Arizona State University and the city of Arizona have launched a “public-private incubator” to find new uses for waste.
Greenbiz reported that the new programme would be run from the Arizona State University Resource Innovation and Solutions Network (RISN) and will be called RISN Incubator. The focus will be to “harness momentum around the concept of a circular economy” and building business models for eliminating waste by continued recycling through “supply chains”.
The programme compliments the city goal to “divert 40 percent of waste” from landfills by 2020 as well as the university’s own programmes relating to sustainability. The article noted that some manufacturing and production companies are on board with the ethos of circular economy and that Adidas, Ford and Dell are such manufacturers as well as the work from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation CE100 and Circular Cities Network.
The article also noted that the Closed Loop Fund have said that there are “structural limitations of local infrastructure” which are often an “obstacle for scaling promising waste-reduction efforts or even basic recycling systems”. Since the fund was launched in 2014 with $100 million (€87.9 million) put aside to improve “municipal recycling” companies seeking to obtain recycled material are finding it hard to find enough supplies.
As an example to the lack of materials for recycling the article cited the recycled paper industry and an article from Recycling Today which said: “Demand, domestically and overseas, has been strong. Supply, on the other hand, has experienced a shortage among various grades. As demand has grown, supply has lessened.”
The City of Phoenix is hoping that the incubator programme will help create new jobs in the related businesses and there are big plans to “eventually locate the incubator and the broader RISN at a $13 million (€11 million) city-backed Resource Innovation Campus currently under construction”.
Meanwhile, distributors are being sought and the types the Phoenix accelerator programme will look to support are “ventures that focus on waste diversion and improvements in processing or utilisation of waste as a raw material for new products or energy,” according to a press release earlier this year.