Upcycling for free

In the battle for market share, "free" wins every time.  "Free" is a whole lot more attractive than "cheap", "less expensive than the rest" or any other permutation.  In a business that needs volume, why not drive for free waste disposal.  Why not indeed? The obvious answer will be that the income lost from waste disposal fees must be regained in the sale of materials or other sources.

Income from the sale of materials will be determined by the price that can be obtained.  Some materials, like scrap metal or cardboard, have their price determined by commodity markets.  Indeed, you can go to London Metal Exchange and get spot and forward prices for all manner of metals.  Generally a scrap metal dealer is needed to access the markets, but this might be achievable without a dealer provided there are sufficient tonnes.  That is, a large upcycler might develop its own channels to market.

Other materials, like books, furniture, timber, mulch and compost are either not readily transported to global markets, or have an intrinsic value that far exceeds its materials.  This is obvious - a second hand book selling for $5 might weigh a kilogram.  At $100/tonne for scrap paper, the paper is worth $0.10.  Conversely, selling the book as a book rather than as paper yields a price of $5,000/tonne.

Materials not easily transported need to have local markets, and this can be tricky, needing significant effort to develop the market.  It may be that the upcycler is better off adding value, perhaps even straying into fields well beyond materials handling (there might be crops that can be profitably grown with compost rather than trying to sell the compost).  Clever work is needed here.

So that is the sale of materials.  Instinctively, with the value of resources generally falling over time as their supply increases to match and surpass demand, relying upon material sales seems unlikely to be a long term winner.  But it might be.

Another, intriguing, source of income is advertising.  An upcycling facility that has a strong flow through of customers with particular values might be a perfect forum for advertising similar services.  As the facility gains in popularity, the advertising can grow as a source of revenue.  This begins to move an upcycling facility towards becoming a platform through which advertisers can connect with a self-selected market.  That could be very powerful.  To make a "waste" facility into a platform able to attract advertising, it has to be absolutely not like a waste facility.  It must be clean, clever, slick.

All of which begins to grow some ideas for a multi-faceted approach to building markets.  Maybe use the facility, or network of facilities, much as a website might be used in the dotcom era.  A channel for traffic, grown quickly (but sustainably) through its unique offering to become the dominant player.  The Amazon, Facebook or Google of the "waste" world.

An idea.