Rheaply's CEO Dr. Garry Cooper speaks at Greenbiz VERGE, a leading sustainability conference, in 2019.
A Conversation with Thomas Fecarotta of Rheaply
By Susan Messer
After watching the April OEFF screening of Closing the Loop, a documentary about the circular economy, I wanted to learn more about the subject—that is, even more than I did when I wrote about it in my first article on the subject.
So here are the basics: In the traditional linear economic model, when a resource serves its purpose, we throw it out, where it adds to the problem of landfill, or we warehouse it, where it slowly depreciates in value. In the circular economy, we give used materials a new purpose; we honor the resources and human labor that went into them and find ways to circulate them back into usefulness. In a circular economy, waste doesn’t exist; it becomes resources that are recirculated to new owners. When businesses and large organizations become part of the circular economy, in addition to being conservationists, they build new economic capital through regeneration, which gives them a competitive advantage.
To understand more about how this works, I turned to Rheaply, Inc., located in downtown Chicago, an enterprise that’s working to further the circular economy, and to Tom Fecarotta, its vice president of marketing, and one of the experts in the OEFF post-film discussion.
Let’s begin with the name Rheaply—a combination of “research” and “cheaply.” Rheaply began with Dr. Garry Cooper, co-founder and CEO, in the days when he was working toward his PhD in neuroscience at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. As is the case with most innovators, he noticed a problem. At Feinberg, it was related to how departments shared (or did not share) physical assets. That is, some departments had a surplus of materials that they discarded even though someone else could certainly have used them, while other departments, due to outdated spreadsheets and incomplete listservs for finding needed materials from peers, purchased new ones instead of benefiting from the recirculation of assets the school already had. Not good!
Rheaply's technology allows organizations to track and recirculate assets when they’re about to make a procurement decision (A) and before they dispose of anything (D), to avoid sending anything to landfill (E).
Q: Tom, tell me how Rheaply addressed and addresses the problem of wasted resources that Dr. Cooper identified.
A: Garry helped Northwestern’s Feinberg School launch a pilot program in which they used our technology to connect labs to each other and to resources, making surpluses known throughout the school. This was the genesis of Rheaply—a way to allow departments and organizations to discover, locate, and transfer assets to those who need them the most.
Rheaply’s Asset Exchange Manager (AxM), as the name suggests, allows organizations to manage, exchange, and track physical workplace assets (think consumables, such as equipment and furniture) before they make any purchasing decisions. On our website, you can find multiple resources—blogs, podcasts, webinars—all about how AxM can make organizations more sustainable and circular.
If we continue at our current consumption rate, and concurrently accumulate all the associated waste, we will need four earths to support us. Rheaply’s idea is to address this problem via technology that connects people in organizations. Billions of dollars of physical assets are sitting idle because the systems to monitor and reutilize them are weak, and because procurement departments are buying new items without knowing whether they already exist within the organization.
Q: So is Rheaply just for mega-organizations?
A: Not at all. Reusing resources is essential for any organization’s green efforts. Smaller organizations can also benefit from local material loops. As we scale our solution, we have a roster of nonprofits, charities, and K-12 public schools that directly benefit from this secondary marketplace. When a new organization joins Rheaply, we work with them to figure out what they need to do to stop wasting, but also to identify local small businesses and nonprofits that should be part of that sharing ecosystem.
Q: And you’d like to see this model applied on both a local and a global level?
A: Yes. Rheaply’s vision is to make the world’s resources visible, easily transferable, and more valuable in our global economy. Closer to home, the Circular Chicago Coalition is bringing together 16 partners, including Rheaply and Plant Chicago, with the intention of seeding a circular city on the south and west sides, asking communities of color what they want rather than prescribing solutions. So we are looking at the city of Chicago and asking how we can eliminate waste within an urban environment, how we can transform the city into an efficient resource-sharing hub. For example, how do we connect nonprofits to larger companies, thereby creating loops for assets?
Q: Tell me about how Rheaply responded to the pandemic.
A: Over the past year, as we all faced significant shortages of resources, the world cultivated a new appreciation for everyday stuff. With global supply chains collapsing and operating budgets shrinking, we saw the demand for goods and services skyrocket. The obvious solution has been to increase the value of everything already around us. At Rheaply, we helped organizations do that by developing better inventory management and resource-sharing tools. For example, during the pandemic, we provided small businesses, community organizations, and not-for-profits with a streamlined way to secure personal protective equipment (PPE) from verified local sources, making it easy to locate important supplies in a hyperlocalized approach to resource sharing.
Q: Speaking of the hyper-local level, my husband and I are cleaning out our basement. How can we use these principles to keep as much out of the landfill as possible and get stuff into the hands of someone who can actually use it?
Thomas Fecarotta
A: At a consumer level, you can find plenty of marketplaces where you can share resources and avoid the landfill. I personally enjoy NextDoor and Facebook Marketplace. However if you’re looking to get a bit more strategic about donating your basement items to organizations nearby, you can go to our Reuse Initiative microsite. Once there, you can download a reuse action plan. We introduced this for Earth Day, to educate people around reuse, and to help them find ways to maximize the value of everyday items. But our guide will also help you see how you can recirculate, repair, or repurpose those treasures you find in your basement. The action plan lists secondary markets, ideas for creating group exchanges, strategies for reaching out to organizations that might be open to reuse initiatives, and links to more obscure reuse communities.
Rheaply’s Asset Exchange Manager (AxM)™ enables organizations to manage and exchange physical assets more effectively, eliminating unnecessary waste and expense. The main dashboard webpage shows listings for items available within an organization.
This article is part two of a series of three articles on the Circular Economy. Find the other two here:
Article 1: A Conversation with Jonathan Pereira of Plant Chicago
Article 3: A Conversation with Jason Feldman of Green Era