Sustainability In Your Ear Transcript: Buckstop's Alexander Olesen Digs Into Urban Mining

Mitch Ratcliffe 0:00

Hello, good morning, good afternoon or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours, welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon neutral society, and I'm your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.

Several years ago, I spoke with Alexander Olesen, co-founder of Babylon Micro-Farms, about how distributed, digitally managed, hydroponic systems could bring food production closer to the point of consumption. That is, we grow our food where we eat it. The company continues to reshape agriculture, one micro-farm at a time. But today, Alexander is back to discuss his new venture called Buckstop. It's an urban mining company founded in early 2025 and Buckstop, which released its beta product in early October, aims to build an intelligence layer for the circular economy, for the electronics infrastructure.

Its mission sounds simple, but it's enormously ambitious to create a sustainable end of use solution for every electronic device on Earth, turning yesterday's waste into tomorrow's resources. Buckstop currently focuses on the sprawling infrastructure that powers the renewable transition that is solar panels, batteries, inverters, EV chargers, all of the elements of the new electronic economy to solve the challenge of what happens when those assets reach the end of their useful lives. Every solar array, every storage bank, every charger installed over the past decade will one day need to be decommissioned, refurbished or recycled. There is no unifying system to handle that flow of material. In short, no operating system for the reverse supply chain that the circular economy depends on.

Batteries and a few narrow categories of consumer electronics are collected and processed, but many of the electronics we use, along with the valuable critical minerals they contain, end up in landfills, and Buckstop seeks to change that, using AI-driven valuation, logistics orchestration and critical minerals tracking, to transform decommissioning from a cost center into a resource engine. If it works, Buckstop could redefine the idea of urban mining that is extracting value not from the earth but from the technological systems we've already built. The implications of making circularity a core feature of the clean energy economy, not an afterthought, are immense. In the long run, it could reduce the need for raw materials extraction from nature by 80% or more.

But that's a steep hill to climb because of the fragmented regulations, volatile secondary markets, and the physical complexity of taking the energy system apart piece by piece to route them to the right processor. There's a lot of work involved. We'll talk with Alexander about how Buckstop plans to make circularity scalable, and what he's learned since starting Babylon Micro-Farms, about building distributed systems that can outlive their creators, and how our civilization might finally learn to design for endings as intelligently as we design for beginnings. So we'll see if we can get the circular economy turning right after this brief commercial break.

[Commercial break]

Welcome, well, welcome back to the show, Alexander, how you doing today?

Alexander Olesen 3:26

I am great, Mitch, thanks for having me on.

Mitch Ratcliffe 3:30

Well, thank you. Talking about Babylon Micro-Farms a few years ago was really interesting, but here you are with a new business, Buckstop, and you describe this as the intelligence layer for the circular economy. So here's the question, what does Buckstop need to build, and in what timeframe to lead the reverse logistics market in electronics and critical minerals?

Alexander Olesen 3:49

Wow, jumping straight into the important questions. Yeah, I think to start off, I'd like to just kind of frame the problem as we see it. So, having been an OEM of some electronic products for the past 10 years, I saw that basically, there's a significant information gap between the asset owners and the options for resale and recycling, and that's one of the many reasons why we have such a low electronics recycling rate in the US, right? It's currently sitting around 20% which is very low. It's obviously bad from a sustainability point of view. It's also bad from a national security point of view, and it's really bad for the customers and the asset owners. So with that in mind, we see the data is one of the key pieces that's missing here.

So really, what we're trying to do is build a novel method to appraise the underlying value of deployed electronics hardware. So our core innovation is what we're calling an algorithmic assay. So an assay is the method of kind of breaking something down into its rare earth element forms and minerals and so forth. And so we've derived a novel overall approach to doing that at scale, which we're really excited about. So we're essentially deconstructing finished goods into their raw materials and critical minerals. We're looking at the resale values. And so we built a platform that allows us to basically ingest companies' asset lists and really give them a new granular level of detail in a very short amount of time about what they have. And once you've measured something, you can start to improve it. And so we think that this is one of the underlying pieces here. It's like, okay, for the companies that are out there deploying electronics, we can measure what you have out there very quickly and in very high fidelity. And that is now the foundational piece from which you can start developing circular programs to resell, recycle things.

Mitch Ratcliffe 5:47

So you just launched your beta of the assessment tool. The question for me is, what is the data, the foundation that powers that assessment? Are you breaking down the bill of materials for all these different products in order to say there's that much gold or cobalt or whatever in that material?

Alexander Olesen 6:05

Essentially, yes, I think there's... We combine a lot of sources, both public and private, to give these... and I think it's also important to look at the context here, where your scrap and recyclers are often relying on a lot of gut instinct to go spec out a project and look, they look for the copper wire, they look for the motherboard, they look for some of these key components that drive value. So we're observing that and figuring out how to do it using the latest technology.

Mitch Ratcliffe 6:32

Now your beta is, I think, primarily aimed at developers of solar, wind and other infrastructure projects at this point. And it's interesting, because typically, all those pieces of equipment are sunk costs, but you're describing them as assets with future value. How does that change the way we think about and track, say, for instance, gold, copper or nickel and lithium through the entire life cycle? Are we going to be able to say I have a recoverable value of this much in my infrastructure?

Alexander Olesen 7:03

Yeah, so that's exactly what we're working towards. I think a helpful analogy here is Kelley Blue Book was the data stream that formalized the aftermarket for vehicles. And you see today, the vehicles and 97% of them are recycled. It's actually the most circular industry on the planet, and that wasn't always the case. People used to just leave them rusting on the side of the road. And so we're seeing a lot of the similar factors in the electronic space, geopolitics, supply chain, shortage and so forth, that are driving demand for domestic recycling. And we think that if we're able to measure it, that is going to help drive circularity, both through resale and recycling.

And just, you know, as it relates to the depreciation point, I think that's absolutely key, that the core of what we're doing is an economic proposition for these companies. We call it the circularity delta. And the way to think about that is, most of these assets are depreciated over a straight line, often to zero, and that is not an accurate representation of their value, and it's also one of the reasons why there's a lot of value destruction. So once you've got an asset, once it becomes idle, surplus or obsolete, there's an operations guy on the ground, usually, who is just tasked with getting rid of it, and so it's landfilled, it's hoarded, maybe given to a scrap yard, if you're lucky.

And we see that as one of the core information asymmetries that we're trying to address is like, how do you give the finance team the visibility on that applied asset in raw materials and in resale so that they can actually map the value of this asset throughout its life? And, you know, instead of a straight line, it's more of a kind of S curve that shows that, you know, like a car, you lose 40% when you drive it off the lot. It holds its value okay, for a certain amount of time, and then it really starts to decrease. And that is exactly what we're measuring across different asset types. And that is really valuable information for the asset owners, because it can help inform when they should upgrade, when are the optimal times do this, and how can they recover more value.

And so just to put some numbers to that, we're seeing the scrap value for electronics, in broad terms, is usually one to 5%. The resale value can be 20 to 30% on the high end, and that's a significant portion. You look at some of these large companies, look in the Fortune 500 where they have billions of dollars of fixed assets, that is a huge portion of their balance sheet that they could be recovering. And so we're trying to build the tools to help them understand that and drive that recovery rate up.

Mitch Ratcliffe 9:23

And if you can measure it, you can finance it, which implies that there's some interesting new economic models. Do you participate in guaranteeing future value, and could you potentially even monetize that as part of your business?

Alexander Olesen 9:37

That is absolutely a goal of ours. It's very hard to do, as with anything, predicting the future is hard, but luckily, we're consolidating a lot of historical data sets that are giving us some really granular visibility there, which we don't think has been done before. And I think, to your point, particularly in the energy space, you know, there are a lot of financial intermediaries for decommissioning bonds, permitting, perpetuity lenders and insurers, all of them require salvage values. That is one of the key risk variables for their underwriting process. And today it's often zero, or they pull a number, they pick a round number. It's actually really a kind of imperfect part of the puzzle. And I think I actually lived this in my previous life.

We were, you know, we were in the vertical farming equipment. We deployed a hardware as a service model. We couldn't get financing from anyone because we were, like, we've never seen this before. We were kind of nearly a first of a kind in that area. And they assumed the salvage value was zero. That drove up our interest rates, you know, the cost of the capital. And so I think in the longer term, if we're successful, there is a world where you enable kind of more circular financing, and you have granular assumptions around the residual values, and that could actually reduce the cost of capital, reduce your insurance premiums, and ultimately, encourage more circular financing towards electronic assets.

Mitch Ratcliffe 11:08

Orchestration is the new function that we're introducing into the economy. And as I think about where Buckstop is, it seems like you also have the opportunity to arbitrage material value based on where it is, differences in value, different costs of collecting and processing in different regions and so forth. So how do you keep track of all of those local, hyper-local pricing and other factors as you assess the value of, say, a battery?

Alexander Olesen 11:34

Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I think we do see ourselves as kind of an orchestration layer. You know, the data allows better decisions. And we think driving up recovery rates is really what we're about. How we go about that is, is, again, lot of data collection. Now, very fortunate to have some co-founders who, one of which comes from the commodities trading world. And if you think about it, commodities, they run netback models which essentially factor in the price and then the shipping cost globally for these more liquid markets. Of course, we're dealing in electronic waste, which is not a measured or liquid market. I think that's going to change. I think we're going to be part of that. And then we have another co-founder who really comes from a data engineering side.

So fortunately between us, we're able to look at, how do you consolidate again, public and private data sets? How do you build methods to gather first hand research on pricing, literally, like, in some cases, calling around scrap yards. So we're building out that methodology to give us really a very granular look at the trading prices of these electronic assets, both through resale and recycling. And as we kind of ramp that up, it's going to be a really useful tool for all of these stakeholders across the life cycle of an asset, from the folks underwriting them at the start of life through to that end of life journey, whether that's reuse or recycling.

Mitch Ratcliffe 12:57

So when you look at that big picture as the orchestrator of a circular economy and this kind of material, a lot of jurisdictions have different e-waste, transportation of e-waste regulations, all sorts of different rules, and that affects the cost of moving these materials around. How are you going to integrate that view and provide that kind of guidance to the customers who are doing the assessment of their materials?

Alexander Olesen 13:20

Yeah, I think it's a really important point, and it's actually one of the key features of our appraisal platform, is we look at your assets, we give you resale values in very high fidelity, scrap values and regulations. Because, as you correctly point out, regulations are one of the key drivers here, and the real challenge we're facing as an industry, from a secular point of view, is hoarding. You know, you've got that drawer full of electronics at home. Companies have warehouses and graveyards full of stuff and then landfill. And I think the landscape is changing there very quickly. And I just came from the Solar Energy Industry Association event earlier this week, and there are two new states that added landfill bans this year alone.

So it's moving quickly, and I think you've got the Brussels effect in Europe driving a lot of that right that way ahead of the US, but states like California and Washington are really driving quite an aggressive policy agenda that is ultimately good for circularity, but it's kind of pushing, banning landfill bans, encouraging extended producer responsibilities. These are all things that we try to give companies visibility on. So as kind of an enterprise data platform, we can look at the state and county level where these assets are being kept, and then we can help show them what regulations apply to them. And I think again, that's kind of a key driver of how to recover value, is like, what are the costs associated with how to handle it properly.

Mitch Ratcliffe 14:41

So you're describing urban mining as the activity that we're ultimately beginning to systematize. Does that mean we're going to dig up everything in landfills and start to sort through it, to pull the gold and cobalt and other materials out?

Alexander Olesen 14:56

That is getting a little bit further down our product roadmap that I want to talk about, but I think it's absolutely right. I love the term urban mining. Obviously it can mean a lot of different things, so I think for context, the electronics around us in the built environment is the richest mining scene on Earth. We've already gone to the work of digging it out of the ground, refining it into a product and a material, and yet we see such low recycling rates.

I think the issue at hand is that it's a highly disaggregated supply, and there's a lot of institutional know-how and what has value. And again, that's what we're trying to provide some rigor to. How do you measure that? And your landfill mining has come up a lot. I think it is pretty obvious opportunity, especially given some of the older electronics that are out there, and most of them are buried in landfill by now, are a much higher density in certain critical minerals. So I have no doubt that that is going to be a source of feedstock in the future. I don't think it's quite what we're focused on, but it's all part of that umbrella term of like, how do we collect what's out there? And you know, I think there are so many tailwinds now from a geopolitical point of view, but also, if you look at the downstream investment that's going into novel recycling processes, automated shredding, sorting facilities, hydrometallurgics, which are really increasing recovery rates.

These are all amazing things, and I think are really setting the foundation for this kind of urban mining world, where the unit economics of material recovery improves significantly, which is great for the industry. And I think as it relates to where we fit in, all of that downstream investment is amazing. It is much needed. It is a huge boost to the industry, but none of those businesses can be successful without feedstock.

Mitch Ratcliffe 16:44

But was this possible before the advent of AI? I mean, we were talking before we went on the air about the fact that you launched your beta three months after the team went full time, and that's obviously an accelerated process. But would it even have been possible to undertake this business without the ability to use AI to optimize the network?

Alexander Olesen 17:05

Not at all. And I think it's one of the key, you know, it's from where we're sitting. It's a really exciting real world use case for AI, and, you know, a sustainability use case as well. And it just wasn't possible. I think if you just look at the sheer amount of data that we're having to crunch through, the also, kind of the manual in a lot of cases, data collection, cleaning, sorting these proprietary data sets to train the models and derive these insights like it was... I think there are kind of fringe examples of where it had been done on a specific device type or category, but the idea of being able to do it across all these different industries and devices was just simply untenable, even, you know, a year ago. And so I think we're really kind of meeting that moment with leveraging this amazing new technology to do something that hasn't been done before.

Mitch Ratcliffe 17:56

You just gestured at the fact that there are a number of companies that, for their own purposes, recycle and recover their materials, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft. Are you aiming also to extend into the consumer electronic space, to offer the same sort of orchestration, and if you do that, do you see offering that as a service to those large companies, or are they your competitor?

Alexander Olesen 18:17

I definitely don't think they're competitors. It's interesting. It's sort of where to start. I think, you know, one, we've got our hands full in the energy and industrial space, and there's just a lot of opportunity there. And also, from a, from a, just a massive material point of view, it's a really high, large segment. It's hard to go into kind of enterprise recycling without running into consumer electronics, right? So it's a lot of crossover in your IT assets and consumers. So it seems like it's inevitable, but I'd say, as it relates to Apple and others, they're a great bellwether for the rest of the economy.

The fact that they're doing this, the fact that they've actually leaned into circularity really is just testament to the value that can provide. And I think when we talk about it internally, we talk about the blended benefit of circularity. It is both a sustainability benefit, but it's also really important for customer retention, and then also the certified pre-owned programs increase your install base. So from a business point of view, you're selling new products, which is great for revenue. You're reducing your emissions and sustainability overall, but you're also kind of actually creating a new class of pre-owned devices that grow your install base.

So this is a kind of win-win-win that is a bit of a no-brainer for these businesses, and the fact that Apple and others are doing it is a great sign.

Mitch Ratcliffe 19:37

So we've unpacked all the complexity. I think we should take a quick commercial break, and then we'll be right back to continue the conversation.

[Commercial break]

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear, we're talking with Alexander Olesen. He's co-founder and CEO of the newly launched urban mining company Buckstop, but Alexander, you are also the founder of Babylon Micro-Farms, and you grew that into a vertical farming leader. How would you characterize the progress in vertical farming since we last talked?

Alexander Olesen 20:09

Well, that's a big question. You know, I'm sitting on the sidelines these days, but still cheering on Babylon and remain actively involved there on the board. The space is really interesting, right? I think there's one. It's absolutely essential for in the long run. And I think the unit economics are being proven out across certain categories and certain types of vertical farming systems. But, you know, there's certainly some headwinds.

The capital landscape has shifted. I think a lot of venture capital flowed into the space. Some, some could say too much. The long-term need for the industry is certainly there. And I don't think consumer habits towards kind of local farming, high quality produce, less food miles, less waste is going to go away. I think all of those things are there that set industry up for long-term success. However, you know, clearly a lot of capital flowed into the space.

There are a lot of very exciting companies that have gone away, and I think that leaves the industry with a bit of a black eye. And that's definitely challenging for everyone that operates in it. And as it relates to Babylon, we're fortunate to be differentiated. We sell hardware, we sell software, we don't sell produce. But, you know, it's a challenging space, and I think a lot of this vibe shift against ESG and other things that doesn't help the industry, you know, because a lot of these companies wanted to invest in the latest greatest thing, and we're seeing this in solar as well. You know, people that sort of just a change in attitude towards investing in these sustainable technologies, which is challenging. But, you know, again, I continue to be a really big believer in the about vertical farming space in the long run. And at Babylon, we're lucky to have Marco Shalma, who's one of the co-founders of AeroFarms, take over.

Mitch Ratcliffe 21:50

So I'm curious what technical or business assumptions have held up from the beginning of Babylon Micro-Farms, and which ones turned out to be, you know, grossly overestimated or underestimated? What surprised you about it?

Alexander Olesen 22:04

I could give you a long list for a whole other episode on this, but I think for us, the complexities of manufacturing hardware from scratch were just immense. You know, it was a very steep learning curve for us as a company developing a novel hardware system. And so, you know, that was a steep learning curve. Again, we're pretty differentiated in the market as making hardware and selling the supporting software, but I think those are some of the bigger learnings are really around the production side.

But as it relates to industry, I think just generally, these small modular systems look to be pretty successful. You know, there are others in our kind of nascent segment, alongside Babylon that seem to be having a lot of commercial traction just on the basis of being very accessible, smaller scale. And it's just interesting to see that some of the small, modular systems that were written off 5 to 10 years ago seem to be the ones having the most commercial success these days.

Mitch Ratcliffe 23:07

You've moved from one industry to another, but what about Babylon Micro-Farms experience informed your urban mining aspirations? What were the inspirations?

Alexander Olesen 23:16

Yeah, so I absolutely wouldn't be doing Buckstop without a lot of the hard-earned learnings through becoming an OEM. And I think while we were in the vertical farming space, we were primarily a manufacturer of equipment and appliances. So we developed, you know, patented IoT platform, and we were manufacturing a product with about 1200 unique components. So, you know, this is a pretty heavy engineering and manufacturing challenge, which, you know, I'm very grateful to have gone through and learned a lot. And, you know, as I mentioned earlier, it's like I saw that anything that's electronic, it goes obsolete. Things break. This is just how it is and what happens then.

And that was really something I was seeing firsthand, where our operations teams, they just want to install the next farm. They want to help our existing customers. If something comes offline for whatever reason, that is their lowest priority. And it led to a lot of value destruction. As someone who knew our bill of materials, I was like, this... it's insane to me that some of these things are ending up in landfill. So that was one of the core insights where I was like, this is a real operational problem. There's a lot of value destruction. And I was fortunate to know a lot of folks in renewables, robotics, other kind of distributed hardware systems, and they all had exactly the same problem.

So I think as I was learning through this I was like, wow, why is there no kind of comprehensive end of life solution for technology assets? And that was really what any... it's what we're trying to build today at Buckstop.

Mitch Ratcliffe 24:43

Well, and turning back to Buckstop in terms of recycling and materials recovery. Are you thinking that you're going to ultimately build processing capabilities, or are you consistently going to rely on third party recyclers? And if that's what's your business, is it about relationships, or is it about information?

Alexander Olesen 25:01

Yeah. So we are not getting into the recycling business. I think there's so much innovation, and also a lot of incumbent players that are a really important part of this. And I think for us, in the context of industry, you've got a lot of downstream processing, a lot of new stuff coming online, and that is amazing for the processing side, but it's really around sourcing and aggregation. So in the industry, we're sitting at about 20% electronics recycled in the US, so there's 80% of this stuff out there, and how are we going to recover that? So our role in the industry, as we see it, is to help measure the deployed feedstock across all of these different electronic device categories and then provide the foundation from which we can sort, aggregate and actually provide more feedstock to these downstream processes.

Mitch Ratcliffe 25:48

You know, getting enough material to make a process economically viable is always the big challenge. Do you see these recyclers beginning to come to you to talk about their future access to content that they can process in order to maximize their return on their investment in new infrastructure?

Alexander Olesen 26:07

We're a little early to say, on that front, I think the main thing for us is about helping the asset owners know what they have so they can make better decisions. So, you know, in the context of circularity, and the economic benefits of circularity, which is what we're trying to frame, is like a lot of these companies are not prioritizing electronic waste, recycling or resale, like, just the value recovery portion in the way that they could be. And so that's where our information tools come in. And so I think we're seeing a lot of interest and demand on that front, which is really exciting. And then as that picks up, we're going to start to see a lot... We're mapping these seams of value right in these deployed assets. And so once those seams are mapped, the next step is really trying to help them find the right resale or recycling partner to process those assets.

Mitch Ratcliffe 26:54

We're talking about complete systems changes in terms of industrial processes. And a couple of weeks ago, I spoke with Tom Szaky, the CEO of TerraCycle, and he argued that the waste industry needs to evolve, to stop handling everything as waste, essentially. But the way he suggested to do that was think of it as the packaging industry that they introduce a new service layer that takes back packaging and products at the end of life, it becomes a component of the brand experience. Do you see Buckstop as potentially being the activator of a new service economy around electronic infrastructure and electronics materials that changes the way we interact with, acquire and dispose of things at the end of life?

Alexander Olesen 27:36

Yeah, absolutely. That is our goal is to be the kind of embedded circularity solution that lets anyone who owns these assets or the OEMs implement circularity, you know, that is absolutely part of our roadmap. And I think in terms of how we're doing that, we have built out this kind of repeatable valuation framework that we're scaling across different verticals, which is going to really help kind of set a baseline measurement for what's out there, and once you've measured it, then you can start to layer on these kind of take back programs, among other things, to help basically enable the circular economy.

Mitch Ratcliffe 28:12

So do you see a new class of work emerging out of this? We talked about the role of AI, but humans are still essential, particularly to the interpersonal interactions around the transfer of materials for recycling. Is there a new economy, in terms of a new workforce that we need to evolve in order to get to this circular vision?

Alexander Olesen 28:33

Yeah, absolutely. And I think you're seeing this, you know, it's really not just us, but in recycling, in the solar industry, in repowering, and there's a whole kind of workforce development angle that is happening to help facilitate these upgrades and so forth. Yes, I think from the workforce idea, the circular economy is a really exciting prospect, because, you know, if you look historically, it's only in recent decades that we've moved to this kind of take-make-waste economy. And I think as you look further ahead, you can see circularity practices being built into these products. You know, just like people have phones now for two or three years and then you're expected to get a new one, they're often on a lease.

I think we see that that is likely to be a trend for all kind of smart devices, where the kind of analog devices that lasted for 10 years and then you throw away or they break, are probably going to be replaced by these smart devices on shorter lifespans that are upgraded more regularly. So that's exciting, but to enable that, we're going to have to build new tools for reverse logistics at its core, like, how do you get stuff from B to A instead of A to B? And so I think there's a lot of things that need to happen for that. I think it's a little bit ahead of where we sit in the chain. But we're like, you know, as I say, if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. And so we're starting there.

And yeah, there are a lot of downstream implications if you kind of play this out and envision the circular economy at scale, yeah, you've got a whole new section of the economy that's going to grow to support this kind of collection, infrastructure, processing, upcycling, reselling, so forth.

Mitch Ratcliffe 30:01

We're talking about something emerging, rather than the end of an old economy. And so you've launched your beta. What are we going to be watching for for the next few months from Buckstop?

Alexander Olesen 30:14

So you know, for us right now, it is about getting this tool out into the hands of as many kind of renewable energy folks as possible. So we're seeing great adoption in the solar space. And, you know, it's a really useful tool to understand what you have, you know, I think for anyone out there who has a balance sheet that they're looking after, like, wouldn't you want to know what the residual value is in your fixed assets? I think that's the core question. You know, we talked about the circularity delta. I think we're honing in on our kind of pricing algorithms. We're finding the models there to give it a very high fidelity look on what's out there and what's it worth. And so I think that piece of the business is moving very quickly.

So our goal here is to kind of grow beyond renewables into other kind of energy and industrial assets, and really kind of set the scene for a valuation layer that can help with all of these kind of upgrades. I'm sure you're seeing, there's a ton of investment going into data centers, energy, all of that, but with every new investment, there's waste, and there's a lot of upgrades and stuff that needs to happen to be able to support that build out. And so we're really meeting that moment with a tool that can help value these assets and help inform those upgrade cycles.

Mitch Ratcliffe 31:26

An exciting vision. How can folks keep up with your work?

Alexander Olesen 31:30

So I think, follow us on buckstop.com. I'm also very active on LinkedIn and X. We're trying to kind of do this whole build in public thing, so posting lots of updates on there and yeah, really looking to connect with anyone who's deploying technology assets and is curious about what their circularity delta is, we can help you figure it out.

Mitch Ratcliffe 31:49

Alexander, thanks so much for your time again. It was great to talk with you.

Alexander Olesen 31:53

Thanks, Mitch, great to be here.

[Commercial break]

Mitch Ratcliffe 32:00

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear, you've been listening to a conversation with Alexander Olesen, co-founder and CEO of Buckstop. It's a pioneering circular electronics company aiming to build the information layer that will support tracking, valuing and recovering electronic components and critical minerals in the renewable energy infrastructure. You can learn more about the company and sign up for its beta assessment tool at buckstop.com.

Alexander's strategy underscores the problem with the concept of waste. That is the idea that stuff is worthless after its primary industrial use value is depleted. When we talk about waste, we ignore the residual value of materials that have already been mined and refined, instead of recognizing those previous investments in materials as available and profitable paths to a reusable infrastructure, and as part of that infrastructure, the opportunity to create a new service layer that ensures there is no waste, only materials that are in perpetual use. In other words, a new economy, a circular one.

Buckstop's measurement of the value of materials currently embedded in the economy in one generation of infrastructure sets the stage for circular solutions that can keep critical minerals, lithium and silicon, in circulation. A valuation layer in the economy enables creative financing and can, as Alexander shared, lift the recovery value of materials from between one and 5% to north of 20%. It's effectively found money, a potential lift in the efficiency of capital that can kickstart electronics circularity. Buckstop's challenge, however, will be to sustain itself through the first generation of use of the assets that it's measuring today, that is in order to help cash in on that value when the first wave of upgrades comes to pass. But as we've heard, the company has built a lean model, one accelerated by artificial intelligence, taking only three months to go from launch to beta product.

Buckstop may be the innovator that captures enough data, data that represent sufficient value that customers will continue to willingly pay to track those assets so that they can liberate the embedded value in the first generation of renewable energy infrastructure when upgrade time comes. If, as the saying goes, data is the new oil, Buckstop is filling reservoirs with future value.

It will be fun and probably a little harrowing to watch, so stay tuned for the next chapter in Buckstop's journey.

And I hope you take a moment to check out any of the more than 500 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear that we've produced. Please share them with others. Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us. You folks are the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste. So please tell your friends, family and co-workers. They can find us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible or other purveyors of podcast goodness. Thank you for your support.

I'm Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another in-depth interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let's all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a great day.