Josh Mastromatto’s startup web app Rego has a mission – making zero waste more affordable and accessible. The project started as a way to bring Philly waste to the proper disposal sites.
“My co-founder and I really looked at different parts of the climate and sustainability landscape, and we realized that waste was one of the only things where it actually costs more money to do the right thing,” said the native Philadelphian.
Mastromatto said the app was initially used during the pandemic to help with furniture donation and moving. The hope was that Rego’s software could analyze photos to help users determine the quality of furniture and what to do with said furniture.
“So, version one was essentially getting people to take photos of their furniture, figuring out whether or not it could get accepted at a place like Habitat for Humanity ReStore or Philly AIDS Thrift or The Philadelphia Furniture Bank, and then based on that data, helping with the transportation,” he said.
As the pandemic ended, there was a real need for helping with other kinds of waste, Mastromatto said.
That’s when the app switched gears – helping with waste auditing.
What is waste auditing?
Many organizations, including retail companies, apartment buildings, educational institutions, and hospitality companies, perform waste audits, Mastromatto said. It is an important part of figuring out how to reduce costs or improve waste management.
“A waste audit is a process to measure waste output and figure out what exactly is in a waste stream,” he said. “It’s used to figure out how to improve that waste stream, both for cost and sustainability. It’s a really important process of the waste industry. A lot of that data is actually used to inform costly financial investments into waste diversion strategies for buildings, and also cities.”
One of the biggest challenges with traditional waste audits, Mastromatto said, is that they can be time-consuming and dangerous. Oftentimes, these reports require hand sorting through physical trash to learn more information.
“So people will show up somewhere in these big Hazmat suits, and they have to spend hours, sometimes weeks, actually digging through the trash,” he said. “So Rego replaces that hand-sorting process. All they need to do is take images of the waste in different settings. Rego’s AI collects those images and analyzes that data to extract the data that has specific context to that organization, and then also provides the reporting.
“So, it’s really eliminating a lot of that hazardous hand-sorting, and then also the time spent on the reporting and insight generation.”
These reports can also take years to complete, Mastromatto said, adding that Rego helps to make these reports more timely, so that better solutions can be reached quickly.
“The thing that’s unique about trash is that the trash profile or these waste streams change daily,” he said. “By the time you go to implement solutions based on a waste audit, you might have a ton of missing data or incomplete information, which leads to solutions that may seem to be up to date or current, but aren’t.”
He said having these insights and data can help corporations better streamline their waste and move toward a circular economy – a system where materials are reused or recycled rather than “wasted” or thrown away.
Widespread uses
Mastromatto acknowledged that waste auditing can be difficult to understand. He said there are many ways the app can help different groups and individuals with waste collection and information.
For example, Rego’s origins with furniture sorting helped both users and local donation stores.
“We just spent several years figuring out what is the most creative, easy, affordable way that we could collect really great data to help people develop new solutions and bring new ideas to life,” he said. “That was the launching point to essentially be able to help collect waste audit data through photographs, whether that’s a cellphone photo or some other type of camera photo.”
The company has also helped local universities during move-out time.
Nina Morris is the sustainability director for the University of Pennsylvania’s Sustainability Office and has worked with Rego for Penn’s furniture diversion program and off-campus diversion program.
Morris and her colleague, Scott Filkin, had been looking for ways to make the move-out program easier and more sustainable for some time.
“Scott and I have been trying to figure out how to solve off-campus move-out waste for a couple of years now, which led to us creating a request for proposals to find a local partner to help us provide curbside collection for our students who live off campus,” she said. “But we were also interested in metrics, making sure we understood what exactly was getting picked up, and then also meeting some of the goals that we heard from the community, which is to keep these materials local. And so when we put out the request for proposals, Rego responded.”
Filkin, who is the one of the directors in Penn’s Office of Social Equity and Community, explained that students likely want their furniture to be disposed of effectively, but that there needed to be a “system” in place to help with this.
“With finals, with saying goodbye, with leaving town, it’s a time-crunch opportunity or time for them,” he said. “And so we were pretty confident that if we had a system in place, they would use it.”
That’s where Rego came in – coordinating everything from condition of furniture to pickup and dropoff to donation sites for students.
“The Rego system allowed them to identify a piece of furniture that they had, which meant that Rego could know the size of it and know what kind of truck was necessary to pick it up and to organize the whole system for us,” he said.
Filkin said he was “excited” that the system worked so efficiently.
“It was an easy link for students to click on, and it made sense, and it was fast and easy,” he said.
Morris said Rego was the “one-stop shop” process Penn had been looking for, and made it easy to coordinate the whole move-out process.
“Rego was able to take something that we wanted to do and scale it,” she said. “We had been trying on our own and working with other local partners to try and make this happen, and with limited success. And so this is the first time that we’ve been able to stick to the goals of our community and also meet the needs of our students.”
As Filkin explains, Rego will “just say yes, then make it work.”
As for the future, Mastromatto said he hopes to continue helping various businesses and industries in the area produce less waste and analyze it more efficiently.
“We really just want to be able to help cities like Philadelphia, that are moving in the right direction and want to do these right things and are investing in new technologies, just be able to collect that data a lot faster, a lot easier, a lot more affordably, so that they have the data they need to make those really important decisions into the circular economy and waste diversion,” he said.
Rego currently works with many other organizations – including K-12 schools and districts, universities, corporations and sustainability and waste teams and consultants.
The post This app makes recycling bigger items work for students, colleges and businesses appeared first on Billy Penn at WHYY.
Want more insights? Join Working Title - our career elevating newsletter and get the future of work delivered weekly.
