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Hi readers,
I’ve seen firms working with different kinds of waste, walked on paths paved with tiles made from recycled plastic, and seen up close that upcycled waste can make for attractive furniture. There was one week where I went store to store, checking out dresses made from recycled PET plastic.
I’ve also looked into how firms are using waste from pineapples to make packaging material and discarded fish scales to produce high-end clutch bags, respectively. The issue with all these ideas: The end user has to be prepared to shell out what’s on the price tag.
The problem of waste is bigger than the biggest trash mountain you’ve ever seen and deeper than the deepest landfill ever dug. Enter Octopus, a Jakarta-based startup helping address “trashy” issues even though it isn’t a waste management firm.
Dubbed the “Uber for waste,” Octopus has grown by 26x in revenue in the past year. “We have been profitable from day one,” says Moehammad Ichsan, co-founder and CEO of Octopus.
From shampoo bottles and aluminum cans to electronic waste, anything worth trading on the waste market gets picked up from doorsteps and taken to waste banks, recycling firms, or corporates looking to meet their EPR quota.
Some highlights: End users don’t pay for the pick-up service and instead get points, which can be swapped for a variety of vouchers (digital gold too, soon); the startup doesn’t have any waste-pickers on its payroll, so its expenses are kept in check; anyone can sign up to be a waste-picker, a role that the firm prefers to call pelestari, a Bahasa Indonesian word that means preserver (of the environment). You might say, what’s in a name? But Octopus has even seen university students sign up with the firm for extra pocket money.
With expansion plans in the pipeline, something tells me we’ll be hearing of this Octopus more in the days to come.
— Nikita, journalist at Tech in Asia
Top stories this week
Image credit: Timmy Loen
1️. Indonesia’s ‘Uber for waste’ finds profits in garbage collection
Octopus has witnessed 26x revenue growth in the past year and plans to expand to other countries in Southeast Asia in 2023.
2. How Shopee launched its attacked on Lazada’s weakness
Shopee had one last hurdle to overcome in the race to become a Southeast Asian ecommerce giant: Lazada’s undisputed lead.
3. Mitra has flattered Bukalapak’s financials, but new challenges await
Bukalapak’s dependency on third parties in sourcing products and delivering goods may hinder the growth of its online-to-offline business, analysts said.
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