Interview With Alasdair Hood, CEO and Founder Recirculate Systems

Get ready for an exclusive Founder Spotlight Interview with Alasdair Hood, the visionary CEO and Founder of Recirculate Systems Limited! This company is revolutionizing sustainable resource management and circular economy solutions. Discover how Recirculate Systems leads the way with advanced recirculation systems, transforming businesses by providing sustainable alternatives to single-use waste. Alasdair Hood will take you on an exhilarating journey through Recirculate Systems in Eqvista’s founder spotlight.

Recirculate Systems aims to revolutionize the way we approach single-use items. Could you explain how your technology works and what its potential impact is on sustainability?

Recirculate Systems has developed a piece of code, like a new protocol, that is set to unlock the circular economy. 

The circular economy means sharing stuff, and in the digital age this is hard. It means sharing personal and financial data too, and lots of it, in a clunky and slow way, like apps for Deposit Return Systems.

Recirculate Systems allows objects to be linked to transactions, and deposits added and refunded without any behavior change from customers or businesses! Now people can simply be given their purchase in a reusable package, and when that is returned to any other point in the network, be refunded without having to do anything different to single use.

This then can be applied to anything reusable, and the circular economy can finally scale beyond those committed enough to download apps or change their way of life. 

Previously one would have had to have a different app, for every single reusable! Who could be bothered with that? It is also an extremely unlikely way to solve the single use crisis.

Congratulations on securing $1,102,569.60 in funding! Can you outline some specific initiatives or projects that this funding will support within Recirculate Systems? 

Coding coding coding! We are ready to scale by offering the use of this patent pending ability to existing reuse networks. Each market has different requirements and different actors that present new challenges for us to code against. 

Our aim is to keep our team very lean, and put all our efforts into producing quality coding assets. 

Recirculate System’s Software allows items to be linked to transactions without requiring an app. Can you walk us through how this technology can be applied beyond coffee cup deposit return systems?

Anything single use is now a market. Using our software, anything uniquely identifiable (Rfid, barcodes, QR codes) can have a value (deposit or pre-authorised amount)  invisibly attached to it. The customer has bought the packaging as well as the product.

When that packaging is returned to any location within that network, regardless of where or what payment provider was used, our software instantly initiates the refund process from the original payment provider.

Sharing is now as easy as single use.

What challenges do you anticipate facing as you work to scale Recirculate Systems’ solutions, and how do you plan to address them?

The scale of the single use crisis we are in, is also the size of the opportunity in front of us. This is pretty overwhelming, but our simple webservice is limited only by the size of server space! 

We can use this as an opportunity to scale as rapidly as we need to.

In what ways do you collaborate with businesses, governments, or other organizations to promote the adoption of reusable alternatives?

Collaboration is a key part of solving the climate crisis. We are not the solution on our own, but a key part of the overall system. We need other people to pick up our software and use their unique skills to exploit it.

Similarly, we need governments an NGO’s to understand what is now possible using our tech, lobby for and legislate accordingly. 

By working with Universities and sharing our data, we can allow this knowledge to be used in ways that our focus does not allow for. This works two ways and has opened up other avenues for our software to be used. The market for reuse is so vast, that there is nothing to fear from collaboration

Could you provide insights into Recirculate Systems’ long-term vision and goals?

I want to see our code used around the world, reducing reuse friction, and allowing the circular economy to truly flourish. If our code can play a part in normalizing reuse behaviors in those who wouldn’t necessarily care one way or the other, that is the goal.

Lastly, what message would you like to convey to aspiring entrepreneurs with Recirculate Systems’ experience?

Flexibility is key. This is needed to chase investment, and with the product itself. When first starting out, the product is so precious, that criticism of it is hurtful. This is totally necessary. Be honest, if it is true, change, and follow the traction.