thing that’s technically recyclable you know our packaging r&d engineers have made this awesome
0:14:43 monomaterial hdpe toothpaste tube in colgate’s example um to now trying to understand okay well
0:14:49 we made this thing that is recyclable is it actually getting recycled and that was a lens that we couldn’t
0:14:55 really get at scale before um and so now with glacier’s technology we’re able to monitor in real time
0:15:01 you know how much of these tubes are actually ending up at the recycling facility and once they’re in the
0:15:06 facility are they ending up in the right place are they being sorted correctly such that they can
0:15:11 actually be turned into new stuff or are they ending up in the landfill in which case you know
0:15:15 suddenly this recyclable tube isn’t very recyclable at all so we’re starting to answer these really
0:15:22 really critical questions so colgate knows whatever how many tubes of toothpaste they sold in a city and
0:15:28 if you are working in the recycling facility for that city you can actually count how many tubes of
0:15:32 that toothpaste came down the recycling line and how many tubes of that toothpaste wound up in the bin i
0:15:38 mean is that the reductive version of what you’re saying essentially yeah and where we’re even seeing
0:15:44 now like with these rapid advances in in ai and in detection that first of all it’s no small feat to
0:15:49 even define what is a tube and how do you tell the difference between a toothpaste tube versus a
0:15:54 sunscreen tube versus a lotion tube yeah um but now we’re getting to the point where we can actually say
0:16:00 the brand of toothpaste it is like from all of those visual markings and so um we’re just seeing this
0:16:05 sort of cambrian explosion of interest from a wide variety of different you know packaging producers and
0:16:12 brands to really start understanding this previous black box on what happens once they release this
0:16:17 packaging into the wild for consumers to buy so i understand that california has a law
0:16:24 that is in some fashion supposed to put companies like on the hook for their for their products right
0:16:31 after they’re used to incentivize companies to have their products be recycled right is is that am i
0:16:35 characterizing that law right and is it relevant to your business yes so i believe you’re referring
0:16:42 to epr or extended producer responsibility laws for those who may not have heard of epr it’s essentially
0:16:48 this premise that you know if our recycling and waste system is supposed to find a way to do something
0:16:52 good with all the stuff we’re throwing out the people making all this stuff that we’re throwing
0:16:57 out should probably have some skin in the game to make sure that that stuff gets uh either disposed
0:17:04 of or reused properly right and so uh epr laws are already in effect uh throughout europe uh throughout
0:17:09 canada some other regions and then they’ve been passed uh in a number of states in the us including
0:17:16 california now while epr in the us is still in its infancy in other words it’s been passed in a number
0:17:22 of states but there’s a lot of hairiness to figuring out how to actually implement the system across all the
0:17:28 producers selling into a state and all of the you know recyclers operating in that state it is i think
0:17:34 a step in the right direction because in a lot of ways it helps to create that circle we were talking
0:17:40 about earlier you know you’re seeing that a lot of brands and producers are starting to take even more
0:17:44 of a vested interest in understanding what is happening to all of their packaging because they
0:17:49 know that imminently they’re going to need to start proving the sort of end-of-life outcomes for that
0:17:56 packaging in order to you know one not be heavily fined and then two maybe even have a a right to continue
0:18:02 selling into that state it seems good that amazon and colgate palmolive are trying to figure out if the
0:18:08 things they make that are recyclable are actually being recycled but it seems like for that sort of
0:18:13 thing to happen at a meaningful scale you would need laws basically right i mean if the companies are just
0:18:18 incurring the cost either out of the goodness of their heart or in the hopes of you know generating
0:18:25 goodwill that will lead to higher revenues those seem like marginal cases are the epr laws such that
0:18:30 you think it will become a meaningful part of your business a meaningful part of the world that
0:18:34 companies will in fact be on the hook to figure it out or like what do you think is going to happen
0:18:39 you know i will say that early indicators are that all of these states are taking it quite seriously so
0:18:47 in addition to requiring a lot of these brands and producers to pay into a massive fund up front to even
0:18:53 just start implementing some of this movement a lot of these states are also you know we’re seeing that
0:18:58 some of the kind of like early deadlines and fines for non-compliance are actually being upheld which i
0:19:04 think is is a really strong signal to the market hey this is something that needs to get taken seriously
0:19:12 now to your point i do think that at the end of the day whatever flavor this legislation takes the key
0:19:18 to make sure that recycling is still a you know viable and sustainable value proposition is that there
0:19:25 needs to be some sort of an end market for that material right because let’s say these brands even if
0:19:32 they’re required to pay billions of dollars into this epr system if there’s no one on the back end to
0:19:37 receive that material that these recycling facilities are sorting then recycling can’t really happen
0:19:44 right at the end of the day someone needs to buy the bale of plastic exactly exactly but if they can
0:19:51 have guarantee that there is a buyer on the other side right and that that person or that company will buy
0:19:58 at a certain price then suddenly they can sustain that business quite well for the long run and so to that
0:20:02 point you know one other model that’s uh often brought up in the realm of legislation is actually
0:20:08 minimum recycled content laws because uh it kind of gets at the same the same issue from the other side
0:20:14 where you say basically creating demand creating demand for a bale of recycled plastic coming out of the
0:20:22 recycling facility exactly and it kind of disentangles the um the market for recycled feedstock from the market for
0:20:27 virgin feedstock which is another great way to kind of catalyze the movement of that material throughout
0:20:28 that recycling ecosystem
0:20:34 we’ll be back in just a minute
0:20:47 run a business and not thinking about podcasting think again more americans listen to podcasts than
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0:21:17 the medal of honor is the highest military decoration in the united states recipients have done the
0:21:23 improbable showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves
0:21:30 this medal is for the men who went down that day it’s for the families of those who didn’t make it
0:21:37 i’m jr martinez i’m a u.s army veteran myself and i’m honored to tell you the stories of these heroes
0:21:44 on the new season of medal of honor stories of courage from pushkin industries and i heart podcast
0:21:51 from robert blake the first black sailor to be awarded the medal to daniel daly one of only 19
0:21:56 people to have received the medal of honor twice these are stories about people who have distinguished
0:22:03 themselves by acts of valor going above and beyond the call of duty you’ll hear about what they did
0:22:11 what it meant and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice listen to medal
0:22:16 of honor on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast
0:22:23 what are you trying to figure out right now what’s a big thing you’re trying to figure out we are at a
0:22:32 really exciting inflection point at glacier because of i think two big things here the first is just how do we
0:22:39 scale um smoothly and rapidly you know we’ve gone from a year ago we were making maybe one robot every
0:22:44 three months and now we have the capacity to make three to four robots per month and we’re expecting
0:22:50 to go even faster by the end of this year in the next six months and then the other big frontier for us
0:22:55 in addition to just you know how do we scale and get more of our stuff out there is what the heck do we
0:23:01 do with all of this data right we’ve already seen that the early use cases for this information people
0:23:08 are taking to really in droves but there’s a much more built-out version of this data platform where
0:23:13 we say you know we don’t just have a camera in one or two points throughout your facility we can actually
0:23:19 get sensors to sort of blanket the facility and in that regard we can take a huge step towards becoming
0:23:25 more like that manufacturer who uh has information on every single step of their process and can respond
0:23:30 in real time and know exactly what’s going on at each stage so i mean let’s just talk about the
0:23:34 recycling business for a minute the facilities you’re talking about they’re just private companies the
0:23:40 vast majority of them are so uh this is a common misconception about recycling is that you know these
0:23:45 are all you know somehow like public entities by our estimation about 80 or 85 percent of these
0:23:51 recycling facilities are um privately owned and they can be anything from a family-owned you know
0:23:56 business all the way up to the massive waste companies like waste management republic services
0:24:02 waste connections these are publicly traded companies that also own many of these recycling plants as well
0:24:09 and the recycling plants are buying recycling from municipalities like are they do they pay for
0:24:17 whatever cans and plastic jugs it’s actually a very interesting question it depends a lot on the
0:24:22 condition of those end markets we talked about so in today’s climate where those markets are really
0:24:28 volatile and a little bit uncertain oftentimes you know these recycling facilities will get paid by
0:24:34 municipalities in order to take in and process that material but what’s interesting is you know back
0:24:39 during the heyday of recycling when you know china was buying everything there was no shortage of uh
0:24:46 you know appetite for that material the equation flipped my sense is some recycling is quite efficient
0:24:51 and a good business and some is not very efficient and a bad business right give me the like stack ranking
0:24:56 for recycling best thing to recycle to worst yeah the i mean at the end of the day the best things to
0:25:02 recycle according to a recycling facility operator would be the things that most reliably will make you the
0:25:08 most money so uh top of the stack would be aluminum cans because there’s always a market for those they’re
0:25:15 super easily recyclable and to recycle an aluminum can actually uses about 95 less energy than to make that
0:25:22 aluminum can from that virgin ore and this gets back to the point about the the sort of cost spread between
0:25:28 recycled versus virgin feedstock right the the harder and more costly it is to make it virgin
0:25:34 the more of a willing market there is for that recycled material so cans are great they always work as a
0:25:39 business aluminum cans are good okay what’s next aluminum cans are great next is we’re going to get a
0:25:46 little technical here uh hdpe natural so this is hdpe is a type of plastic resin if you look at the little
0:25:52 chasing arrows recycling logo it’s resin number two and most commonly it takes the form of milk jugs
0:25:58 right that’s that’s sort of translucent white the gallon milk jug exactly exactly um and then from
0:26:05 there you know i’d say it’s probably pet bottles so that’s triangle number one that’s like your water
0:26:12 bottles your soda bottles this is actually a type of resin where we forecast a huge gap in the supply
0:26:17 versus what’s going to be demanded about five years from now so that’s a really interesting one to watch
0:26:23 and then why i can imagine demand going up but why can’t they just make more of them from virgin
0:26:29 petroleum or whatever yeah it’s a combination of legislative requirements around minimum recycled
0:26:38 content combined with uh sort of like the nature of the end markets that are demanding pet so you know pet
0:26:44 could be used by you know water or beverage bottle manufacturers but a lot of that pet also gets
0:26:52 absorbed into markets you wouldn’t imagine like carpet or mattresses or other textiles so the bad news is
0:26:57 that there’s plastic everywhere but the good news is at least they can use our recycled bottles exactly
0:27:03 exactly so that that’s one turf that’s getting pretty heated uh and then to at least to round out the sort of
0:27:09 container side of things the other very common thing that gets sorted is hgpe color so h again it’s triangle
0:27:15 number two but it’s it’s been dyed right so this is typically things like your shampoo bottles or your
0:27:20 laundry detergent jugs and so is that also like pretty good are we still at pretty good on the stack that’s
0:27:26 all that’s all pretty good i’d say those every single recycling facility you go to will sort out those
0:27:32 commodities okay and i’ll mention here that there’s a big time honorable mention for cardboard and for
0:27:38 paper i was focusing on containers but a lot of people talk about plastics a ton the majority of
0:27:43 the recycling stream is still paper and cardboard right so that stuff like that’s almost table stakes
0:27:47 for a recycling facility you just have to get that right if you want to stay profitable and that and
0:27:52 that’s a reasonable business as well yes that’s a very reasonable business a lot of these recycling
0:27:58 facilities actually talk about something called the amazon effect in other words as you know e-commerce
0:28:03 and shipping has become the way we buy things cardboard has just inundated the recycling stream
0:28:09 which is great because you can always sell cardboard now there’s a really hot market but also not so great
0:28:14 because maybe your facility was built 10 to 20 years ago before this became a thing and now you have to
0:28:18 find a way to sort of jerry-rig it to handle all of these massive oversized boxes that are coming
0:28:24 through your stream so what that we recycle is dumb isn’t really getting recycled doesn’t make
0:28:30 sense whatever yeah uh this is a very long tale of things you know i mentioned everything else yeah
0:28:36 it is the everything else and this points me to what i often tell people is a misconception about
0:28:40 recycling is the phenomenon of wish cycling and i i was guilty of this too until i started glacier and
0:28:44 learned a bit more which is this idea that if you’re not sure if something is recyclable a lot of
0:28:49 people who want to do good for the planet are like i’ll toss it into the recycling bin in case they can
0:28:53 do something with it and in fact this ends up being a huge problem for these facilities because most of
0:28:58 the time they can’t do something with it much as we wish they could so a lot of these contaminants that
0:29:05 people throw in there are things like those plastic bags or you know those films and flexibles which
0:29:12 some facilities can recycle but most can’t it’s things that have plastic in them but it’s not kind of standard
0:29:19 plastic so for example uh one very confusing and insidious example that gets brought off up often
0:29:24 is children’s toys right maybe they’re made out of some bulky plastic you’re like hopefully this can
0:29:29 be recycled but chances are that toy has various different grades of plastic on it that aren’t easy
0:29:34 to pull apart and heaven forbid it’s an electronic toy with the batteries still in it because that can
0:29:37 literally cause an explosion or a fire and blow up the facility
0:29:44 we’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round
0:29:57 run a business and not thinking about podcasting think again more americans listen to podcasts than
0:30:02 ad-supported streaming music from spotify and pandora and as the number one podcaster iHeart’s twice as
0:30:07 large as the next two combined so whatever your customers listen to they’ll hear your message plus
0:30:12 only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio think podcasting can help
0:30:20 your business think iHeart streaming radio and podcasting call 844-844-iHeart to get started that’s
0:30:26 that’s 844-844-iHeart the medal of honor is the highest military decoration in the united states
0:30:32 recipients have done the improbable showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much
0:30:39 bigger than themselves this medal is for the man who went down that day it’s for the families of those who
0:30:46 who did make it i’m jr martinez i’m a u.s army veteran myself and i’m honored to tell you the stories of
0:30:53 these heroes on the new season of medal of honor stories of courage from pushkin industries and iHeart
0:31:01 podcast from robert blake the first black sailor to be awarded the medal to daniel daly one of only 19
0:31:06 people to have received the medal of honor twice these are stories about people who have distinguished
0:31:14 themselves by acts of valor going above and beyond the call of duty you’ll hear about what they did what
0:31:21 it meant and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice listen to medal of
0:31:26 honor on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast
0:31:34 let’s do a lightning round it’s going to be a little more random so i know you were a consultant
0:31:39 is it right that you were a management consultant i was a management consultant i’m curious you know
0:31:46 now you run a company right i’m curious what do you know now from running a company that you wish
0:31:54 you knew when you were you know telling people how to run their company yeah i think a lot of what i’ve
0:32:02 learned running glacier has been around always identifying and then sort of like revalidating
0:32:09 what is that north star metric or objective that we’re aiming for and then making sure that anything
0:32:14 else we’re working on or anything we’re communicating is in support of that so like you’re still a consultant
0:32:22 absolutely i mean honestly i think like running glacier a lot of people think that the tech is
0:32:26 the hard part and don’t get me wrong it’s insanely hard insanely challenging but when you think about
0:32:35 something as cross-functional as a circular economy like i’d say the majority of my day gets spent thinking about how to align
0:32:42 incentives right like recycling facilities brands manufacturers local legislators like they all kind of want different things
0:32:49 things so how do you explain initiatives or proposals to each of those parties in a way that makes sense
0:32:53 to them and gets everyone rowing in the same direction so it’s the answer nothing it’s the answer
0:32:58 you feel like you’re actually still doing what you were doing no no not at all i mean i would say that um
0:33:04 you know one big mindset shift for me that has been very healthy is i’m definitely a perfectionist
0:33:10 and a type a personality you know by upbringing and in management consulting you’re really encouraged to lean into that
0:33:16 right like people are are paying you big bucks to make sure that you got every every single last detail
0:33:24 down to the decimal place right everywhere um and so um you know i’d say that my my consulting days were
0:33:29 great for training me on like how to make sure i knew what details mattered and really like make sure
0:33:35 that everything lined up uh but with an early stage startup it’s the opposite right like you don’t have time
0:33:43 to be perfecting everything and so that has actually allowed me to sort of flex towards how quickly can i
0:33:49 move and still be efficient right like what is the right sort of balance of making sure that you’re
0:33:53 putting out high quality work and that things are generally moving the right direction but also realizing
0:33:59 that actually it’s okay and probably good that certain balls are getting dropped because as one of my mentors
0:34:05 told me if you find that you are doing everything perfectly and nothing is failing you’re probably
0:34:11 not moving fast enough yeah i interviewed the guy who started planet the satellite company and he told
0:34:17 me that he he was upset when none of their satellites were failing it meant they weren’t launching soon
0:34:22 enough they were spending too long to work on it it’s the same that’s exactly right that’s been a massive
0:34:27 learning and frankly a pretty painful one in the early years of glacier when all i wanted was to make sure that
0:34:33 every single thing i outputted was gonna work and uh you know at the end of the day i was like i just
0:34:36 got to get get rid of some of those sort of controlling tendencies if i really want this
0:34:43 company to to scale at the rate that it needs to what’s one tip to stop being too type a when you’re
0:34:48 running a startup honestly uh i don’t know that this is healthy but my approach was to kind of just like
0:34:54 overwhelm myself give yourself too many things to do so that you have to just pass them on before you’re
0:34:59 done with them yeah and i’d say it wasn’t our intentional per se because it’s certainly not a
0:35:07 very pleasant experience to go through but i i often joke uh that you know i think starting an early
0:35:12 stage company was maybe the only thing that could have broken me of some of these perfectionist habits
0:35:20 because um i really had to go through sort of the dark side of pulling all-nighters working myself to the
0:35:26 bone realizing you know like what is this all for and having that sort of existential crisis moment to
0:35:30 say okay i don’t want to give up on glacier and i know we’ve got an immense amount of potential ahead
0:35:37 of us so i now need to fundamentally rethink how i’m balancing this list of a thousand priorities
0:35:41 if i want to do it and still be around and a successful leader years from now
0:35:46 are you less of a perfectionist in your non-work life now than you used to be
0:35:54 uh absolutely it’s like amazing what perspective gives you on things just a lack of time yes yeah
0:36:01 yeah some would call it just a raw lack of time um i do think that it really sort of forces you to think
0:36:06 much bigger picture about what matters to you and make sure that you’re carving time out for that
0:36:12 and then just not sweating the details and the amazing thing is once you start doing that and you
0:36:16 realize that the world isn’t going to end because you forgot to do this thing or decided not to do
0:36:21 that thing perfectly it gets easier and easier to do right so that’s been really healthy for me
0:36:36 rebecca hu trams is the co-founder and ceo of glacier please email us at problem at pushkin dot fm
0:36:42 we are always looking for new guests for the show today’s show was produced by trina menino
0:36:48 and gabriel hunter chang it was edited by alexandra garrettin and engineered by sarah bruggear
0:36:51 i’m jacob goldstein and we’ll be back next week with another episode of what’s your problem
0:37:05 the medal of honor is the highest military decoration in the united states recipients have done the
0:37:12 improbable the unexpected showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than
0:37:19 themselves this medal is for the man who went down that day on medal of honor stories of courage you’ll
0:37:24 hear about these heroes and what their stories tell us about the nature of bravery listen to medal of
0:37:35 honor on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts this is an iheart podcast
0:00:18 run a business and not thinking about podcasting think again more americans listen to podcasts
0:00:22 then add supported streaming music from spotify and pandora and as the number one podcaster
0:00:26 iheart’s twice as large as the next two combined learn how podcasting can help your business call
0:00:33 844-844-iheart the medal of honor is the highest military decoration in the united states
0:00:39 recipients have done the improbable the unexpected showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name
0:00:46 of something much bigger than themselves this medal is for the man who went down that day on
0:00:51 medal of honor stories of courage you’ll hear about these heroes and what their stories tell
0:00:57 us about the nature of bravery listen to medal of honor on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or
0:01:04 wherever you get your podcasts imagine you’re running a factory you’ve got to put out a consistent
0:01:11 high quality product that your customers will buy but you have no control over the raw materials that
0:01:19 come into your factory every day one day half of what comes in is literal garbage the next mixed in
0:01:26 with your usual inputs is some random lithium ion battery it’s a fire hazard and also a surfboard
0:01:33 weird and you have to deal with all this stuff and still keep getting your product out the door
0:01:41 this is literally the way the recycling business works recycling plants take in a largely random
0:01:47 occasionally hazardous stream of stuff a stream of stuff that changes in a pretty unpredictable way from
0:01:54 day to day from hour to hour and then recycling plants have to turn that random stream of inputs into
0:02:03 aluminum and plastic and cardboard that other companies will buy and use to make new stuff this is why my
0:02:10 guest today calls recycling the most demented form of manufacturing on the planet and it’s why she and her
0:02:14 colleagues are trying to use technology to bring some order to the recycling chaos
0:02:25 i’m jacob goldstein and this is what’s your problem the show where i talk to people who are trying to make
0:02:33 technological progress my guest today is rebecca who troms she’s the co-founder and ceo of a company called
0:02:40 glacier rebecca’s problem is this how do you use ai and robotics to make recycling a somewhat less
0:02:46 demented business if rebecca and her colleagues are successful they’ll not only help recycling plants work
0:02:51 better they’ll help companies figure out how to recycle more of the stuff that they’re sending out into
0:02:56 the world in the first place our conversation started with rebecca talking about the moment around
0:03:04 five years ago when she and her co-founder decided to start the company i was you know even at the time
0:03:10 obsessed with trash just obsessed with where does all of our stuff go and it’s one of those i call it
0:03:15 like a matrix moment or a red pill moment where once you realize that you’ve never thought about where all
0:03:23 all of your garbage goes after you put your bins on the curb you can’t unsee that right and so this was
0:03:27 also around the time where there was a lot of change happening in the recycling industry so we’re
0:03:34 rewinding to roughly 2018 2019 one cataclysmic shift for the industry is that china who had previously been
0:03:42 the world’s largest buyer of recycled uh feedstock to make into new things they basically said very rapidly
0:03:47 you know what we’re taking in the world’s recycling but most of this is trash people are not sorting it
0:03:52 well enough we’re getting a ton of contamination and we don’t want to end up as the planet’s landfill
0:03:58 or incinerator so we’re going to drastically increase the bar on quality of what we’re accepting
0:04:03 and then that caused shock waves throughout the globe and certainly for the us where suddenly recyclers
0:04:09 for the first time in a long time were like the game is not to just crank through all this recycled
0:04:16 material bail it and ship it overseas we actually need to invest a lot more uh in increasing the bar
0:04:22 on quality and on purity rate and what’s even more challenging is that a lot of the backbone historically
0:04:28 and even to this day is still just people standing next to conveyor belts sifting through our recycling
0:04:33 and our trash and of course that’s not only very dangerous uh it’s not a very well compensated job
0:04:38 there’s a lot of hazards there but also there’s this massive sort of labor shortage yes it seems
0:04:43 like a robot friendly moment a robot friendly environment so like what’s your move what’s your
0:04:49 first move so my my co-founder had already at the time he wasn’t my co-founder he was just a friend of
0:04:55 a friend um he was already pretty intent on this idea that hey you know automation ai all of these
0:05:03 technologies are so good now that for the first time we could feasibly rapidly commercialize a purpose-built
0:05:09 industrial robot specifically for recycling sortation huh and it’s not going to cost us massive amounts of
0:05:15 capital and we can actually do it in a matter of like a couple of years so this idea that oh now is
0:05:21 the moment is it computer vision like what is the underlying technology that made five years ago
0:05:26 or whatever the moment when oh we can do this in a way that hasn’t been done before yeah honestly it’s
0:05:31 the confluence of a lot of things so i’ll break it down into sort of the computer vision piece and then
0:05:38 also the the hardware or the robotics yes when you think about where industrial automation has come from
0:05:45 even to this day a lot of those technologies are operating in really well-defined truly repetitive
0:05:51 rote environments so think about a robot at a warehouse and it’s literally just palletizing
0:05:57 identical boxes over and over again and so to hearken back to this idea of recycling plants as being this
0:06:04 extremely volatile manufacturing environment even if you have automation that’s just sorting let’s say
0:06:09 aluminum cans right yeah you’re talking about aluminum cans that your computer vision needs to
0:06:15 detect in infinite varieties not just thinking about the wide variety of cans that are on the market and
0:06:21 all of their you know colors and designs but also the fact that they show up not as pristine cans but
0:06:28 crinkled in various ways stuffed into bags like there’s so much heterogeneity that even just identifying
0:06:34 that item on a conveyor belt that by the way has you know dozens of other types of items on it is
0:06:40 already a massive challenge that only recently has been something that we can adapt to in a cost-effective
0:06:46 way and then you can layer on to that the fact that now you’re not only seeing those items with this
0:06:52 computer vision system but you also need to find a way to actually go and grab that material and sort it
0:06:58 into the right location so when we talk about advances in sort of off the shelf parts that you use to
0:07:04 design and make your robot or even like the gripping technology that’s available a lot of that even a
0:07:10 decade ago would have required an immense amount of r&d with a much bigger team and a much higher price tag
0:07:15 to get to the same point that we’ve gotten to after just a couple of years tell me about the first one you
0:07:20 built tell me about building a prototype and putting it in the world oh man so there are a lot of uh
0:07:25 different stages to our prototyping the first prototype if you want to go way back was when i
0:07:30 hadn’t even decided to start this company with my co-founder yet but i did tell him i would help him
0:07:36 learn about the industry see if there was some sort of a business to be had and we uh met in his kitchen
0:07:42 in san francisco where he had a little you know corner set up so like very very simple um i think that it
0:07:48 actually involved a used yogurt tub as like this rotating wheel with a piece of string tied around it
0:07:54 like that’s how janky we were talking but it worked we were like okay there’s something here the first
0:07:59 piece of equipment we actually installed into a recycling facility also tells you a lot about the
0:08:05 constraints that these facilities are under i was kind of thinking we had to have this super built out
0:08:12 sophisticated polished thing that we’ve proven out to the nines in the lab and we actually called up a
0:08:16 number of recycling facility operators nearby and one of them was like you know what when you got
0:08:22 something just like bring it in here and and try it out because literally i remember him saying if
0:08:28 your robot can pick one more can than i would have gotten otherwise like it’s already worth it to me
0:08:34 just try it was there a rat moment tell me more did you see a rat when you were putting in the first
0:08:42 literally i was like what what is not a metaphor not a metaphor a rodent i i have seen many rats um
0:08:47 literally even on that first install there was a moment where i was like literally army crawling under
0:08:53 a conveyor belt to fasten one of the legs of the robot and i i came eye to eye with a rat who then of
0:08:57 course grabbed a piece of food that was on the floor and then scurried away right there are many uh
0:09:02 friendly critters uh running around some of these facilities was there any part of you that kind of
0:09:08 loved it oh a hundred percent so let’s talk about where you are today both on a kind of micro level
0:09:13 like what your robot or robots look like and then also a little more macro of like the scope of the
0:09:19 business do you have like one basic robot what’s it look like or you got a bunch of them yeah so we
0:09:26 have uh one base model of robot we actually are already working with several dozen customers across
0:09:32 the country but if you imagine any sort of conveyor belt in an industrial facility our robot think of
0:09:38 it almost like a table right so it’s got four legs and it kind of sits over that belt and then the the
0:09:44 guts of the robot or the mechanisms doing the picking are kind of over the top of that conveyor system so
0:09:50 you’ve got these arms that are going back and forth um they can pick up something from the belt and then
0:09:54 they carry it off to one of those sides of the belt where they actually drop it into the right location
0:09:59 okay so that that’s the robot and now one other thing we haven’t really talked about is this computer
0:10:05 vision system so that’s yeah imagine basically like a camera with some lights to illuminate the belt
0:10:10 sitting on this little rig that’s a little bit uh upstream of the robot so the material passes under
0:10:16 the camera the camera has a second to process uh or shall i say a couple milliseconds to process what
0:10:21 it’s seeing and then not only does it tell the robot you know hey there’s a can coming in this
0:10:27 location pick it and then put it into this other spot but what we’re also finding is that that data
0:10:34 as a standalone is also able to massively advance these operators abilities to understand and optimize
0:10:40 their facilities so that’s opened up a whole new world of use cases because they weren’t gathering
0:10:46 data in that kind of way before they they only sort of knew what was coming through in a very gross macro
0:10:53 way right and and this gets back to you know recycling facility operators i have so much admiration for how
0:10:57 they have gotten really resourceful with trying to understand their operations but you know to give
0:11:03 you a sense of things the state of the art in the industry to this day is still mostly manual audits and
0:11:08 when i say that i mean imagine taking a half ton of material off your line and then literally having
0:11:15 two to four people hand sort and categorize and weigh each item to understand what’s coming through
0:11:19 and then assuming that that half ton is representative of like the thousands of tons
0:11:24 coming through your facility on a yearly basis i often tell the story of one of our early data customers
0:11:30 uh this gentleman who runs a recycling facility in california when he met me he was telling me that
0:11:36 he had mounted a gopro camera above his conveyor belt the one that was basically supposed to be all
0:11:41 trash leaving the facility but he knew he was missing some good stuff and he would spend an hour a day
0:11:48 after work going frame by frame through some random snippet and manually tallying how many cans and bottles
0:11:54 uh were on that line and then using that to back into what he would try and change in his operation
0:11:59 the next day and then he would check that day to see if it changed anything and so imagine his delight
0:12:03 when i told him hey actually we can mount our own camera on there and suddenly we’ll just give you
0:12:09 access to a dashboard a machine will literally count everything that goes literally literally in real
0:12:13 time so we’re seeing that you know the robot is this incredible foot in the door with a lot of our
0:12:19 facility uh partners but that everyone’s starting to realize that hey actually this data can also help
0:12:25 us understand the entire world not just the location where the robot is sitting either so at this point is
0:12:32 it kind of a robot business on the front but really you’re like a computer vision data ai business
0:12:38 so a lot of customers come to us saying you know i literally had a gentleman tell me a couple months
0:12:42 ago like i would never pay you to tell me what i already know about my trash and i’m like i’m not
0:12:46 going to convince you that you don’t already know everything about your trash but you know you want
0:12:51 a robot let’s get you a robot and that has since evolved the conversation where we’re just sort of
0:12:55 starting to show him this data and he’s like oh actually i didn’t realize that this was the case
0:12:59 the flip side is also true where someone’s like i don’t know if i need a robot yet but i’m really
0:13:03 interested to see what i’m losing on the back end we install that camera and then suddenly
0:13:07 lo and behold that data makes the case that holy cow i’m losing so much stuff i don’t just need one
0:13:13 robot i maybe need two or even three robots right so it’s kind of this mutually reinforcing flywheel
0:13:18 that’s been really integral to the success of our business so far tell me about your work with amazon
0:13:26 and with colgate palm olive what are you doing for them with them yeah so to start maybe just i’d love
0:13:30 to explore this idea of what is a circular economy because it’s a buzzword that gets thrown out a lot
0:13:35 but um it’s really important to understand why amazon and colgate and their peers matter here
0:13:41 right now we are living in mostly a linear economy in other words someone makes a thing we consume a
0:13:46 thing and then we dispose of it right a circular economy tries to turn that process into a circle so
0:13:51 instead of throwing it out in a landfill forever or incinerating it that material gets brought back
0:13:56 to the front end and reused somehow to make new stuff that we can then consume and the ideal is
0:14:02 to make this go on forever so that we limit our resource consumption yeah so now that we have this
0:14:06 growing base of recycling facilities that are you know gathering data that are getting a better
0:14:11 understanding of what’s coming into their facilities what’s actually being bailed and sent out to the end
0:14:18 markets we’re working with companies like amazon and colgate on a number of fronts you know the first
0:14:24 is even just to understand where is all of that packaging going to their credit uh they and
0:14:30 several of their peers have realized that there’s a paradigm shift possible now from we have designed
0:14:35 a thing that’s technically recyclable you know our packaging r&d engineers have made this awesome
0:14:43 monomaterial hdpe toothpaste tube in colgate’s example um to now trying to understand okay well
0:14:49 we made this thing that is recyclable is it actually getting recycled and that was a lens that we couldn’t
0:14:55 really get at scale before um and so now with glacier’s technology we’re able to monitor in real time
0:15:01 you know how much of these tubes are actually ending up at the recycling facility and once they’re in the
0:15:06 facility are they ending up in the right place are they being sorted correctly such that they can
0:15:11 actually be turned into new stuff or are they ending up in the landfill in which case you know
0:15:15 suddenly this recyclable tube isn’t very recyclable at all so we’re starting to answer these really
0:15:22 really critical questions so colgate knows whatever how many tubes of toothpaste they sold in a city and
0:15:28 if you are working in the recycling facility for that city you can actually count how many tubes of
0:15:32 that toothpaste came down the recycling line and how many tubes of that toothpaste wound up in the bin i
0:15:38 mean is that the reductive version of what you’re saying essentially yeah and where we’re even seeing
0:15:44 now like with these rapid advances in in ai and in detection that first of all it’s no small feat to
0:15:49 even define what is a tube and how do you tell the difference between a toothpaste tube versus a
0:15:54 sunscreen tube versus a lotion tube yeah um but now we’re getting to the point where we can actually say
0:16:00 the brand of toothpaste it is like from all of those visual markings and so um we’re just seeing this
0:16:05 sort of cambrian explosion of interest from a wide variety of different you know packaging producers and
0:16:12 brands to really start understanding this previous black box on what happens once they release this
0:16:17 packaging into the wild for consumers to buy so i understand that california has a law
0:16:24 that is in some fashion supposed to put companies like on the hook for their for their products right
0:16:31 after they’re used to incentivize companies to have their products be recycled right is is that am i
0:16:35 characterizing that law right and is it relevant to your business yes so i believe you’re referring
0:16:42 to epr or extended producer responsibility laws for those who may not have heard of epr it’s essentially
0:16:48 this premise that you know if our recycling and waste system is supposed to find a way to do something
0:16:52 good with all the stuff we’re throwing out the people making all this stuff that we’re throwing
0:16:57 out should probably have some skin in the game to make sure that that stuff gets uh either disposed
0:17:04 of or reused properly right and so uh epr laws are already in effect uh throughout europe uh throughout
0:17:09 canada some other regions and then they’ve been passed uh in a number of states in the us including
0:17:16 california now while epr in the us is still in its infancy in other words it’s been passed in a number
0:17:22 of states but there’s a lot of hairiness to figuring out how to actually implement the system across all the
0:17:28 producers selling into a state and all of the you know recyclers operating in that state it is i think
0:17:34 a step in the right direction because in a lot of ways it helps to create that circle we were talking
0:17:40 about earlier you know you’re seeing that a lot of brands and producers are starting to take even more
0:17:44 of a vested interest in understanding what is happening to all of their packaging because they
0:17:49 know that imminently they’re going to need to start proving the sort of end-of-life outcomes for that
0:17:56 packaging in order to you know one not be heavily fined and then two maybe even have a a right to continue
0:18:02 selling into that state it seems good that amazon and colgate palmolive are trying to figure out if the
0:18:08 things they make that are recyclable are actually being recycled but it seems like for that sort of
0:18:13 thing to happen at a meaningful scale you would need laws basically right i mean if the companies are just
0:18:18 incurring the cost either out of the goodness of their heart or in the hopes of you know generating
0:18:25 goodwill that will lead to higher revenues those seem like marginal cases are the epr laws such that
0:18:30 you think it will become a meaningful part of your business a meaningful part of the world that
0:18:34 companies will in fact be on the hook to figure it out or like what do you think is going to happen
0:18:39 you know i will say that early indicators are that all of these states are taking it quite seriously so
0:18:47 in addition to requiring a lot of these brands and producers to pay into a massive fund up front to even
0:18:53 just start implementing some of this movement a lot of these states are also you know we’re seeing that
0:18:58 some of the kind of like early deadlines and fines for non-compliance are actually being upheld which i
0:19:04 think is is a really strong signal to the market hey this is something that needs to get taken seriously
0:19:12 now to your point i do think that at the end of the day whatever flavor this legislation takes the key
0:19:18 to make sure that recycling is still a you know viable and sustainable value proposition is that there
0:19:25 needs to be some sort of an end market for that material right because let’s say these brands even if
0:19:32 they’re required to pay billions of dollars into this epr system if there’s no one on the back end to
0:19:37 receive that material that these recycling facilities are sorting then recycling can’t really happen
0:19:44 right at the end of the day someone needs to buy the bale of plastic exactly exactly but if they can
0:19:51 have guarantee that there is a buyer on the other side right and that that person or that company will buy
0:19:58 at a certain price then suddenly they can sustain that business quite well for the long run and so to that
0:20:02 point you know one other model that’s uh often brought up in the realm of legislation is actually
0:20:08 minimum recycled content laws because uh it kind of gets at the same the same issue from the other side
0:20:14 where you say basically creating demand creating demand for a bale of recycled plastic coming out of the
0:20:22 recycling facility exactly and it kind of disentangles the um the market for recycled feedstock from the market for
0:20:27 virgin feedstock which is another great way to kind of catalyze the movement of that material throughout
0:20:28 that recycling ecosystem
0:20:34 we’ll be back in just a minute
0:20:47 run a business and not thinking about podcasting think again more americans listen to podcasts than
0:20:52 ad-supported streaming music from spotify and pandora and as the number one podcaster iHeart’s twice as
0:20:58 large as the next two combined so whatever your customers listen to they’ll hear your message plus only iHeart can
0:21:04 extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio think podcasting can help your business think iHeart
0:21:11 streaming radio and podcasting call 844-844-IHEART to get started that’s 844-844-IHEART
0:21:17 the medal of honor is the highest military decoration in the united states recipients have done the
0:21:23 improbable showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves
0:21:30 this medal is for the men who went down that day it’s for the families of those who didn’t make it
0:21:37 i’m jr martinez i’m a u.s army veteran myself and i’m honored to tell you the stories of these heroes
0:21:44 on the new season of medal of honor stories of courage from pushkin industries and i heart podcast
0:21:51 from robert blake the first black sailor to be awarded the medal to daniel daly one of only 19
0:21:56 people to have received the medal of honor twice these are stories about people who have distinguished
0:22:03 themselves by acts of valor going above and beyond the call of duty you’ll hear about what they did
0:22:11 what it meant and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice listen to medal
0:22:16 of honor on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast
0:22:23 what are you trying to figure out right now what’s a big thing you’re trying to figure out we are at a
0:22:32 really exciting inflection point at glacier because of i think two big things here the first is just how do we
0:22:39 scale um smoothly and rapidly you know we’ve gone from a year ago we were making maybe one robot every
0:22:44 three months and now we have the capacity to make three to four robots per month and we’re expecting
0:22:50 to go even faster by the end of this year in the next six months and then the other big frontier for us
0:22:55 in addition to just you know how do we scale and get more of our stuff out there is what the heck do we
0:23:01 do with all of this data right we’ve already seen that the early use cases for this information people
0:23:08 are taking to really in droves but there’s a much more built-out version of this data platform where
0:23:13 we say you know we don’t just have a camera in one or two points throughout your facility we can actually
0:23:19 get sensors to sort of blanket the facility and in that regard we can take a huge step towards becoming
0:23:25 more like that manufacturer who uh has information on every single step of their process and can respond
0:23:30 in real time and know exactly what’s going on at each stage so i mean let’s just talk about the
0:23:34 recycling business for a minute the facilities you’re talking about they’re just private companies the
0:23:40 vast majority of them are so uh this is a common misconception about recycling is that you know these
0:23:45 are all you know somehow like public entities by our estimation about 80 or 85 percent of these
0:23:51 recycling facilities are um privately owned and they can be anything from a family-owned you know
0:23:56 business all the way up to the massive waste companies like waste management republic services
0:24:02 waste connections these are publicly traded companies that also own many of these recycling plants as well
0:24:09 and the recycling plants are buying recycling from municipalities like are they do they pay for
0:24:17 whatever cans and plastic jugs it’s actually a very interesting question it depends a lot on the
0:24:22 condition of those end markets we talked about so in today’s climate where those markets are really
0:24:28 volatile and a little bit uncertain oftentimes you know these recycling facilities will get paid by
0:24:34 municipalities in order to take in and process that material but what’s interesting is you know back
0:24:39 during the heyday of recycling when you know china was buying everything there was no shortage of uh
0:24:46 you know appetite for that material the equation flipped my sense is some recycling is quite efficient
0:24:51 and a good business and some is not very efficient and a bad business right give me the like stack ranking
0:24:56 for recycling best thing to recycle to worst yeah the i mean at the end of the day the best things to
0:25:02 recycle according to a recycling facility operator would be the things that most reliably will make you the
0:25:08 most money so uh top of the stack would be aluminum cans because there’s always a market for those they’re
0:25:15 super easily recyclable and to recycle an aluminum can actually uses about 95 less energy than to make that
0:25:22 aluminum can from that virgin ore and this gets back to the point about the the sort of cost spread between
0:25:28 recycled versus virgin feedstock right the the harder and more costly it is to make it virgin
0:25:34 the more of a willing market there is for that recycled material so cans are great they always work as a
0:25:39 business aluminum cans are good okay what’s next aluminum cans are great next is we’re going to get a
0:25:46 little technical here uh hdpe natural so this is hdpe is a type of plastic resin if you look at the little
0:25:52 chasing arrows recycling logo it’s resin number two and most commonly it takes the form of milk jugs
0:25:58 right that’s that’s sort of translucent white the gallon milk jug exactly exactly um and then from
0:26:05 there you know i’d say it’s probably pet bottles so that’s triangle number one that’s like your water
0:26:12 bottles your soda bottles this is actually a type of resin where we forecast a huge gap in the supply
0:26:17 versus what’s going to be demanded about five years from now so that’s a really interesting one to watch
0:26:23 and then why i can imagine demand going up but why can’t they just make more of them from virgin
0:26:29 petroleum or whatever yeah it’s a combination of legislative requirements around minimum recycled
0:26:38 content combined with uh sort of like the nature of the end markets that are demanding pet so you know pet
0:26:44 could be used by you know water or beverage bottle manufacturers but a lot of that pet also gets
0:26:52 absorbed into markets you wouldn’t imagine like carpet or mattresses or other textiles so the bad news is
0:26:57 that there’s plastic everywhere but the good news is at least they can use our recycled bottles exactly
0:27:03 exactly so that that’s one turf that’s getting pretty heated uh and then to at least to round out the sort of
0:27:09 container side of things the other very common thing that gets sorted is hgpe color so h again it’s triangle
0:27:15 number two but it’s it’s been dyed right so this is typically things like your shampoo bottles or your
0:27:20 laundry detergent jugs and so is that also like pretty good are we still at pretty good on the stack that’s
0:27:26 all that’s all pretty good i’d say those every single recycling facility you go to will sort out those
0:27:32 commodities okay and i’ll mention here that there’s a big time honorable mention for cardboard and for
0:27:38 paper i was focusing on containers but a lot of people talk about plastics a ton the majority of
0:27:43 the recycling stream is still paper and cardboard right so that stuff like that’s almost table stakes
0:27:47 for a recycling facility you just have to get that right if you want to stay profitable and that and
0:27:52 that’s a reasonable business as well yes that’s a very reasonable business a lot of these recycling
0:27:58 facilities actually talk about something called the amazon effect in other words as you know e-commerce
0:28:03 and shipping has become the way we buy things cardboard has just inundated the recycling stream
0:28:09 which is great because you can always sell cardboard now there’s a really hot market but also not so great
0:28:14 because maybe your facility was built 10 to 20 years ago before this became a thing and now you have to
0:28:18 find a way to sort of jerry-rig it to handle all of these massive oversized boxes that are coming
0:28:24 through your stream so what that we recycle is dumb isn’t really getting recycled doesn’t make
0:28:30 sense whatever yeah uh this is a very long tale of things you know i mentioned everything else yeah
0:28:36 it is the everything else and this points me to what i often tell people is a misconception about
0:28:40 recycling is the phenomenon of wish cycling and i i was guilty of this too until i started glacier and
0:28:44 learned a bit more which is this idea that if you’re not sure if something is recyclable a lot of
0:28:49 people who want to do good for the planet are like i’ll toss it into the recycling bin in case they can
0:28:53 do something with it and in fact this ends up being a huge problem for these facilities because most of
0:28:58 the time they can’t do something with it much as we wish they could so a lot of these contaminants that
0:29:05 people throw in there are things like those plastic bags or you know those films and flexibles which
0:29:12 some facilities can recycle but most can’t it’s things that have plastic in them but it’s not kind of standard
0:29:19 plastic so for example uh one very confusing and insidious example that gets brought off up often
0:29:24 is children’s toys right maybe they’re made out of some bulky plastic you’re like hopefully this can
0:29:29 be recycled but chances are that toy has various different grades of plastic on it that aren’t easy
0:29:34 to pull apart and heaven forbid it’s an electronic toy with the batteries still in it because that can
0:29:37 literally cause an explosion or a fire and blow up the facility
0:29:44 we’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round
0:29:57 run a business and not thinking about podcasting think again more americans listen to podcasts than
0:30:02 ad-supported streaming music from spotify and pandora and as the number one podcaster iHeart’s twice as
0:30:07 large as the next two combined so whatever your customers listen to they’ll hear your message plus
0:30:12 only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio think podcasting can help
0:30:20 your business think iHeart streaming radio and podcasting call 844-844-iHeart to get started that’s
0:30:26 that’s 844-844-iHeart the medal of honor is the highest military decoration in the united states
0:30:32 recipients have done the improbable showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much
0:30:39 bigger than themselves this medal is for the man who went down that day it’s for the families of those who
0:30:46 who did make it i’m jr martinez i’m a u.s army veteran myself and i’m honored to tell you the stories of
0:30:53 these heroes on the new season of medal of honor stories of courage from pushkin industries and iHeart
0:31:01 podcast from robert blake the first black sailor to be awarded the medal to daniel daly one of only 19
0:31:06 people to have received the medal of honor twice these are stories about people who have distinguished
0:31:14 themselves by acts of valor going above and beyond the call of duty you’ll hear about what they did what
0:31:21 it meant and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice listen to medal of
0:31:26 honor on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast
0:31:34 let’s do a lightning round it’s going to be a little more random so i know you were a consultant
0:31:39 is it right that you were a management consultant i was a management consultant i’m curious you know
0:31:46 now you run a company right i’m curious what do you know now from running a company that you wish
0:31:54 you knew when you were you know telling people how to run their company yeah i think a lot of what i’ve
0:32:02 learned running glacier has been around always identifying and then sort of like revalidating
0:32:09 what is that north star metric or objective that we’re aiming for and then making sure that anything
0:32:14 else we’re working on or anything we’re communicating is in support of that so like you’re still a consultant
0:32:22 absolutely i mean honestly i think like running glacier a lot of people think that the tech is
0:32:26 the hard part and don’t get me wrong it’s insanely hard insanely challenging but when you think about
0:32:35 something as cross-functional as a circular economy like i’d say the majority of my day gets spent thinking about how to align
0:32:42 incentives right like recycling facilities brands manufacturers local legislators like they all kind of want different things
0:32:49 things so how do you explain initiatives or proposals to each of those parties in a way that makes sense
0:32:53 to them and gets everyone rowing in the same direction so it’s the answer nothing it’s the answer
0:32:58 you feel like you’re actually still doing what you were doing no no not at all i mean i would say that um
0:33:04 you know one big mindset shift for me that has been very healthy is i’m definitely a perfectionist
0:33:10 and a type a personality you know by upbringing and in management consulting you’re really encouraged to lean into that
0:33:16 right like people are are paying you big bucks to make sure that you got every every single last detail
0:33:24 down to the decimal place right everywhere um and so um you know i’d say that my my consulting days were
0:33:29 great for training me on like how to make sure i knew what details mattered and really like make sure
0:33:35 that everything lined up uh but with an early stage startup it’s the opposite right like you don’t have time
0:33:43 to be perfecting everything and so that has actually allowed me to sort of flex towards how quickly can i
0:33:49 move and still be efficient right like what is the right sort of balance of making sure that you’re
0:33:53 putting out high quality work and that things are generally moving the right direction but also realizing
0:33:59 that actually it’s okay and probably good that certain balls are getting dropped because as one of my mentors
0:34:05 told me if you find that you are doing everything perfectly and nothing is failing you’re probably
0:34:11 not moving fast enough yeah i interviewed the guy who started planet the satellite company and he told
0:34:17 me that he he was upset when none of their satellites were failing it meant they weren’t launching soon
0:34:22 enough they were spending too long to work on it it’s the same that’s exactly right that’s been a massive
0:34:27 learning and frankly a pretty painful one in the early years of glacier when all i wanted was to make sure that
0:34:33 every single thing i outputted was gonna work and uh you know at the end of the day i was like i just
0:34:36 got to get get rid of some of those sort of controlling tendencies if i really want this
0:34:43 company to to scale at the rate that it needs to what’s one tip to stop being too type a when you’re
0:34:48 running a startup honestly uh i don’t know that this is healthy but my approach was to kind of just like
0:34:54 overwhelm myself give yourself too many things to do so that you have to just pass them on before you’re
0:34:59 done with them yeah and i’d say it wasn’t our intentional per se because it’s certainly not a
0:35:07 very pleasant experience to go through but i i often joke uh that you know i think starting an early
0:35:12 stage company was maybe the only thing that could have broken me of some of these perfectionist habits
0:35:20 because um i really had to go through sort of the dark side of pulling all-nighters working myself to the
0:35:26 bone realizing you know like what is this all for and having that sort of existential crisis moment to
0:35:30 say okay i don’t want to give up on glacier and i know we’ve got an immense amount of potential ahead
0:35:37 of us so i now need to fundamentally rethink how i’m balancing this list of a thousand priorities
0:35:41 if i want to do it and still be around and a successful leader years from now
0:35:46 are you less of a perfectionist in your non-work life now than you used to be
0:35:54 uh absolutely it’s like amazing what perspective gives you on things just a lack of time yes yeah
0:36:01 yeah some would call it just a raw lack of time um i do think that it really sort of forces you to think
0:36:06 much bigger picture about what matters to you and make sure that you’re carving time out for that
0:36:12 and then just not sweating the details and the amazing thing is once you start doing that and you
0:36:16 realize that the world isn’t going to end because you forgot to do this thing or decided not to do
0:36:21 that thing perfectly it gets easier and easier to do right so that’s been really healthy for me
0:36:36 rebecca hu trams is the co-founder and ceo of glacier please email us at problem at pushkin dot fm
0:36:42 we are always looking for new guests for the show today’s show was produced by trina menino
0:36:48 and gabriel hunter chang it was edited by alexandra garrettin and engineered by sarah bruggear
0:36:51 i’m jacob goldstein and we’ll be back next week with another episode of what’s your problem
0:37:05 the medal of honor is the highest military decoration in the united states recipients have done the
0:37:12 improbable the unexpected showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than
0:37:19 themselves this medal is for the man who went down that day on medal of honor stories of courage you’ll
0:37:24 hear about these heroes and what their stories tell us about the nature of bravery listen to medal of
0:37:35 honor on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts this is an iheart podcast
Recycling plants take in a huge amount of random (and occasionally hazardous) stuff, which they then have to turn into reliable outputs that their customers will buy. That’s why Rebecca Hu Thrams calls recycling “the most demented form of manufacturing on the planet.” Rebecca is the co-founder of Glacier, and her problem is this: Can you use AI and robots to make recycling a somewhat less demented business?
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