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Our planet is dying but how do we bring about sustainable change? Join us as we interview Steve Peer from 2b0 and discover how they are using automation to find simple, clean recycling solutions.
What does it take to found a globally important company in these times? We’re interested in what happens before universally-acknowledged success.
Join Brett Kistler as he engages in deep conversations with business leaders from emerging markets, being vulnerable about their experience in the early- to median-stage moments of their founding journey.
Intro: Can we even stop using plastic? If I am aware of how much plastic I am using and how much of a carbon footprint that's creating, and if I get rewarded, would I be incentivized to maybe look at alternative products or the same products even but with a different type of packaging?
Brett: Welcome, everybody. Today I am talking with Steve Peer. Steve Peer with 2B0, which is a company building a recycling unit to bring us to zero carbon, zero plastic and zero waste. Welcome to the show today, Steve.
Steve: Hey, Brett. Thanks very much for having me here. It´s a pleasure.
Brett: Can you tell me a little about 2B0? What are you guys doing?
Steve: Absolutely. 2B0 was founded by our CEO, Milorad Arsovic, and Milorad came up with a very innovative way for material to be recycled. When I say recycled, we are thinking about the problem we are solving. The problem is that recycling currently is very complicated. You have to have a number of different blue bins, different types of materials have to go into it. The volume in the material is so high that we need to have municipalities pick it up at least every week, and even so, when all things are said and done, there is a ton of material that does not get recycled. It ends up in landfills or even worse it ends up in the ocean.
What Milorad came up with this is this really innovative way to take material, automatically recognize it, sort it and then process it based on the material type. He actually patented this technology. To give you an example, let's say you have aluminum cans, which is kind of like a good basepoint. You have your recycling appliance, or as we call it, the recycling robot. You put the can inside the appliance and on a touchscreen about the size of an iPad, it will tell you right away I know what this is. It's an aluminum can, and it uses a number of different ways to identify that it is an aluminum can. Then, from there, it will process it by moving it into the unit and actually grinding it up.
The consumer gets to have this amazing experience of watching a can get ground up on the screen, and they will be able to share that with video with their friends if they want because it is kind of a cool process. In the process of grinding up the can, it actually makes the aluminum smaller in volume and of a higher value to companies that are doing recycling. It also means that municipalities wouldn´t have to come and pick this stuff up as regularly as they are right now, which again, in many places is at least once a week or so.
We are trying to make recycling to the point where it is a pleasurable experience. It's actually a rewarding experience, so consumers are rewarded for recycling through our partners. Also, just the overall experience is exciting and unique because again the problem right now is that a lot of places do recycling are doing it in such a way that it is not providing a net reduction in carbon to the planet. We absolutely have to rethink the way we are doing it.
By using artificial intelligence, we are able to develop these learning sets that essentially get smarter and smarter over time in recognizing the material based on a number of different data points, and data is actually another thing that I will talk about a little bit further. If you have any questions, please let me know.
Brett: So basically you are using AI to filter and select exactly what that particular recycling depository is meant to be receiving, and then grinding it down and turning it into a more condensed form so that it is more valuable and also doesn´t need to be picked up as frequently because there is less air in it.
Steve: Exactly. But again, depending on the materials, so in the case of aluminum, it will be ground up. In the case of steel cans, which are your average day soup can, vegetable cans, things like that, they will likely be ground us as well. In the case of paper and cardboard, we are going to need to coordinate with various municipalities and recycling centers and find out what format they would receive it in. They may prefer to have it compressed, for example, as opposed to ground up. But that's the really exciting thing is that as time goes on, as we continue to develop the 2B0 recycling appliance over time, it will actually become smarter and be able to do more things.
We want to make sure that the overall experience is just as simple as putting dishes in the dishwasher, which to me requires a little bit of thinking. It is like where am I going to put this place, this cup and so forth. We want people just to be able to put things inside the robot, and the robot does the rest.
Brett: It makes me think about the way we do recycling today, even home recycling. A lot of what it turns out to be is the recycling bin is more of a feel good box because what happens in a lot of cases is people put things in the recycling, and depending on where you are, which municipality this is, there's a lot of different requirements. If you miss any of those requirements, like you put the milk jugs or you have tape on your cardboard or Tetrapaks that are lined with aluminum or whatever, any amount of those can make the entire block of recycling. They break things down into certain sized crates. If there are a couple of items that are prohibited or not usable, then they throw out the entire crate.
What actually happens in practice is very different than what we feel like is going to happen when we are dropping things in our recycling bin. This sort of thing is actually really important.
Steve: I agree hundred percent with what you just said, and it is really important for consumers to realize a lot of these recycling programs literally are feel good programs. The city will pick this stuff up in blue boxes, but the blue boxes or blue bins are actually filled with material that just simply can't be recycled because it is either a mixture of material or it has been contaminated in one form or another with things like meat or cheese. As a result, it can't be recycled. Consumers think I can buy whatever I want whenever I want, and then I will just put this in a blue bin and the city will take care of the rest of it.
The city is looking more from a political perspective to let the voters think that they are actually doing something in a positive way, and to be fair, they are in some respects. But we are seeing, so for example, right now, we are seeing the plastics industry, which is an offshoot of the oil and gas industry, they are actually lobbying governments right now not to ban things like single use plastic bans. Of course, they want to have governments not ban these things so consumers can continue to consume them.
Then within the context of recycling, we think we can use as many bags as we want. We can use as many plastic containers or packaging as we want. We will just put it in the blue bin. But the reality is that those blue bins, as I mentioned before, the material does not end up getting recycled, and quite often ends up in landfill. In other cases, it can be in a place where we don´t want it to be, like the ocean, for example.
We used to ship tons and tons of this stuff over to China until very recently, and China just said no, that's it. We are not taking it anymore. It's actually causing a big problem here in North America, in Canada and the US. You mentioned how complicated it can be to recycle. I lived in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada for a few years, which is a great year. It is actually kind of our Silicone Valley North, where Shopify is located, Research In Motion. Blackberry started there. We have got the University of Waterloo, and a whole bunch of other really cool, technology-focused institutions there.
Recycling, when I lived there, I had to have five different containers in the kitchen. One for compost, one for paper and cardboard, one for flimsy plastic, one for regular what they call containers, and then one for garbage. I had to think about it every single time, and then my parents, who are getting up there in age, I had to go over to their house and help them sort it all out as well. It was a very complex process, and when all things were said and done, I knew instinctively that a lot of this material was not going to be recycled. We felt good because it was being picked up in blue bins, but it was just going to end up in a landfill afterwards.
2B0 is a startup, and what we are doing right now is we are looking for venture capital partners. We are trying to scout out VC firms that focus on green initiatives, CleanTech for example, which is a little bit riskier than other types of startups. We are looking for these partnerships that can help us take this concept and grow with it, and one of the really cool things is that we are not the first market. To me, that’s really cool because it shows that there is already an existing nascent industry that is starting to form around this.
2B0 is oriented towards homes, offices, and retail locations. We can envision this being like in a coffee shop, for example, where customers can take their cans and plastic bottles, and then put it inside the recycling unit and watch it get ground up or processed. We think that the market for this is absolutely huge. Partnering with municipalities is going to be part of that, but as any type of startup, when we are searching for funding, part of my job is not only to do the research and to kind of lay out as a CTO our technology stack and framework but also make sure that we are on a path to profitability and as we move from step to step also do things like reducing risk. Whomever is investing with us, we want to mitigate risk as much as possible moving forward. One of the most exciting things I can think of right away is the fact that there is already an existing market for this appliance that’s out there already.
Brett: Tell me what that market looks like. What is the business model? Do you sell the machines? Do you lease the machines? Are they part of a subscription for picking up materials?
Steve: We are thinking that we can sell the machine. We can lease the machine almost at cost and have a hugely profitable business model just based on things like adding additional value to the unit. That can be in terms of extended warranties. That can be providing supplies and materials, services to the unit, and then a very big part of our business model is the data. The data part of it is huge because we have all these data aggregators that are out there right now that are collecting data from all different points. I mean it is getting ridiculous almost. I shouldn’t even laugh.
An example of putting a photo on Instagram, which is part of Facebook, that photo is analyzed for all of its possible metadata, anything which is there. There are now AI engines which will analyze every part of that photo, including the types of lamps you have, where you actually bought them from, where did you get that couch from, if it looks old. Let’s see my face. Does my face look a little bit haggard? Any type of data they can get, they want to collect that data and then they want to aggregate it and then use their prediction models and then understand what your behavior may be and reduce their risk as far as whatever type of business is leveraging that data.
What we are not seeing yet to my knowledge is analyzing consumer waste data. We are not collecting it. We are not correlating it. We are not analyzing it. We like to think we are an ethical company so that our data, whatever we collect, is going to be used to benefit the consumer. We certainly think that there is a market for it as well, but there is an ethical market for that data. If you are putting in 100 beer cans a week, maybe you are drinking too much beer. Maybe we should put that on our mobile app that maybe this is not necessarily a good consumption habit for lack of a better term, and I personally don’t go through 100 cans of beer just for the record in case anybody is listening.
Say that again.
Brett: It sounds like there are a lot of different ways that that data could go. There are ethical cases. There are unethical cases. It would be a horror show if the government could detect from your beer can use when you are having parties or something. There is a big brother element to that.
Steve: There is very much so. We have to be transparent.
Brett: But also to know where our recycling goes. If you could even link an individual package from like which store it came from to where it eventually ended up, whether that ended up in a landfill or made it back into the system somehow, got recycled, then you could track aspects of the packaging. Is it obvious to somebody that this is recyclable? Is it obvious how to recycle this effectively so that it is not rejected by the system? That could lead to being able to adjust the products or adjust recyclable products to have better outcomes.
Steve: I agree hundred percent. You just touched on something which would be part of our ultimate business model, which would for example right now with things like block chain technology, we are able to track anything, anywhere, at any time very reliably. If we use RFID tagging with some of the products, we could literally track it from inception to end of life, and then find out if that material is being recycled properly or if it is ending up, as you say, in a landfill. That type of analysis we think is critical not only from the standpoint that manufacturers and companies that are producing consumer goods would be very, very interested in but also from the standpoint from 2B0 helping to educate consumers of their consumption habits.
We take so many things for granted. We are not necessarily as self aware as we should be about how our consumption habits are affecting the planet. How much carbon are we adding because we have chosen a plastic container over something with a different type of container like glass or aluminum? I want to be clear as well. When we talk about recycling plastic, it is a different type of recycling altogether. Glass can be recycled, no problem. Paper, no problem. Aluminum, there is never enough aluminum in the market no matter how much we recycle. There is always a demand for more aluminum. In the case of plastic, it is a very, very fine line because we want to be able to recycle it. In many cases, it can be recycled, but there is only so much within these recyclable, for lack of a better term, life cycle. It can only be recycled once or twice, and then that’s it. It can’t be recycled again.
So then the big question comes down can we even stop using plastic. If I am aware of how much plastic I am using and how much of a carbon footprint that’s creating, and if I get rewarded, would I be incentivized to maybe look at alternative products or the same products even but with a different type of packaging? We even saw in Waterloo, for example, there is at least one store that has no packaging whatsoever. You literally walk in with your own containers. They weigh the containers beforehand, and then you walk out with stuff in the containers that you are reusing. It is a no package option, which to me is fantastic.
Then of course, you have other retailers that are now popping up everywhere with sustainable types of packaging. We know we have to wrap something up in such a way that it has to get out there. You need to put it in the container. You can’t carry around shampoo in your hand all day, but at the same time, the type of container that’s being used for that is a sustainable choice. Helping consumers to become more aware of these choices we think is absolutely critical as well.
Brett: So tell me a little bit more about the technical aspects of this device? Dive into that a little bit.
Steve: Sure, definitely. We have a proof of concept right now. The proof of concept is we can put like an aluminum can in. It gets ground up. We have actually been able to measure a 15 to 1 volume reduction in grinding up this aluminum. The AI part of it is really exciting, so depending on the number of different sensors we can use, the types of sensors we can use, so everything from video sensing. We are looking at also if the product has a barcode on it. We have a barcode scanner on the outside of the unit because that could always be like a source of truth.
As our AI engine is developing, as it becomes more intelligent, as we have more datasets that go in, as it learns more, it can have some data from bar codes to go back and fall back against. It is like I thought this was a soup can, but it could be an aluminum can, but the bar code being the source of truth shows it is actually an aluminum can. That makes our system smarter, so we prototyped our 2B0 recycling with an infrared scanner on the outside for now, but as we get further into it, we can see that going away as the datasets become larger, as the learning algorithms become smarter over time.
We are using weight as well. We are not doing anything as far as isotopes. We don’t want to burn anything inside the unit, and I don’t want to get into too much of the proprietary stuff either because that’s like our secret sauce as well. But still, very, very exciting because there is actually a company called Amprobotics which is hitting the municipal markets right now doing a similar type of thing, but they are doing it on a larger scale. They have got camera sensing technology for municipalities, and as all this recyclable material comes in on conveyor belts, they are automatically recognizing it. They are actually using robotics to pick this material from the conveyor belt based on its material identification.
Again, from a startup perspective, this technology already exists. We are not the first ones to market, and in doing so, I want to stress to our VC partners, that’s a huge risk reduction as well. Then once the material is encapsulated inside the 2B0 recycling robot, then it is a matter of determining how often the material has to be picked up. We can envision not even necessarily having regularly scheduled pickups. It may just be more a matter of we know some time next week, we are going to have enough glass to schedule a glass pickup, for example, or we are going to have enough for a steel can pickup. We want to make it convenient for the consumer. We don't want to make this anymore than I am just putting stuff in a dishwasher or stuff in a washing machine. We don't want them to have to think about it too much because if it becomes too much work, then there is going to be a lack of engagement we think.
Brett: You want to have a positive feeling associated with it. I´ve noticed myself once I started to learn more about the challenges of recycling with the blue gins and if you get it wrong, you are going to end up causing not even your trash but your neighbor's trash to also be thrown out or recycling to be thrown out. Then there's like this every time I go to throw something into the recycling bin, I am like oh, I don´t know. Am I messing this up?
Having a positive associated experience, oh look, it just got ground up and it's accepted by this machine. I now know this was the right thing to put in there, and it is part of the supply chain that I can even see some of the data on and even see some data on my own usage.
Steve: Exactly. You have just illustrated it perfectly. We can actually see people getting so excited about this that they can become addicted to it. I love watching these cans get ground up. Can we have any more cans? Can I find some more cans to put in there? And then actually sharing the videos of the material being ground up on social media as well, which we would actually encourage. We want to create this ground swell movement around 2B0 and the positive user experience I guess from a technical perspective. Like a fully engaging, exciting experience overall.
Brett: Is there any economic incentive for people to use? Do they get anything like deposits back on cans? Do they get any fee from the scrap aluminum that gets returned?
Steve: We have actually looked at many different aspects of that, and I just mentioned the convenience factor. Let's say, for example, there was an arrangement. We have a test market. We have made an arrangement with a local recycle center that for every pound of aluminum, you are going to get paid. I am going to make up a number in dollars. There would be an incentive for you to do that, and then there would be an expectation that you would actually somehow be responsible for getting that to the recycle plant or they would have to come pick it up. But that would take revenue away from the cities, and we are thinking that we are going to have to partner with the cities for this to be truly effective.
When you say would there be like an incentive, the ultimate would be for municipalities to realize because they are not doing pickups as often, because the material they are collecting is worth more, there would be a great incentive for them to provide every household and business with a tax rebate on an annual basis. In doing so, the 2B0 recycling appliance becomes not only like net zero as far as the cost is concerned, but it can actually be a revenue generator.
I don't want our business model, however, to be completely dependent on understanding that we need to get a tax rebate from municipalities, not consumers getting whatever revenue they can get from the recycling. We want this to be something which is in such a way that when we roll it out, it is so exciting and it is so positive as far as the planet is concerned, that they are kind of doing it on their own.
If I buy a washer and dryer, I am not expecting to get my money back on that. If I buy a dishwasher, I am not expecting to get a return on investment, so the fact that there is that ability to do that with the 2B0 recycling appliance we think is a very exciting possibility. But that would require, again, a partnership with municipalities. We would have to negotiate each one I would imagine, and then if that can be done, then we are looking at a huge amount of market penetration.
Brett: Is there a single product or is there a range of products? There is maybe a home one, a commercial one, or is it all?
Steve: That´s a fantastic question. We are envisioning a unit for residential, a larger one for things like offices where you have more people using it on a regular basis, and then in a retail location you would have not only more people using it, but you would have a high volume of material going into it. There would be a different one for retail. Then this would be an evolving product over time as well from the perspective of let's get our MVP out there, our minimal viable product. Our MVP may be aluminum and steel cans only to get it up and running and show that this is not only doable but it is doable in such a way that it is very positive all the way around, and more importantly can provide that ROI as far as our VC partners are concerned.
Then we have the MVP up and running, we can. Again, I am just using two examples. We may end up launching with five different materials for all I know as we get further into the research and development, but once we have our MVP up and running, we can envision having different types of recycling and processing depending on locales even. There may be certain locales, for example, geographically, where there is a lot more composting material than there is plastic. There may be a lot more glass than there is aluminum. We would want to be able to customize these over time, but we don't want to get so granular that our cost goes up. We are looking at supply chain management from the perspective of the more of these units that we have out there, the less expensive they become for us to manufacture and distribute. Then of course, the consumers benefit from a lower cost as well.
Brett: I am curious to learn more about your tech team, what the team structure is and how you bridged the gap between the hardware and the firmware and then the software and then the IOT connectivity stuff. What does that look like? What was your journey in building the team from having the idea to where you guys are now?
Steve: Absolutely. Let's look at it from a consumer product perspective. I learned years ago. I developed a neat little software application, and this is before the web, that would help people that were playing recreational baseball, softball, free pitch just to let them track their statistics. It was good. People who played baseball and softball recreationally would go to their games and then have a little pad they would tick things off and then enter them into a computer afterwards. We sold this actually at the retail level. It was very well received.
But one of the things since I was so new, I was in my mid 20s when I did this. I was so new to retailing that I didn't realize the package was far more important than the product inside the package. This is pertinent to our discussion about packaging in general. We just had a thin little cardboard box, and the graphic on the outside wasn't even that professional looking. People would perceive the quality of the product inside based on that unprofessional, thin packaging on the outside. We didn't do nearly as well as we could have if we had a professional package designer.
The reason I am using this example is with the 2B0 recycling robot, we want the exterior to be sexy. We want the product design to be as important as the user experience. When people are looking at this, we want them to think whoa, this looks really cool. This is something that I want to have in my home or in my office. We don´t it to be so ugly that they are looking at and thinking we don't want to have this or I can't imagine using this type of thing. Part of our product design team is having designers that have the same vision that we do at the exterior, and I know it seems very, very superficial, but the exterior of this thing has to be very, very compelling.
The inside of it, we are partnering with different engineering firms that focus on robotics, that focus on material sensing, and also the ability to be able to grind this stuff up and process it or process it in a different way if that is the case for certain other types of materials like paper and cardboard, for example. That's the mechanical engineering part of it, the robotics engineering. For the IOT part and the machine learning part, we are actually developing partnerships right now with just third parties.
We don't have the investment yet to bring on full time developers to do the machine learning part, to do the IOT part. We do have a proof of concept native mobile app that we have developed that will scan barcodes, and then be able to record the type of product based on the barcode scanning. It uses a UPC code API on the backend. The team that we are putting together, we are going to end up using people inside 2B0 and also more importantly partnering with some other people that are outside that have done similar things in the past that are going to allow us to scale as well because we can see this scaling very, very quickly.
To give you an example of just my own personal experience, I have been sold on serverless. I didn't know what it was at first. It was like serverless. What does that mean? I have been doing stuff on a server forever, and then when I realized we can host a frontend application, like a web application or a native mobile application. The frontend can be hosted in such a way that it is available on demand and it is scalable instantaneously. We can go from 0 to a million requests per second with no downtime, with no load balancing. That, to me, was like amazing. Then the same with the backend as well, using things like AWS, Lambda Microservices on the backend. DynamoDB as opposed to SQL. Just keeping it very, very clean, a tight footprint as far as all of our applications. A data link for the data collection part of it, something like RedShip, and then as far as applying our machine learning to the massive data that we are going to be collecting, I am so open to suggestions for that. I´ve been evaluating different things, like Athena, for example, but we don 't want to be tied necessarily to everything with AWS as well. We are certainly open to other alternatives. Go ahead.
Brett: I was going to ask. What is your team size right now? Are you guys all distributed because of COVID and everything? How has this past year been for you guys?
Steve: It has been an interesting experience, just like everyone. It is a different experience for different people in different regions. I was actually working on a contract in New York City, and then COVID hit. My family is actually in Louisiana, and that's where I am right now. Today we are on to our third day of our ice storm, which is really unusual here, and that's because of climate change. Coming from Canada originally, an ice storm just means you hunker down. If you have to drive somewhere, you drive but you just do it more slowly and more carefully, but here in the South, it is a huge deal because they are not used to it and there is no infrastructure to handle it. We have seen massive blackouts over in Texas. There have been rolling blackouts here in Louisiana, and that's just from the power perspective. When people are driving on the streets, it is a whole other type of horror all together. I used to chuckle at it thinking just slow down or whatever. It's not that big of a deal, but it is a big deal here because people are simply not used to it. It is a very dangerous situation. It is specifically because of climate change, and of course, Louisiana is also under intense pressure from climate change from the rising sea level.
I lived in New Orleans for about 13 years. That city is already below sea level to begin with let alone what's happening right now all over the world. These coastal cities are under threat by the rising sea levels, and in places like New Orleans where the hurricanes are coming more frequently, they are stronger, and the state is disappearing. There is something like a couple of football fields a day are going under water permanently. That land mass is not coming back, and then when you combine that with the storms, with the rise in sea levels, this is probably one of the worst places to be in the United States as far as being exposed to climate change.
It makes me even more passionate that we have to do something. We need to, all of us, collectively think about what we are doing and why we are doing it. Are we buying bottled water? Why are we buying bottled water? Can we use a filter? Can we put something on our taps at home that gives us good tasting cold water that doesn't require us to be using all of this plastic up? When I am at the grocery store, am I going to go to the soup aisle or am I just going to make my own homemade soup? It may be a bit more effort, but in the end run, I am ending up making hopefully better tasting soup on my good days, which are most of my days, and also creating less garbage, less of a footprint. We all have to start thinking in these kinds of terms.
It is very, very difficult because you mentioned COVID. Before COVID, we were just all trying to earn a living. We were trying to put food on the table. We were trying to deal with whatever we had to deal with in our personal lives, and now we have COVID and climate change. Where do the priorities lie? If we can develop something with 2B0 where recycling becomes so second nature and such a pleasurable experience, then we think we can reverse a lot of these consumption habits that are out there right now and simply make the world safer. Let's start even getting carbon negative. Our motto right now to be zero zero would be fantastic. It is a big goal. If we can even get negative as far as our carbon consumption, carbon footprint, then by all means, let's look at ways of doing that as well.
Brett: An interesting challenge for the climate change process that we are all going through is shifting from what the narrative around climate change has been, which has just been we are screwed. We are doing all these bad things to ourselves and to our environment, and it is like a wicked problem. Nobody knows how to solve it, which that just makes it really uncomfortable to even think about. People don't think they can even bother to make a dent with their own personal lives, and then when you stack that with the fact that to alleviate that pain of the reality of climate change, so many of the solutions have been sort of greenwashed solutions or feel good solutions.
Then you end up having people who are resistant to those solutions because they see through them. That makes those people look like they are actually just being a climate change denialist or an obstructionist. I think it will be really interesting. I am starting to see a lot more of this type of thing that you guys are building start to come up where people are like we can actually do this in a way that feels good and brings more value to our value chain. You can associate positive feelings with what we are doing without it just being a greenwashed type of positive feeling.
Steve: Absolutely. I agree a hundred percent, and it kind of drives me crazy because I am on social media all the time. I am seeing these large multinational corporations, and they come up with something with a story that gets repeated over and over again in social media. The one today I saw was Coca Cola is no longer going to be using cardboard that's not recyclable. They are focusing on providing recyclable material, and the first thing I think of right away is you are still using plastic. That's not going away. The second thing is how widely is this going to be adopted. Is this just a test run for you to get some social media buzz or is this a true measure that´s going to be adopted internationally that, as you mentioned, actually has an actual impact?
Greenwashing is all over the place, and I think that as consumers we need to be more aware of that entire process of greenwashing. We don't want to be caught up with that. At 2B0 as well, I often think if our system is so cool and awesome and handles plastics so well that people that go out and buy more plastic, I´ve done the opposite of what I intend to do. We don't want to greenwash the recycle aspect of plastic to make people think they can be as much as they want or consume as much as they want. We want to actually help them be more aware of their consumption habits, and then actually make changes to those consumption habits as well.
Getting caught up in some of these greenwashing things. Some of them are amazingly cool, don´t get me wrong. I saw one. I think it was on Mashable where you put an orange in a machine and it squeezes the juice out and then actually makes a cup out of the skin. I was like I want one of those. I´ll drink my orange juice out of a cup made from the orange peel. That sounds really cool, but it probably costs $4 million dollars. It's great buzz, but where is the added value? Where is that true sustainability part of that? I´m still trying to figure that out.
Brett: The carbon footprint of producing the machine is probably much greater than whatever reusable cup you might have used to drink your orange juice.
Steve: Absolutely. I signed up for a subscription service actually about a year and a half ago that was delivering things like laundry detergent and Kleenex tissues and toilet paper, and the Kleenex and the toilet paper were made from bamboo. The shampoos and the laundry soap and things like that were put in containers that were supposedly 100% recyclable. Because it was a delivery service, all of this stuff was coming in cardboard boxes, and then they had boxes inside the boxes. They had packaging galore. Mind you it was paper packaging, which makes me happier than if they were using Styrofoam. Styrofoam is not recyclable. It is something we don't want to put in an incinerator. We don't want to recycle Styrofoam.
Again, I think that maybe someone somewhere had a good idea, but then maybe that idea kind of got lost along the way because now the question is are you actually reducing the carbon footprint by using this subscription service or because of the packaging, the way they are doing their shipping even, is it actually increasing the carbon footprint?
Brett: Yeah, that's a lot to think about. To close this episode, I would like to ask you something more personal. What's something that's happened during the course of developing this business that personally impacted you and changed the way that you see the business or the environment and yourself?
Steve: There is a very interesting backstory to 2B0. It was actually introduced to me by a friend of mine who I had known for a few years and I trusted him completely. Then, it turned out that he was talking about things that were not based in reality at all, so he was able to get not only me but other people caught up with this idea about this amazing recycling robot that would do all the things that I've already discussed. But he talked about it in terms of the fact that the product already existed and that it was not only in development but it was actually in the final phases of testing and getting ready to do a test over in one of the airports and so forth.
Anyway, it turned out that none of this was true. I was like oh no, so that was a huge deal. I found myself kind of doubting myself in general. How could I be kind of like taken in like that? Other people that were involved in this individual, they have gone through a very similar process of having to have a reckoning as far as what I was told, if I did something wrong that actually put me into that path. But the net result is that all of us are actually stronger now. We are a lot more passionate than we were before because now we are being transparent and we are understanding that we have a real opportunity. It has actually given me a lot more drive than I would have had before.
Before I was excited about it. I was like it sounds like a great business. I can see the business model, blah, blah, blah, but because of the falsehoods that were being perpetuated in that first group, all of a sudden I realized this is not only too good to be true, this is completely into the stratosphere of nonsense. Any normal person probably, and I say normal person because maybe I still am having self doubts. Any normal person would have said no, this is impossible. There is no way this thing is doing all these things. It has only been developing for three months or whatever, but all of us were buying into it. Every week it was like oh yeah, we are so close. We are so close.
That experience has made me driven, and I was already like again very interested in what I was doing before. But now this is like my obsession. 2B0 is something that to me I am going to make this work. I´ve had a lot of success in the past doing not only development from a technical perspective, but also on the promotion side as well. From a promoting standpoint, I have been able to tell a good story, hit the right sources, and then hit the right outlets. The next thing you know I had a friend calling me saying Steve, your web app is not on Good Morning America. Literally it was right there on Good Morning America. I was like whoa, that's amazing. It got featured in the Wall Street Journal a couple of times.
This is important. This is actually a big day because that web app that I am talking about was actually sold today. It got sold, so that´s like wow. That's another vindication.
Brett: Congrats.
Steve: Thank you. We all do different things for different reasons. For me, my passions are a multitude. I like to get recognition from my work but at the same time I can also stand back from my work and realize am I doing a good job or can I do a better job. To me, there is always a process of continual improvement no matter what I am doing right now, whether it is a web application, a mobile app, artificial intelligence or a machine learning application. These things are always going to be better six months from now than they are right now.
The key to doing team building as you brought up before is to make sure that we are collaboratively moving together towards these goals. From the prospect of our VC partners, again, we want to mitigate risk. We want to move to a point where we are revenue positive as quickly as possible, and then get to that next round of financing that will take us to the next level as well. We have already had some media coverage last week. That was kind of exciting to see us in the news last week. Then today with the podcast, another great opportunity, and we really appreciate that.
Brett: Yeah, and thank you for joining us.
Steve: My pleasure, Brett. I am just going to throw in a plug. 2B0.io The number zero and the number two, and the letter B, so 2B0.io is the website. There are three different streams on there as far as students if you have any questions, investors, consumers, and if you have any other questions, please feel free to contact us through our website. We are also on Instagram, LinkedIn. Facebook, not so much right now. I am trying to figure it out. I think once we have a product, we will probably expand that Facebook presence assuming they are no longer evil. From there, please, feel free to reach out. We are also on Twitter.
Brett: Great. Thank you very much, Steve, and have a good day everybody. Thanks for listening to the ClearView podcast.