Hello, I'm Stephen Carroll. I'm in Brussels where many of Europe's biggest decisions get made. And I'm Caroline Hepgett in London with the hosts of the Bluebeg Daybreak Europe podcast. We're up early every week day keeping an eye on what's happening across Europe and around the world. We do it early so the news is fresh, not recycled and so you know what actually matters as the day gets going. From Brussels, I'm following the politics, policy and the people shaping the European Union right now. And from London, I'm looking at what all that means for markets, money and the wider economy. We've got reporters across Europe and around the globe feeding in as stories break. So whether it's geopolitics, energy, tech or markets, you're hearing it while it happens. It's smart, calm and to the point. And it fits into your morning. You can find new episodes of the Bluebeg Daybreak Europe podcast by 7am in Dublin or 8am in Brussels, Berlin and Paris. On Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. ESG is constantly evolving. Over the years, it is shifted from socially responsible investing to impact to sustainable finance. While the terminology continues to change, what hasn't changed are the underlying science, market pressures, tangible physical and financial impacts of the climate crisis, as well as increasing regulatory scrutiny and rising consumer expectations. We aim to filter out the noise by speaking with industry experts to identify what is really driving value. Welcome to ESG Currents, brought to you by Blueberg Intelligence. Hi, I'm Gail Glazermann, Senior ESG Integration Analyst at Blueberg Intelligence. Four years, plastic has been a growing concern for consumers and governments. And as a result, corporations from viral stories about the Pacific garbage patch, including a turtle with a straw stuck up its nose. To what seems like almost daily reporting and new studies on the prevalence of potential harms associated with microplastics. Today we are joined by Svanika Bala-Sabramian, the Founder and Chief Circularity Officer of Repurpose, which aims to help corporations address plastic waste. Thanks for joining us today. I'm sure we'll dig into this much deeper as we talk. But just to start, can you please tell us a little bit about Repurpose? Yes, hi everyone. Thank you so much Gail for having me here today. I'm a big fan of your podcast. I actually started 2026 by listening to your coverage of what to expect in 2026 in ESG. And I thought it was really fascinating. So yeah, I'm Svanika. I'm one of the founders in CCOs at Repurpose. We're the leading packaging sustainability and compliance platform for consumer brands. So put very simply the way I see it since day zero. At Repurpose, our mission is to help companies profitably participate in that transition from a linear to a circular economy. And we do this across two core verticals. First we have our set of software solutions that help brands measure and account for their packaging because you really can't change what you don't understand. And so we have a lot of measurement tools and databases. And then we also help them redesign this packaging to be more compliant with evolving regulations, which I think we'll talk more about today as well. And of course, make it more sustainable. And on the other side, we also run today one of the world's largest voluntary plastic recovery supply chains. So we have a waste management infrastructure that we fund across 40 different regions of the world across 11 countries, South America, Africa and Asia, where we're really bringing what you would call a curbside recycling here in the United States to coastal areas, places around the world that have very vulnerable biosystems, but really don't have access to that sort of infrastructure to clean it up and to keep plastic from attacking them. So as part of that, we actually just a few weeks ago went big with our big milestone. We have removed over 100 million pounds of how to recycle low-value plastic waste from nature that otherwise wouldn't have been. And in doing that, we've also ensured in just an ethical transition for thousands of waste work on the front line of this crisis, who previously were in the informal sector. So there's a few different things that we do to allow companies to again participate in the circular economy, but that's a synonym show. Okay. Thank you. And I suppose maybe just taking a step back. So we're talking today about plastic. And I think, as my introduction suggested, the first thing people think of when they think about plastic is waste. But there really are very different elements when you think about plastic and what it's used for. For instance, there's the waste element, but there's also resource intensity and emissions. And I ask this in the context of a plastic package can be hard to manage the waste, but alternatives may offer less subtle physical protection for the product being packaged, which in itself could generate more waste if it gets damaged during shipment. Or for instance, you know, a loaf of bread wrapped in paper-based packaging alternative, it might spoil faster. Glass bottles are more prone to breakage, which could also generate more waste. There can often be more emissions tied up in that product being packaged than the package itself. So there are a lot of people that might think about that. And also just in the use phase, for instance, glass can be heavy. So moving around can be heavier than plastic, which could generate more emissions, for instance. So I'm just asking, you know, how do you suggest the companies that you work with balance those different priorities when you think about plastic? So kind of the waste, the resource, the emission side. Yeah, this is a fantastic question. I'm so glad we're just sort of diving right in and starting here, because this is a question I really wish more people asked, because when it comes to plastic, I think people are so impulsive. There's an immediate reactivity around plastic. And you know, I think we want everything to be in block and white. Plastic equals bad, paper equals good, but no answer to anything, you know, that has depth has ever been found in these black and white areas. I think everything is in the grade, requires nuance, it requires actual time and energy to go through all of those different layers that you just laid out. So I think that very philosophical here and talk about how we have a responsibility to mitigate all negative externalities that we bring upon this world. However, that's neither here nor there, and that's really difficult, you know, for a private company. That has so many other competing priorities. So I'll give you three very tactical thoughts on this. And these are thoughts that I feel like I've evolved over the last 10 years of working with, you know, these hundreds of brands and learning from them. I don't know if they're perfect, but I think they're practical compared to even where I started with my opinion, 10 years ago. So the first thing that I always talk about is that people often mistakenly assume that solving the plastic problem means finding an alternative material for their packaging. And this is part of the solution, finding an alternative material, but that isn't necessarily always the main solution or the first solution. And I think something that needs to come far before replacement is designing for reuse. The amount of resources that go into the creation of a product, the creation of a material, whether that is a paper bag, whether that is a compostable or bi-degradable, whatever material we're talking about over here, the water, the energy utilization, the manpower, the creation of any material is extremely resource intensive. And so whatever material it is, if we use it once and then throw it away, that's an extreme disservice to the planet. And all we're doing is, in some ways, moving the problem from one material to another, right? Because as you rightly put, it creates other negative externalities. So let me give you an example. Is there something that you bought today? What's the last thing that you bought at a grocery store? I'm guilty of saying probably prepackaged salad. Right. So let's say prepackaged salad comes in these thermoformed trans-barren containers that are actually very hard to recycle. So there are a few different options that we have over here. We can either say, "I'm going to make this a different kind of plastic that still does give me the shelf life that the salad would need." But it will be much more recyclable in the infrastructure that we have available to us in this country right now. We can say that, that's one option. Another option is to say, "Well, actually, it doesn't, you know, like, plastic as a whole, we want to reduce the amount that we're doing. So let me move it to a different material." We really can't put a prepackaged salad in a paper bag or any of these, you know, biodegradable materials that you have.
So what often ends up happening is that it's a cardboard box with a plastic liner inside it to hold that shelf life. And that again is just sort of moving the problem a little raised down because the plastic liner is incredibly difficult to be psyched. And so my favorite solution here would be to say maybe all of these and adjust salad actually does a great job with this. They ask you to bring your own container from home. And if you do that then you get some sort of benefit. You get some sort of discount from the company itself. And in that way you're able to reuse that container and that container might be plastic actually. But that's a whole point. Plastic is meant to be the use. Plastic is very very durable as a material and it's not meant to be single use. And that solution actually might end up being the best you know in terms of overall over a few years reducing the amount of plastic waste that we're creating. And simultaneously not adding to carbon emissions, not adding to food waste. And all of these are the things that we're talking about. So I do think it really does become a little bit more nuanced in thinking through what are the variations of solutions as opposed to being very reactive and saying I'm going to keep the design exactly the same but just change swap out of material. Because that's really the you know it might be the easiest answer but that's really the correct answer. I think the other thing that I will say is I do believe that there is a huge data gap, a knowledge asymmetry across the board. And so it repurposed in our work with policy like EPR we work closely with regulators and policy makers and on the other side we work with brands and often we see this gap between these two entities but also within each other. So packaging design feels like it can be very idiosyncratic. Every company figuring out what they want to do for their own product but it cannot be in reality because post consumption right so every shampoo company can design their shampoo bottle however they wanted to but after consumption we all have one shared downstream supply chain. It all goes into the same place. So if you have some companies prioritizing say compostable materials and other companies prioritizing recyclable materials the local municipality they need to decide which type of destination they need to scale up. Is it going to be their composting infrastructure or their recycling infrastructure and in you know the this whole space is zero some game and so it this Caleb for example their recycling infrastructure and a lot of the companies that have changed their packaging to be compostable but only industrial compostable well all of those materials will end up in a landfill and that's what's going to happen and that's what we often see happening and so I think another part of the solution is having platforms for more of these decision makers to speak with each other and have more harmonized solution making as opposed to again being very reactive and idiosyncratic in how they think about this just within the four worlds of their own company. Going back to your just solid example it raises another question that I always think about when when talking about plastic and to be honest many issue issues overall I guess to one degree there's what consumers say they want and then there's what consumers really want so the challenge here is balancing kind of function and consumer expectations versus the environmental goals that might be associated with reducing waste and you're just solid example requires a change in consumer behavior and even that composting versus recycling versus trash example also requires significant consumer behavior changes that are probably not happening so you know as much as consumers might say they're supportive of reducing plastic waste who wants it they also appreciate the convenience of a lightweight plastic soda bottle that they can easily reseal as they're walking around and I'm just wondering what advice do you give companies that are trying to balance that contraption about wanting to meet the consumer demand to reduce the use of plastic but also trying to provide a good and in a way that consumers actually want to use it and interact with it. Yeah I mean this is this is a really good point right I think at the end of the day I would say you know to caveat the answer that I'm about to give you I would say it isn't ultimately the responsibility of the consumer I think it is the responsibility of the government and the private sector to come up with the right solutions that do serve consumers best because to your point I think if it was convenient consumers would choose it and so I think too often historically the narrative has you know alienated the consumer and made it out to be that you know this is a very difficult thing that the consumer isn't doing which I think has other unintended consequences on just consumer behavior overall where the way the narrative has been laid out right now there is a sense that you need to be an ultra sustainability you know tree hugger type of person to like do all the right things and if you're just a general person as you're so hard to be sustainable right and I think that actually isn't true but anyway having said that putting that aside for a second I do think there are two pieces of advice that I would give to companies that that are facing this this dichotomy in some sense the first is this is a little counterintuitive but in my experience I actually think the companies that have done the best are the ones that don't shy away from the hard conversations that don't necessarily infantilize their consumer base because you get a lot of companies thinking that consumers only understand black and white and so I can only give them very very simple instructions and I can you know that this is also where green hushing comes from where I'd rather do nothing and then try to educate the consumer on progress that I'm making and slightly better things that I'm doing but it's not perfect and algorithm criticism and so on and so forth but I think I've seen a lot of companies where they have tried to move towards better types of packaging and they're very transparent with their consumers about hey this is a trial this is an experiment that we're doing and this is the sustainability KPIs that we're looking for at the end of this experiment so help us right like help us think through whether this is working or not and if it doesn't work like give us your feedback on what parts of it aren't working we'll go back to the drawing board and try to come up with a better design for you and this will be a collaborative process and that will evolve through together and I know for example this company Riverside Naturals they're out of Canada they're large company they're most well known from Made Good they're granola bars that you find out of Whole Foods and they took on a similar approach where they have committed to going plastic free but they keep telling their consumers very transparent they okay this time we're gonna try this type of compostable packaging and see if it works out and they get feedback there's something you know maybe it's too crumbly maybe it's not holding shelf life and they go and change it again and so I do think that sort of ownership when it is given to consumers that they are part of this process actually works very very well as opposed to again infantilizing them or just sort of you know not adequately communicating with them so that's my my first I guess point on this my second is I do think retailers actually interestingly have a lot of power over here to to help standardize things across different brands because often you know to your question actually gale back to that address salad example it's a little bit like the tragedy of the comments right where you know if one company is giving you something more sustainable but slightly less convenient and right next door there's a different company or on the next shelf over there's a different company that is giving you something less sustainable but more convenient you're maybe more likely going to gravitate over there but as a retailer I think there's a bit more power to harmonize design so one thing that might be for instance is you go to Sephora or Target or CVS and right next to checkout you have these like little tiny 20 ml 30 ml you know moisturizers samplers right like these like little makeup samplers and whatnot and they're supposed to be impulse buys like you you're signing at the encounter and you're like you know I'm gonna try this new this new night cream and you grab one those are incredibly bad because they're so much packaging for so little products and most times they're very hard to recycle but if one company's doing and other brands also have to do it to stay competitive in in front of that consumer in front of that particular time of decision but if these retailers just you know just said hey as a decision we're just not gonna have these tiny samplers next to our checkout no one can have them over here then it
made it so much easier for brands, not to have to go and make that competitive decision, but really use a little bit more harmonized. So I do think there's a few different players that might need to get involved here, but those are my two thoughts. Interesting. And I guess do you feel that the companies that you speak with are the governments that maybe you interact with understand the level of nuance that we've been talking about to date? And I guess I asked this in my dimension green hushing, but the other problem the companies have had before they started green hushing was greenwashing. So they might have a packaging solution and claim it's using glass plastic, but maybe it doesn't really, if you think about like broader in the life cycle and kind of doesn't necessarily balance out like the various problems that the packaging may producing. So how well understood from the people making the decisions do you think kind of this level nuance and these challenges are? I think it's definitely getting better, but I think the short answer is no. I don't think they understand. I think, you know, and I feel like sometimes people just don't have the patience for nuance anymore, because it doesn't fit really nicely in a 10 second short phone reel on Instagram or TikTok. The black and white things fit a little bit better there. But having said that I do think as the conversation gets more mainstream and as there are more dollars allocated towards it, the nuance does get in because when it is just companies coming in and saying, well, I'm just going to throw like a hundred thousand dollars at a pilot that I get to, you know, do a lot of press around a lot of PR around. But then I'm not going to make any fundamental changes to my packaging. Then I think there wasn't a lot of nuance and you will not believe how many of these plastic-related decisions were being completely handled by marketing teams at companies, you know, like not even as a sustainability team, just completely handled by marketing teams. But as I think regulation has become a little bit more sophisticated, especially for companies that are multinational, the regulations in other countries are a lot farther along than what we've seen the United States today. And so when you think about the requirements for post-consumer recycle content integration in Europe or even actually in countries in the global South like India, you know, that you're seeing a lot of progress come out of these other nations. Then a company like PepsiCo or a Mondaleez or a Mars or a Unilever that has a lot of exposure and these other markets does need to start taking these things seriously. And when that happens, we see that translating into more nuance of them influencing the regulatory discussions here in the United States as well. And so I do think as it becomes not hundreds of thousands of dollars in the line but rather hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, the nuance does enter the conversation more. And if you're speaking to a company that legitimately understands this nuance and wants to address the challenges that are in front of them, what do you think the barriers are? I mean, is the infrastructure there? Does it need some other changes that are maybe beyond their control to really accomplish it? Like you mentioned composting. Well, that's not available everywhere just as one example. Yeah. I think the biggest barrier in my view is really harmonization. I think that is the problem where even if companies are willing to make certain decisions, let's say you have one country that wants to prioritize BCR, post-onsumer recycle content in their packaging. Another country that wants to prioritize recycled recycling design in their particular country, does make it really difficult, you know, the cross-border interoperability or the back thereof for companies to make better decisions. And so I think right now, as we're seeing more regulation move into this space right now, there is fragmentation notches between countries, but even between states. Like we have this thing called EPR that moved in to the US just a few years ago. Last year was a big year for EPR. It sounds for extended produce responsibility. And essentially is where every company is needing to measure the amount of packaging, including plastic that they use at a component and subcomponent level. And then report that into their state government and then they get taxed based on that. There's a fee associated with each material. But the fees that California levies is very different than what Oregon does, which is very different than what Maryland or Washington are planning to do. And so for a company that is now thinking about how do I eco-modulate, which is basically how do I design better packaging that allows me to lower my fees, it might mean different answers in different states. So I do think these sorts of very obvious own goals that we're putting on the sector is really what I would like to see changing for those in power over here. But I think the other part that I would say is also that at the end of the day, a lot of this thing, it just requires capital. So that we purpose, we did some research a couple of years ago with Ertaxian and a few very, very good nonprofits in this space. And we found that in order for us to reduce plastic leakage by over 90% compared to baselines, we would need about $5.2 trillion by 2040. And that is invested across all the different gaps in the supply chain that we have right now. And we would need to be on scaling up a better alternative. We have some really cool ones coming in like seaweed, plastic, things like that. And all the way on the downstream side, scaling up the right infrastructure to make sure that plastic isn't leaking your recycling. What is possible? You're scaling up chemical recycling, advanced recycling where possible. All of these gaps that you have, right? Well, where is the $5.2 trillion going to come from? That does become then the other big question. And we were very hopeful that tools like the UN Global Plastics Treaty could actually mobilize that financing, or really, mobilize regulation that enables the financing. But that has stagnated a little bit, and we can talk more about that. That's a whole other round that I can go on. But I think it's also just important for us to acknowledge the reality that this needs capital. And so we need to find ways to make it profitable in the short term, because we reward quarterly gains and annual gains so much more than what is right 10 years or 20 years down the line. And so in the absence of finding ways to incentivize profitability, it's just always going to be a peripheral conversation for most people. So there's a lot to unpack there. I think starting with the EPR, the extended producer responsibility. As you noted, some US states are getting more aggressive with that. It's not necessarily a new concept in some states that had bottle bills, which is a form of EPR for a long time. But internationally, it's also been used. And I don't know if you have done this, but I just want to ask, have you looked at the impact of places like in Canada, where there's been EPR in place for a long time, much broader and I think probably more in line with what we're starting to see in US states. And how effective that has been at solving the problem, when you start kind of putting a financial cost for the companies on the packaging waste that their activities generate. I think it does at a very, very high level, there is a positive impact. Even in the basics of it forces a company to acknowledge and measure what their packaging footprint is. Because otherwise, you know, up until now, the majority of companies that we purpose would start working with had just never thought about their footprint before, had never thought to measure or need it to measure their footprint before. So even in just giving companies that starting point that baseline to then design policy around is really, really useful. But in terms of I think now, what is the overall impact on that local economy and has that been, you know, have they been able to prove in a proven way, reduce the D.C. Whatever KPI, right? Like reduce the plastic that is leaking out into the environment or reduce the waste that is out in the environment. I think that is a little bit more of a great area because we're still figuring out what kind of the PR actually works. And then let me give you, let's say, a couple of examples. One form of the PR, and you see this in some of the European nations, is where the taxes or the fees that are collected from the companies for producing packaging, it doesn't necessarily have to go directly into building infrastructure for waste management or infrastructure for the circular economy. can be, you know, that can go into building hub.
with school systems or building hospitals or anything else that a government is spending money on. It's just really adding to their overall budget. And so in those cases, then the whole system is basically just waiting for the penalty of the tax on the company to force them to be designed their packaging, but not necessarily doing much else beyond that. So then you're not really seeing the gains you want to be seeing with improved infrastructure that is lowering the waste trade to really even just increasing the supply of recycled content to make it more competitive with virgin content, all of these other economic levers that you want to be seeing. So that's one example. Another example is in a country like India where you did have EPR come in a few years ago, but the way people could work with that is you buy almost the sort of triad market tokens to say, well, I'm putting out a million telegrams of plastic and I'm going to fund the recovery of a million telegrams of plastic by investing into this recycler. And so it almost sort of completely swung the other end of the spectrum and just made that the company responsible for even the downstream consequences that they're doing. But that was also problematic because in the absence of a third party governing entity, it became a base to the bottom. And now you have extremely cheap. The markets are flooded with the certificates you can buy with bribes and then they actually do nothing for the economy. It's like so they're very cheap. They don't have much additionality. Oftentimes they're not even real. Like I can give you a lot of examples where you can just like walk in and purchase these fake certificates. And so that again has been a problem for a different reason. So I think when we speak about how effective EPR is going to be in say a state like California or in how the US is implementing it right now, I think my answer is a cautious optimism. I think it has a lot of potential, but we also do need to learn from the mistakes of some of these other modes of implementation and build on that. And you referenced the UN Global Plastics Treaty and you know an interest in ranting. So let's do that. Can you talk a little bit about what it was trying to accomplish if you think they were in the right path, how close they got and any sense of whether it can be revived because ultimately they weren't able to reach a deal. Yeah, I do think it will be revived. I am again cautiously optimistic over here. So just a nice tab that was a meeting that was convened to you know, elect a new chair to restart the proceeding. So there is more momentum that I'm hoping to see this year. So for the listeners, a UN Global Plastics Treaty is essentially you can think about it in parallel to the biodiversity, the Montreal Protocol that came in there or you know what we did for climate in Paris a few decades ago, which is to bring all countries together and align on a common goal that we want to reach as a planet, be a common understanding of the biggest problems that inhibit that today, see a common set of solutions that we all want to in a harmonized way, push for across countries and then be find the right ways of financing those solutions. So these were you know, in a nutshell, the four things that the treaty was trying to achieve. So in climate, for example, you know, talking about we want to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees cc, these sorts of things are very helpful because it gives a common goal for the entire planet. We don't have that in plastic today. We don't have a common goal that says we want to reduce plastic leakage by 90% by 2050 or by we want to you know, reduce plastic production. Like there is no understanding of what is the common goal for plastic across countries. We also don't have a common understanding of what the problem is. So you might have some countries just saying, well, the problem is you have a lot of these attitudes that are extremely harmful like the chemicals, the dyes that people use. They have a lot more leach and others and we just need to ban that and that is the main problem over here. And I'm going to think of this more as a health concern for your human beings. And you might have other people say, well, no, actually the problem is, you know, the marine ecosystems and the the presence of plastic in our oceans that are both an economic nuisance to fishermen communities, but also, you know, wrecking havoc across a lot of the birds and the fish and the the different various ecosystems that thrive in that marine environment. And I can keep going. I can go on and on. So I think the reality of it is we just don't have a good way of speaking about the plastic issue. And the same goes for even solutions, right? You don't even have a good way of saying what is recyclable in the United States, you know, like for even between different states. So just because something is hypothetically recyclable doesn't mean it is economically viable to recycle it. It might be too expensive and therefore it won't get done. And so some might say, well, I want to only call something recyclable if it can be economical. And others might say, no, as long as it's recyclable and over 20%. And then I will call it recyclable. So you can I think have a lot of debate on these topics. And I think part of the reason why the global plastic treaty took so long to get mobilized was really arguing about the definitions and, you know, what is the ultimate north star that we wanted to be moving towards as a planet. And the it came very close last year. But one of the reasons why it ultimately fell through was a big difference between these two different coalitions. So you had, you know, what has been like the high ambition coalition, but is a group of countries like the SIDs nations who wander and so on that are really pushing for a cap on overall plastic production. And you have a different set of countries like the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, a lot of really the oil producing countries that don't want to control anything upstream at the production level. And instead only want to focus on improving recycling rates and downstream waste management infrastructure. So their argument is if we're able to collect everything, then it doesn't matter how much we produce because it's not becoming waste. And then you shouldn't be putting any caps on plastic the way we try to put caps in some places on carbon emissions. And I think that was one of the biggest sticking points that led to the stagnation of the treaty process itself. But having said that, I think again, we are trying to revive it going into this year. And I'm cautious, the optimistic that we'll be able to find at least some little ground that pushes intermediate progress before we revise it for higher ambition as as we keep going through the years. And just one last area to touch on, I believe you said a lot of the companies you work with don't even measure and haven't thought about measuring their plastic waste. I do actually believe that because I spent some time working in a project to help guide how companies should actually measure that waste. But I'm just wondering when you think about repurposes role, what metrics do you look at? What KPIs do you recommend that companies start tracking? And is it something that you're seeing more and more companies actually do as the regulatory backdrop is shifting at least a little bit? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So our software actually enables exactly this. Where there's two components to measuring someone's packaging footprint. One is just understanding what is in the packaging itself. And the second is understanding how many units of that packaging you've sold in any given geography. So if I have a bottle and the bottle is, let's say, for use of math, a pound of plastic. Again, I'm selling 100 bottles. My plastic footprint is 100 pounds. Then you get into some more sophistication of what kind of plastic it is. Is that recyclable in this particular geography? Is that compostable? Is that reusable? Does it have, you know, post-the-zimmer recycled content in it? All of these are the levers that go into it. And so for a company, the thing that is very easy to do is know how much they're selling, know how many units of any particular skew they have put out into the market. However, what is really difficult for them to know is what is in my packaging. Like what kind of material is it? You know, is it recyclable? All of these different questions, I think is just not something that they've ever had to ask before. And is not something that there are systems in place to enable them to track in a more continuous way. And so that's exactly what we helped them with entry purpose. So when a company comes to us, we actually have a whole suite of tools that allows them to just upload.
even just images of their packaging onto our database. And we asked for some questions like, what's that for they're in, if they, if we know who they're packaging manufacturers and so on. And then we're able to auto-map that to our database that has thousands and thousands of sub components in that, all anonymized from the hundreds of brands that we have been working with, but we also have data injection pipelines from packaging manufacturers. And so then it becomes really easy for a company to just sort of come in and say, well, I know I'm selling 4,000 units of this, but now this is what is in each of these units. And therefore, here is a comprehensive view of my packaging footprint. So that first step, we lowered the barrier to entry there as much as possible. And in many ways, I think what I see ourselves doing there is creating that universal data layer for packaging sustainability and compliance and creating that data layer across packaging suppliers and brands and policy makers, because then what really the brands do with this data is either recorded for things that EPR and submitted to each of their different states or their countries, or this sustainability team can then use it to help redesign their packaging, or they can also invest in our global waste management supply chains to recover an equivalent to monoplastic as well. And so there's just different ways for them to take action. But again, they need to know what their plastic footprint is first. And then we help across the board from start to finish there. All right. And I guess just final question. You know, we're still relatively early in 2026. I'm just wondering, what is your level of optimism for seeing progress on global plastic use and waste and what's your level of optimism over the next few years? Yeah, I think 2026 is definitely going to be a very polarized year. I think when it comes to this issue, because I feel like voluntary commitments are going to be lower or maybe just at the same level as what we saw in 2025. But regulatory effort is going to go up. And so I am more bullish on the regulatory side of things this year. Voluntary depends on a lot of other things, like even the tariffs in fact, the trade of margins go lower for a brand. They're going to have less disposable budget for other things that they don't need, you know, completely urgent in 2026. Regulatory, however, I do see moving more quickly this year. We have different states taking even when there isn't like a federal mandate, for example, each state then is able to come up with their own different versions of this which does create progress. But again, then you have some issues with interoperability that are least spoken about already. And regulatory at the global level, which I think, you know, relates to the global plastic treaty conversation, I think that I'm less slightly less bullish on than domestic regulation. But more than voluntary commitments. So that's my, I guess, hierarchy for, you know, the progress of the space in 2026. Over the next few years still, like I think if we're looking out into 2030, 2040, I do think, you know, my more philosophical answer, I guess over here, is that better choices are inevitable. I think, you know, oftentimes human beings were just slow at figuring things out that are not short term, you know, it took us forever to figure out democracy as a political framework. It took us forever to figure out that it was beneficial to let women go to school and go to work and vote and that it helped the economy as a whole to do all of these things. And I think the sake of economy is exactly that. It is an inevitable progression to where we are today. And it is going to absolutely benefit financially the entire economy. And so I think there is no doubt in my mind that we will figure it out. And so I'm much, much more optimistic looking farther along into 2040. That is a great uplifting note to end it on. As we started our discussion, there's a lot of nuance here. And I realized we could only really touch the tip of the iceberg. But thank you so much for your time and your insights today. You can find more information on plastic packaging and waste management by going to our ESG dashboard at BIEESG Go on the Bloomberg terminal. And if you have an ESG quandary, questions or suggestions who would like to ask of BIE's expert analysts, please send us an email at
[email protected]. Thank you so much for joining us today. This is Caroline Hyde. And I'm Ed Ludlow inviting you to join us for Bloomberg Tech, a daily podcast focusing exclusively on technology, innovation and the future of business. Every weekday we bring you the top headlines from the world's biggest tech companies. From finance to defense, AI to entertainment and from startups to the magnificent seven. We highlight the latest stories of the people and companies pushing the tech sector to new frontiers and the politics that shape global tech markets. We do this all every weekday, then bring you the most important conversations and analysis in our podcast. Search for Bloomberg Tech on YouTube, Apple, Spotify or anywhere else you listen. Join us every afternoon on your commute home and stay ahead of the tech news cycle. That's the Bloomberg Tech podcast. I'm Caroline Hyde in New York. And I'm Ed Ludlow in San Francisco. Subscribe today wherever you get your podcasts.
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