Welcome to Part I of a three-part series about Circular Philadelphia leadership’s trip to Texas as part of several Circular Cities trips to learn more about how different American cities are approaching circularity in an effort to share knowledge and learnings in making the transition to a circular economy. We’re excited to bring you our learnings from Austin and we thank the Claneil Foundation for their support of this project.
Before getting to circularity, framing the beginning of this trip is a must. After a pretty bumpy landing into a storm in Houston that basically lasted the entire five days that Nic and Sam were in Texas, the duo picked up their rental car and started making their way to Austin for the first leg of their tour. But as they were driving their modest, fuel efficient Kia that Sam meticulously picked for those attributes, Nic kept asking, “Is a door open or something?” as they hit the highway.
After pulling over, they realized that their back window was broken and would not go up all the way. Not wanting to risk rain getting in the car as well as a possible break in, Nic and Sam returned the car to the rental center. Upon return, they were informed that the only replacement cars would be a truck, a mini-van, or this.
Well, they had no choice. They went with the hotrod and lighted off (following all speed limits and traffic rules, of course) for Austin.
The Journey Begins
The next morning, the first stop in Austin was meeting Ann Marie Wakely, owner of Heron. Named after one of Ann Marie’s favorite birds that in her view represented graceful delivery, Ann Marie built her business around all of the things she wished she had access to when she first moved to Austin just three years before and was setting up her apartment. She also cross-checked her own needs with what she saw were the top rental items provided by similar companies, primarily on the west coast.
Today, Heron rents everything from extra chairs and party gear (fire pits, cornhole boards and popcorn makers) to practical goods like carpet cleaners, knee scooters and tools. Her operations are a very well organized, but small storage space. With demand up, she is looking to move to a proper warehouse to continue serving her growing clientele. Although she hasn’t been directly assisted with financing by the City of Austin, she feels that their support and business assistance has allowed her business to thrive.
Being two organization nerds themselves, as well as being extremely interested in rental models, Nic and Sam could have spent the entire morning at Heron. However, they needed to make the 35-minute drive to Organics By Gosh, located outside Austin’s city limits. And good thing they gave themselves extra time, because just a minor inversion of the FM Route* from 969 to 696 in the GPS sent Nic and Sam on an unplanned tour of Texas ranch country.
(*FM stands for Farm to Market route in Texas highway lingo.)
But with their bearings finally straight, they pulled into Organics By Gosh just a bit late to meet Craig Crawford of the company EPH, which now operates the facility. Started 35 years ago by the Gosh family as a place to compost local ranchers’ manure on seven acres, EPH bought the site from third generation composter Phil Gosh and expanded it to 170 acres.
The site serves the City of Austin’s residential curbside compost collection program as well as 350 commercial accounts throughout Austin. A portion of these commercial accounts are grocery stores that send food still in its package but beyond its sell-by date (or in the case of the loads of Christmas cookies on site that day, not seasonally appropriate for sale). To deal with this, the facility has a depackaging machine called “The Tiger” that depackages the food and separates out the packaging for recycling and the food waste for compost. The facility also takes brush from local landscapers, which is how they supply the brown material to mix with the green material to make compost.
Joining us on site was Meghan Doherty, who works for the City and takes a circular economy approach to economic development. Both Meghan and Craig spoke to the collaboration it takes between Austin city government and Organics By Gosh to do the education that ensures the quality control and quantities of material from Austin residents to make the contract work. Although they could always use more material – and contamination must always be addressed – both highlighted the partnership as key to continuing curbside organics pick up in Austin.
Thankfully, Meghan was able to let her team know that the tour was running just a little late due to the aforementioned scenic route Nic and Sam took. But if anyone can adapt and make it work, it’s the City of Austin’s circular economy team. So it was no big deal that Nic and Sam arrived at Austin’s staple Counter Cafe for a delicious lunch and a discussion about how the circular economy is taking root in Austin’s city government. (Nic finally got the biscuits and gravy he was craving, and Sam went full on Tex-Mex with a healthy helping of chilaquiles.)
The City’s circular economy team sits in Austin Resource Recovery’s (ARR) Strategic Initiatives Division. The program also has a partnership with the City’s Economic Development Department. The team is led by Maddie Morgan who serves as the Circular Economy Program Manager. She’s supported by a full-time staff of four, several of whom were able to join us for lunch! Renewed focus on circular economy is supported by the City’s 2021 Climate Equity Plan, which saw a major opportunity for circular economy principles to make Austin’s economy more sustainable and equitable.
Collectively, their work falls into three buckets: business innovation, consumer behavior change and leading by example (increasing circularity internally). Their program expects to offer three programs this year for circular businesses. The first is the REverse Pitch competition, where, historically, the City of Austin put out a call for entrepreneurs to present ideas for how to deal with a certain business byproduct material.
After a few years of this process – and finding that it was hard to find solutions based on specific materials – the new iteration will focus on working with established businesses to create sustainable partnerships to keep materials in use for as long as possible through strategies like resale. They’ll also host a Circular Accelerator to help early stage entrepreneurs develop their minimal viable product (MVP) through education. The Accelerator will culminate in a soft pitch, and the top entrepreneurs will get to pitch for a small prize in the Circular Austin Showcase. This pitch event is for circular businesses that have an MVP and now need investment, and up to six businesses will compete for at least a $10,000 prize. Being selected at Circular Showcase helps these businesses gain exposure in Austin’s start-up investor space.
If that wasn’t enough, Austin’s circular economy team hosts community events, one-on-one business consultations, business roundtables, fix-it clinics, and an off-campus move-out program (which has kept over 223 tons out of local landfills). There’s even more to tell about how other programs in Austin Resource Recovery are supporting material recovery, but that’s for later. For now, as Ann Marie Wakely expressed when she talked about Austin city government, if every city had a team like this, we’d have circular economies throughout the U.S. in no time.
So with all that excitement about how the City is supporting the private sector, Nic and Sam were privileged to end their day with three people who are doing incredible work in the private sector to promote the circular economy.
Start Up Innovation
These meetings began on the leafy and expansive campus of the University of Texas at Austin where our circularity tourers met Chris Rausch in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Digital Harvest Lab. Chris’ job is incredible. As a Canadian who worked for modular home companies, he had long been fascinated by how to assemble and disassemble buildings and building materials. Aside from a personal concern with protecting air quality, Chris explained, “I’m driven by the economics of how to make circularity work at scale and keeping the engine going but in a sustainable way.”
Now at UT, Chris has an entire lab where he works with students to understand how best to deconstruct and recover material. An example he showed them was a framed demonstration wall where he and his students use geometric algorithms to piece together cuts of used drywall to minimize waste. Sam and Nic couldn’t help but smile when they saw the Certainteed logos, and you know for sure that an email was being composed in their heads to Circular Philadelphia sponsor Saint-Gobain.
Keeping with the theme of acting as a network connector, Nic and Sam asked Chris to walk them across campus to meet with their next contact, Bart Bohn at the UT Austin Tech Incubator, in a space called The Launchpad. Although Chris’ guidance was very welcomed by two people who already got lost once that day, it was even cooler to see Chris and Bart meet each other and say, “I can’t believe we don’t know each other. We need to meet up sometime.” And with Chris saying his goodbyes and Bart getting into his story, it became apparent why that was so important.
The Austin Technology Incubator has been around in one form or another for 40 years and was created to keep Austin grads in Austin to apply their knowledge to building the local economy through start-ups. Bart came to the work in 2006 and believes that the early work then may have been one of the first clean-tech incubators in the country. After a 2016 visit from the MacArthur foundation, circular economy became a major focus of the incubator.
Bart is interested in the consumer product goods side of circularity, and he is in regular contact with Maddie Morgan’s and the City’s circular economy team to collaborate and assist in their business acceleration and incubation work. Bart’s team also partnered with the City’s Green Workforce Accelerator, and listening to him talk made a major impression on Sam and Nic in regards to the need to better engage local Philadelphia universities in business incubation for the circular economy.
With a full day of touring almost complete, Nic and Sam were more than happy to meet their last contact, Rashad Abbasov of Circular Route, over a beer at Lazarus Cafe. As coincidence would have it, it turns out that Rashad offered a little taste of home. He worked at Trenton’s Terracycle as a VP Incubation and New Business Ventures where he led the building of an in-house incubator that went on to develop the Terracycle Home program. But as a serial entrepreneur, Rashad could only work in the corporate world building other businesses for so long. Soon enough, he told Terracycle leadership that he was leaving to build his new venture – Circular Route.
After launching Circular Route as a national reverse logistics company that worked with brands and companies to find recycling and reuse options for their materials, he localized the company in Austin and launched the residential collection service “Circular Austin”, which finds a home for the goods Circular Austin collects. Although it is natural for a circular economy company to want to have one brand and site to connect collection and resale, it is a unique model to have one site dedicated solely to the service of pickups for material that needs a home and another site that funnels those materials directly to sales. Rashad sees a big opportunity with bulky materials, such as furniture and mattresses, and is excited to continue growing his business in Austin’s thriving circular economy sector.
With the day done, Nic couldn’t help but quip to Sam as they went to Allens Boots to procure their own Texas flair, “I know there is Extended Producer Responsibility, but what we saw today was great examples of Extended Producer Opportunity.”
But it wasn’t just words of wisdom that the duo received that day. They also picked up some killer boots and a hat – the perfect compliment for the hotrod.
Reuse at Scale in Austin
The next morning, you would think the two would be beat from such a full day. But not our intrepid travelers. They managed to shoot a video dispatch from the road, have breakfast and make it to JOSCO Products by early morning to meet with CEO Colleen Halbrook. JOSCO was started as a distributor of fiberglass raw materials for the boating industry and as a side business, they also started making rags from discarded fabric for the boat-makers to use to apply chemicals in the production process. JOSCO also saw a business with boat owners who constantly must keep their boats clean for general maintenance.
So when Colleen’s father wanted to concentrate on the fiberglass side of the business, she saw an opportunity to keep JOSCO going as an upcycled rag manufacturer. They receive unsold clothes from institutions that use linens (like hospitals & hotels) and second hand clothing stores and employ a team of people who sort by color and material and remove any items like buttons or zippers (many of which are then donated to the Austin Center for Creative Reuse). The shirts are then cut up into smaller pieces, bundled and sold to oilfield supply houses, construction supply stores and janitorial product distributors. According to Colleen, the fabric that they ultimately send to a client for final use as a rag has gone through the economy 7-8 times. Although she bemoans how fast fashion is hurting her industry due to the cheap, synthetic (and therefore non-absorbent) fabrics, 30% of her customers have been with her since 1995 and they are continuing to grow.
And if Nic and Sam thought they’d seen all there was to see in Austin’s circular economy scene, it was a perfect surprise to end the tour at the Austin Resource Recovery Recycle and Reuse Drop-Off Center. As referenced earlier that Austin’s circular economy team had a few more things to show them, this is a crown jewel of the department. Along with Maddie Morgan, the crew was met by Andy Dawson, who manages the facility. Originally, the site was built in 1999 as the City’s material recovery facility (MRF) and operated until 2007 when the City started contracting with other companies to handle the city recycling. But in 2015, the City reopened the facility as a drop-off for materials, much like Philadelphia’s sanitation centers.
But whereas Philadelphia takes recycling, trash, limited tires and electronics, as well as hosts quarterly household hazardous waste (HHW) events, Austin does all this and then some. Not only can residents bring their excess single stream recycling, they can also bring styrofoam that is processed on site. And Austin residents don’t have to wait every three months for one day to get rid of hazardous waste like paint, oil and other chemicals. This facility takes those materials on a daily basis.
They collect oil that is primarily used for fuel oil applications, and antifreeze is filtered and reused in City vehicles. They also accept excess paint from residents and mix it into new paint that they give back to residents at no-cost. They collect batteries for recycling, and when they receive HHW in perfectly good, sellable condition (such as spray paint), they have a “Reuse Shed” where residents can pick up those items for free for their own use.
The site serves tens of thousands of Austin residents each year, and before the pandemic, they had lines of cars wrapping around the facility waiting for drop-off when the facility opened each morning. Now they take material by appointment only.
But what is most notable about the facility is how the City’s material recovery team lets problems drive the solutions. Every time a material became hard to manage in the City’s curbside waste and recycling streams, ARR found an innovative way to handle, recover and/or divert that material from the landfill/incinerators. In a time where some City recycling programs are cutting back and finding it too hard to manage materials, it was remarkable to see this team take on more materials to make Austin more sustainable. This work will be bolstered in the coming years as ARR secured a $4 million grant from the EPA to build a Reuse Warehouse that will focus on bulky materials like furniture for recovery and reuse.
It was this innovation and creativity in the public and private sectors that made Austin the perfect start to the Circular Cities Texas Edition trip. With that excitement, Nic and Sam headed out in the hotrod down Texas Route 183 to the next stop – San Antonio.
Continue reading Part II of the series about the San Antonio leg of the Circular Cities tour.
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