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Peter Cowan · · 1 min readPodcast – This social enterprise accepts recycling as payment
Malaysia’s recycling rate stood at just over 31% in 2021 – a long way off from the country’s goal of reaching a rate of 40% by 2025. Edar, an online-to-offline retail grocery chain, is looking to push things along by allowing people in the country to pay for products by recycling household waste.
Some Edar grocery store outlets allow customers to pay for their goods with “bulk used cooking oil, electrical and electronic waste, and papers and cardboard.”
Suthan Mookaiah, the founder of the social enterprise, recently spoke to Kevin Brockland of Indelible Ventures on the SEA of Startups podcast about the unique business model. The conversation also touched upon using partnerships to scale faster, the importance of logistics, and more.
Here are four highlights we picked out from the conversation:
13:40 – How Edar approaches partnerships to scale its business.
19:45 – Managing minimum recycling volume collections from different outlets.
23:10 – Why managing the logistics of a social enterprise focused on recycling is Edar’s “secret sauce.”
30:50 – How to set a timeframe for breaking even when entering a new market.
Editing by Arpit Nayak
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