 Hi everyone. I'd like to get started. So my name is Ellen Martin. I'm a Vice President for Impact and Strategic Initiatives at Closed Loop Partners. And we are here to talk today about investing in the circular economy. So the economy side of circular economy, as I'd like to think of it. We've got a great group of folks who are gonna speak today about their experiences in ways to value investing. We'll talk about infrastructure. We'll talk about innovation. And I'm gonna start out with giving a little intro into the circular economy concept just to make sure we're all grounded in that idea. We'll have questions. We'd love to have you all contribute and ask things that are on your mind as we get further into the conversation. So I will probably get us started with a few questions initially and then turn to you all. And hopefully by the end of the session you'll have a good sense of the need and the opportunity for capital in this space. So let me just start by giving a little grounding on the circular economy concept and why we need to be focused on issue. We are in a world globally where waste and waste management is still an enormous problem in a lot of parts of the world. And I would say that it's not necessarily even a developed or developing world type of distinction, but really different problems that exist and manifest themselves in different ways based on old economics. So when we talk about circular economy, we're contrasting that with a linear economy model where essentially you have a value chain that relies on extraction of resources, consumption, sometimes within just a few minutes. And then disposal infrastructure and something that just ends up in a landfill or a hole in the ground or in the waterways. What we're really seeing on the economic side of this is that we're losing a tremendous amount of value by reinforcing this system. So if you think about plastics alone and my context is mostly around North America, in the US we use 19 billion pounds of plastic packaging every year. That value, if you extrapolate across the world, is equivalent to about 80 to 120 billion dollars worth of value that gets lost after a single use in many cases. And the impacts of that on the environment are also tremendously significant when we think about all of the things we need to do to address climate change. So this is happening by accident but it's also being reinforced by a lot of capital. So what we need to understand is that there are vested interests that are reinforcing this linear model, right? And that is on the order of billions and billions of dollars every year. The circular economy concept became popularized, I guess you'd say in the last few years, Ellen MacArthur Foundation is a big advocate and awareness builder of the concept. Essentially, what we're talking about is re-envisioning an economy that actually doesn't rely on the linear, but which would be like a top down spine, but actually re-imagines the opportunities to rethink business models, to rethink manufacturing, to rethink the physical world in a way that really creates more value and decouples our need to extract from the world's resources and persist with an economic growth that's unsustainable. So I'll take a moment to just also tell you a little bit more about closed loop partners. So we started in 2014 as an impact investment model aiming to invest over $100 million by 2025 in a circular supply chain aspect of the circular economy. So our focus primarily is really on the packaging waste side of things and making sure that infrastructure exists within markets in order to consume, collect, sort, process, treat that material not as waste, but as feedstock into re-manufacturing. Our investors in the work that we're doing is primarily actually what we have traditionally thought of as the producers of the waste. So large consumer packaged goods companies and retailers. We've also extended this investment model to include venture funding and also an acceleration model that's sort of pre-investment stage. And that work is ongoing and we'll talk more about that as we get into the conversation. Important to note here is that in the linear model you have investors who invest in the waste management side which in many market contexts are really about public projects and infrastructure as well as the manufacturing side as well as the consumer goods and brand side. So you have an investment community that doesn't necessarily talk to each other or connect or see the connections across this loop that the problems that we see on either side are not connected and seen as interrelated. This is something that's changing. I think we have seen in the last year or two a real attention to the risks associated with not seeing the fuller picture and a loop as a possibility but a lot more needs to happen and a lot more capital needs to go into this space if we're really gonna create the change and recreate an infrastructure that goes from linear to truly circular. Today's conversation I'm excited to say includes a variety of different players in this space today where some of us are making investments, some of us are developing projects, some of us are looking at the space from a more mainstream lens and we are looking forward to dialogue today with all of you around what needs to happen, what are the opportunities and how can we move forward in a really productive way. So with that, we have Emily Landsberg from Ultra Capital and I'll let each of you talk more about your models as well as the examples that we'll be highlighting today in today's conversation. We'll hear from Sam Almeyu from Cambridge Industries and we'll also hear from Jennifer Signori from New Burger Berman. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Emily and sit there if you want, you can come up to the podium, I'll let you choose. All right, great. So first I need to start with a maya culpa because I'm here talking about circular economy drinking out of a single use bottle. Because my, I did refill it. Yeah, my reusable water bottle is lost somewhere in the universe. So my apologies. So I'm Emily Landsberg. I am a director at Ultra Capital and we are a private equity fund that is making equity investments in small infrastructure that has a positive environmental impact. And that means that we're investing in projects that are typically between five and a hundred million dollars in circular economy and waste sectors as well as energy, water and agriculture throughout North America. Now, what we've seen in the past, I'd say two or three decades is big improvements in technology paired with increasing value for natural resources and environmental attributes writ large. And those, the combination of those things together means that smaller scale infrastructure makes economic sense in a way that it didn't in the past, right? The economies of scale now to make a project pencil art are actually a lot smaller than they used to be which is phenomenal from an impact standpoint and from an opportunity standpoint. But becomes problematic when we talk about actually deploying these projects into the real world because there haven't been great financial tools to do that. So conventional project finance, if you want to build a refinery that's like a half a billion dollars, that's fairly easy to do from a capital standpoint. There's a very clear pathway to obtain that capital and there's very efficient capital instruments to finance that. But if you want to build say a 20 million dollar advanced recycling facility, that's very difficult capital to find and particularly difficult if you want to build not just one plant but multiple plants. So ultra capital was formed specifically to address this underserved capital need. We invest in these small scale infrastructure projects and do so in a programmatic way where we're not looking at just, okay, let's do a one off here but let's find a management team and a solution provider, project developer who we really like was a platform to scale and invest in a number of projects with them. We do the first one and then we sort of lather rinse repeat deploy a number more and that reduces transaction costs, it increases overall efficiency and allows a lot of these projects to get into the marketplace. The way we do that, I'm going to delve into sort of what that means and how we do it and during the Q and A you guys can ask a lot more questions if I've glossed over something. So the way we do that is we invest into a special purpose entity that's comprised exclusively of the physical infrastructure itself. So we're not investing in the solution provider Topco, we're investing in a project company that's comprised exclusively of that infrastructure and the Topco, the developer of the solution provider, they're going to run that project, they're going to get a fee for running the project and making a bunch of day to day decisions about how that project should be run and they're also going to get a carry in an interest in the cash flows from that facility. So we're both making money from the operating cash flows of that facility. This isn't a build and flip model. So we're underwriting these to 10, 15, 20 year terms that are commensurate with the long-term supply and off-take agreements of these assets. And that creates really strong alignment with a project developer and also with the suppliers and the off-takers because we're all looking at this based on how does this asset work, not sort of an in and out model. We look for projects that have proven technology. So they may be newish technology. There may only be one commercial deployment operating but there needs to be a proven track record for this. We don't have an appetite for technology risk. And the other key attribute of these projects is that there needs to be predictable cash flows and those are achieved through long-term contracts for the supply and the off-take with credit-worthy counterparties. So we know that over time what the cash flows are going to look like from this project. And that becomes important and I'll speak to you in a minute around an appropriate risk-adjusted return and sort of the sort of cost of capital arbitrage that you can recognize as an entrepreneur here or as an investor. What this project finance model allows for is a build-on operate model for small-scale infrastructure, for entrepreneurs and technology providers instead of having to sell your gear to an end user and sort of do a big cap-act sale, you can instead use the build-on operate model and have this be fully financed and then turn to your end user and enter into a long-term contract for material or service that's a much quicker and easier sale. So overall, this is a business model that's been applied to other places that's novel in this application and I think is really groundbreaking and really exciting because it's gonna allow a huge amount of acceleration into the circular space and get the infrastructure that we need to realize a circular economy actually in the ground. And so I think there's three key reasons for that. One is for the end users, this is a much lower risk model, right? You're not deploying $20 million off your balance sheet and having to stick your neck out to secure that from your capital budget. So it makes the buying decision a lot easier. Number two is as an entrepreneur, you can tranche your capital needs based on risk. So it's sort of like if you need to do a renovation for your house, would you rather use a home equity line or would you rather use a payday loan? And no offense to all my VC friends in the audience, I'm not really comparing you to a payday loan, but it's a lot, it's a much different risk profile and it's a much different type of capital. And so rather than do, let's say you gotta do a $20 million, $25 million raise and five of that is for your top co, you've got growth, you need to hire some folks, you've got some development work to do and 20 of that is for an actual infrastructure. This model allows you to raise five at the top co from venture and raise 20 in project finance at the special purpose project company level. It's a much more efficient use of capital and it's non dilutive at the top co. So as investors, that's something that you can appreciate. As entrepreneurs, that's something that you can appreciate as well, right? And for investors, it means you don't need to fear solutions that have a heavy infrastructure component. So there's been a real retraction in clean tech generally around not wanting to invest in solutions that have a heavy infrastructure component because how are you really gonna fund that and are you gonna have to put it on the balance sheet? And you don't need to do that, you don't need to worry about that. There is a financial instrument now that will allow you to very efficiently scale these businesses. So I wanna switch to a real life example. Do I have time to talk? Okay, so last year we invested in a project in Maine with the solution provider Fiberite who's based in Baltimore. This project will treat about a third of the waste of Maine, black bag, municipal solid waste. It's about a $70 million project which is on the larger side of what we do but it's very much in our sweet spot. And it's a dirty mirf that's sort of a next generation version of this. So state-of-the-art mirf, robotics, AI, all the bells and whistles plus a bunch of downstream and side stream processing that allows us to recover substantially more materials from that waste stream through, we pull out the conventional recyclates and then we take the soluble organics out and put that into an anaerobic digester to create renewable natural gas. And we're able to take the paper or the typically unrecoverable paper and pull that through a washer and a pulper and create a very clean, uniform pulp that can either be sold back into the packaging industry or in the future could be hydrolyzed into industrial sugars and used as a building block for biochemicals and biofuels like ethanol. And right now we take the three through sevens and the films and make that into an engineered fuel but also down the road we'll do a bolt-on to create a higher value from that. So the macro thesis here is sort of circular economy as a whole is profitable because you've got two revenue sources, right? You've got the material coming in which you often get a tipping fee for and you've got saleable product on the back end, right? So we like that in general. And then the other key investment thesis here for us was that the waste industry is changing. So we wanna invest in platforms that are gonna be resilient through a lot of different market conditions. The ton is changing, the composition of the waste is changing and the markets are changing. So this was one example for us of a facility that has a lot of optionality and can be resilient through different market conditions and allows for a lot of different expansion opportunities that will enable us to play as that more and more changes come about in the waste industry and in the circular economy writ large. And this just as an example, national sword which came about after we made our investment, originally we'd underwritten a certain amount of revenue from recycled paper. Now with national sword that's no longer really accessible but we can send that paper through and make pulp out of it which is now a really, really strong market. So that's one example of how that's playing out. Perfect. National sword refers to China import policies that have greatly affected recycling in North America and lots of other markets, if for those of you who are not as familiar with the recycling commodities markets. One quick question is a follow up. What does ultra capital see as the size or scale of the market that you're serving? Like how big are we talking about and what are the kind of key areas in which you're doing this? If I could quantify it technically I would say a lot. So I don't have a specific number but we're looking at circular economy and sort of incremental steps towards full circularity where we may not be exactly closing the loop but we're able to valorize the waste into some sort of upcycling or side cycling and recover value from that. And so we're looking at both post-consumer waste and also post-industrial waste and specialty waste streams coming out of heavy industry and manufacturing both across solid waste and liquid waste as well. You're just investing in North America. Yes, just North America. So just to share a little bit of closed loops pipeline, I was looking at this recently and since we started we probably see like a hundred or so inquiries for project investment or venture capital. The demand is in the billions in terms of what is coming in. Obviously not all of that is investable but it's interesting to sort of watch that trend change and see how folks are really out there but seeking capital and there aren't a lot of options for them. So let's turn over to Sam and Sam, you're operating in a different context. So I want to hear from you sort of how you got there but also specifically what your model is. Thank you so much. Thank you everyone. So for me kind of a little background on what we do at Cambridge Industries and specifically I'll talk about the one flagship project that we've just finished in Addis Ababa Ethiopia in Africa. So for me I was here in Silicon Valley doing a series of startups in the consumer media and mobile sector and then kind of the natural shift was I was originally from Ethiopia, moved back, set up a business throughout on a Pan-African level again on the mobile-based businesses and we did a lot of gaming platforms, mobile services platforms in Cameroon, Senegal, Ethiopia and then as soon as I had my exit, the bankers that helped me sell the company and myself, we've been talking a lot and we decided we need to do something in the infrastructure sector. So the managing partner from Credit Suisse at the time for Emerging Market and myself, we formed Cambridge and the whole idea was trying to not just invest in renewable energy where energy is like a major crisis if you're going to develop as a continent and specifically for individual countries you have to have power that supports your expansion. If it becomes a bottleneck, if you rely on diesel generators, you're not gonna grow. So for us the one kind of project that we honed on was looking at one, there's this massive problem from the energy side, there's this massive problem with overall resources. There are a lot of areas in Africa that's associated with resource extraction but there is a significant amount of resource that is not distributed the right way. So they have a lot of countries that desperately need plastic resources, metal resources. They do not have the large scale facilities that are producing their own metal. So anything that you could recycle, anything that you could reuse is important and simultaneously cities are also growing. So we see this on the energy side, there is a demand for energy, a demand for resources and a huge amount of population growth that puts constraint on cities. So look at Addis Ababa for example, the city of Addis Ababa has grown to a population of 5 million from about 500,000 in the 1970s and that's the massive population grows. So just the country alone did just be 45 million people in the 1990s. 1992 was 45 million, right now is 107 million people. So the population is growing at a faster pace but the infrastructure is not meeting those type of resources. So what we ended up doing was specifically on the waste management solution and Addis Ababa, a city of 5 million people, a waste is removed from about 2,000 tons of waste a day. The facility that we have built is a waste to energy facility that also does a series of extraction from the waste. The 1,400 ton goes through our waste to energy facility. That's roughly around 75% of the waste in the city and generates 25% of the city's electricity which is about 185 million kilowatt hours of electricity. And then simultaneously 400 ton we put through our insect farming and we are able to take specifically food waste and raise soldier flies that allow us to extract animal feeds for chicken feed as well as for fish food. And then simultaneously from the animal feed, sorry, from the waste facility, we're able to generate the electricity, we're able to take the steam because the main goal is the steam. If it was a different market, we could be able to use the steam for other usage be it desalination or other purposes but specifically in Ethiopia, generate the electricity, 25 megawatt, 185 kilowatt hours of electricity, extract metal, so we extract 3.8 million kilograms of metal a year. The ash that comes out of the facility, produce 27,000 interlocking bricks every single day that are used for road pavers and we're able to take the moisture out of the garbage and treat the true leisure treatment facilities and generate clean water and also for the excess steam because once it has gone through the turbines, it still comes out about 185 degrees centigrade. We're able to use that for industrial use specifically for curing concrete. So the whole goal is how can we take not a typical kind of view of just a waste of energy facility but a waste of energy facility that is able to take the waste of stream and extract a significant amount of the resources out of it via the organic material for the insect farming, the organic material and the carbon and the existing cellulose materials are in there in the same way that you're doing in Maine but for us, instead of creating kind of a gas facility, being able to generate electricity simultaneously from the facility, thank you. So I would have loved to put on videos because more than me describing all this outputs, there are things that we're able to do smack in the middle of the city, this was waste that was becoming a huge problem and offsetting over 200,000 tons of carbon every single year, just from this specific facility. So for us, it was being able to look at this waste of stream, how can we generate value from it? And because the one thing you have to remember is the waste that we're getting in Ethiopia is around seven megajoules per kilogram. Compare that with the waste in San Francisco or London or DC, that is 14 megajoules per kilogram. So that means there's a huge amount of plastic, there's a huge amount of paper in the waste that you have here. So if you are successful in a circular economy, then you will get the kind of waste we already find in Ethiopia because the main thing that happens is we do not have kind of the typical large-scale recycling facilities that will take the waste and melt it and change it, but we have a huge amount of reuse. So when I first came to the US, when I looked at a bottle of beer, I was surprised somebody was throwing out a way a bottle of beer into a garbage can because that doesn't happen anywhere in Africa because you actually put out a deposit to take the beer bottle, and once you're finished it, in order to get your deposit back, you have to return it because everything is reused, not recycled, reused. So it gets washed, so every beer factory, beer, the Hanukens, the Diageot of the world, they are not recycling the beer bottle, they are actually reusing the beer bottle, and you see this massive market that already reuses a significant amount of the plastic. So whatever is left over, whatever is thrown, has been used number of times, and it is in the extreme, extreme level of its usage, and we're able to extract as much resources from it as possible. Sam, can you talk a little bit about how you financed this project, like the first project, and how you're thinking about financing the others? Sure, so when you look at this problem, so we use a lot of project financing for the specific project, so take the Ethiopian facility, for example, so our goal was create one facility that is an absolutely great blueprint for other African cities to follow. The two things that you have to notice is, one, a lot of major African cities, as I said, have grown in population, so they're anywhere from two to five million, so a lot of these major cities, and these cities are running out of their dumping site, and they're not normal landfills, but this are dumping sites, so they are right on that cusp where they need to build a new landfill facility. So the minute that they're looking at, they look at two things, just for waste disposal, so if you were to look at our facility as one waste disposal and energy generation, financing for energy generation is simple. You look at it, you get your purchase agreement, this is the price, we do the IRR, and you get the model for that. But for waste energy, you have to look at how much does it cost them to build a new landfill, so roughly expose the same amount of waste as we're doing, just through the waste storage facility that's 450,000 tons of waste a year, an additional 100,000 ton we're processing through the insect farming. So the 550 tons of waste, you will require roughly around $50 million to build a sanitary landfill, $6 million a year to run it, and they need 200 hectares of land for the new landfill. And what is happening is land constraint is a huge problem in a lot of cities. So in America, for a lot of people, it's hard to see a lot of waste energy facilities. If you live in any Scandinavian countries, like 90% of the waste is disposed in that fashion. So coming into financing, so for us is being able to look at the two ways. One is just as an energy generation facility, we're able to get a whole lot of financing from export credit agencies and individual financing sources, but from the waste side, we take over what would be a new landfill. So we take the cost of the new landfill, so we reduce the land, and instead of taking 200 hectares of land, we could be able to do our work in five hectares of land, and we take over that land. And we work with developers to bring value to that land. That automatically has been a successful way for us to raise a huge amount of money. In Ethiopia, we've raised $120 million to build this facility in partnership with the government. For additional six cities, we've raised $750 million. Awesome, thank you. All right, so let's turn it over to Jennifer, and I'll let you talk about Newburger-Burman and what you're doing there. Great, thank you. So I'm gonna zoom out a little bit, just a tad. So Jennifer, senior, I'm at Newburger-Burman, where I'm leading our impact investing initiatives. As a firm, we are a multi-asset class investment manager investing $300 billion across public equities, fixed income, and private equity. We have a long history in ESG and sustainable investing mostly on the public equity side. And as a firm, we're very focused around ESG integration across the board. But in addition to that, there are more and more clients and demand that we're seeing to a step further, right? So more sustainable, more impact-oriented investment strategies and products, which we are accelerating the innovation around and developing. In terms of how circular economy investments fit within this broader umbrella trend of increasing demand for sustainable impact investing, it's one of many areas that I look at across social and environmental themes and across lots of different asset classes. In terms of where I spend the bulk of my time, it's around the private equity space. So as a principle of our private equity impact strategy, I think that's a natural area where there are dedicated fund managers that focus on circular economy investments. But we're also seeing individual investments through some of our co-investment activity from more generalist private equity managers that are investing in some of these waste management, recycling projects as well as companies that process the waste and recycling. But in addition to that, just across asset classes on the fixed income side, less obvious places, right? So the municipal bond market is an area where folks typically think, okay, state and local governments are issuing tax-exempt taxable bonds to finance a range of uses that range from general use of proceeds to fund operations and government facilities, but also very specific projects. And we have a municipal impact strategy that is very proactive about finding those use of proceeds in places that need it the most on a relative basis. And these projects involve both social and environmental use of proceeds, affordable housing, school construction, as well as on the environmental side, things like mass transit projects, water sewer bonds that are very focused around pollution cleanup. But an area that we find a lot of circular economy deals is around the high yield part of the municipal market. So if you think about a facility, environmental facility, recycling facility and the capital stack, there's equity that's needed that's provided by perhaps some of my colleagues here on the panel, but also debt financing that is needed to fund some of these projects. So we're seeing really interesting deals as it relates to waste, to energy, as well as waste to manufacturing inputs that we're seeing in the bond market. And there's a couple that we've invested in within our municipal impact strategy, but even beyond that as well because these are really attractive parts of the market to invest in, especially in an environment where investors are seeking yield in their fixed income allocations. So an example of a deal that we invested in is one where the facility is able to access tax except bonds because of the environmental use of proceeds and it's taking wheat straw waste, so agricultural waste in a part of the country where there is such an abundance that much of it does go to feedstock for animals but there is just an oversupply where a lot of this ends up being burned, believe it or not. And it is the largest contributor of air pollution in the state. So rather than burning this waste or have it go to landfill, this facility is able to process that waste and turn it into pulp, which is then an input into paper and packaging manufacturing. In terms of broader macro trends that we're seeing, if we zoom out again, looking at overall impact investing and some of the opportunities we're looking at, we're looking for opportunities where these are attractive investments, right? So as a mainstream investor, we need these to stand alone. I think a lot of the perception around some of these deals historically has been, oh, they're dependent on subsidies, they're subscale, we are not able to invest in them. And I think over the last couple of years, a number of trends have helped in terms of the tailwinds to make these attractive investments in their own right. So one of those trends is around consumer and business preferences and preferences for more sustainable products and packaging. So going back to the example about this facility, taking wheat straw waste, converting it into pulp to be an input into packaging and paper, there is a premium associated with some of these sustainable products. So they are displacing hardwood-derived pulp that otherwise would have been used in these materials, displacing non-hardwood pulp that's being imported from other parts of the world, which is carbon-efficient in its own right. But by doing so, that is enabling an attractive, sort of at the tail end of the cycle from the consumer end, there is a demand and a willingness to pay and premium pricing that is essentially a win-win if you think about it from both an impact and a commercial perspective. So I think that's one example that we've invested in that we're very excited about. And then we see other examples that you may have heard of that are a bit more common, waste to energy. So taking, again, agricultural waste, including potato waste, macaroni pasta waste even, which the facility is able to get for zero cost, which is a great cost of good sold line item, zero. And they're taking that waste and converting it into ethanol using a technology that's been proven in Europe where 20% of the ethanol that's produced in Europe is using this technology. So there is a minimization of that technology risk that this facility is taking on and then converting that into energy. And then on top of that, there's additional revenue streams you're able to get from some environmental credits that are administered by the state of California, so not federal credits, which we view as sort of gravy on top because generally we like to look at investments that are not dependent on these credits. So the sale of the ethanol and the revenues from that are what is really supporting the cash flows of the bonds. And then on top of that, the credits are additional revenue streams, which is what we look for. Great, thank you. I mean, it's interesting in our work, we think of the opportunity for what the circular supply chain looks like, especially for plastics is really being pretty enormous. Like in the sense of if you think about the opportunity to recover and reuse a variety of material types in, not just in packaging, but in consumer goods, consumer electronics, there are a number of different, even white goods and not single use, short-term types of items, but actually longer-term usages. We're talking about markets that are on the order of a billion dollars a year in the U.S. alone. And that's what kind of gets me excited about it because we're talking about not just a recycling industry or a waste management industry that's more on the order of 100 or 200 million a year, that's something much more significant. How do you think about the opportunity at Newberger-Burman? Across, you're looking at multiple asset classes, so how have you thought about the scale of the opportunity and what you talk about with maybe the traditional side of your colleagues? Yeah, I think historically the scale of more specialized or any strategies has been a deterrent for investors to exclusively invest with that thematic in mind. I think one framework that's been mentioned lots of times at this conference is sustainable development goals. That's been really helpful for us as mainstream investors as an overarching framework that we can use that cuts across multiple macro trends and multiple themes of which the circular economy is one of many. What that enables us to do is, there may only be a handful of these environmental facility high-yield munibonds that I mentioned. And it's really difficult for us at this point in time to launch a strategy that's exclusive to only that, but that is part of a broader municipal impact strategy where we're investing in a range of both social and environmental user proceeds across the entire country where there's over 55,000 municipal issuers. So that scale enables us to have that top of the funnel to be wide enough for us to still be selective and still maintain that same rigor and threshold that we have for all of our other portfolios. And that's a big point that has resonated with our investors that are mostly institutional investors that cannot compromise on lower returns or taking on additional risk. So there's lots of different parts of the market where some investors that can be more patient, we definitely need that capital to fund those projects and those user proceeds, but where we sit in that broader spectrum, that's where we're able to play. So I think being diversified across multiple thematics of which the circular economy fits neatly into conserving the natural environment or addressing climate change, it's quite obvious that some of these projects have, or all of these projects have inherent high potential for environmental impact. And one of the nice things about environmental deals is that it very much cuts across developed market and emerging markets. It's something where if you look at the SDGs and you drill down into the sub-target, some of the social goals are a little bit more difficult to do in more developed markets at the scale that we need to be able to invest in them. Whereas some of these environmental deals, an example of a co-investment we made into a waste management company that had a pretty substantial recycling and composting line of business. The caveat is the bulk of their business still was more traditional waste management in landfill, so I'll disclose that. But that's an area where if you look at the recycling and the composting businesses, those are more specialized in nature where the barriers to entry are higher and the margins are higher, so they're naturally more attractive from a commercial perspective. So as this company is going to scale and grow, those are natural areas that the company will seek to grow and expand over their long-term strategy, especially as more and more businesses and consumers are demanding recycling and waste management and composting, for instance. And this was a $5 billion buyout deal, so this is at tremendous scale. So these are the types of deals, I think, that we are able to invest in as mainstream investors. Great, terrific. So I'm looking at the clock and we're running out of time quickly, so I want to turn to the audience now. And we have a microphone here. Do we have a runner? Yes, will you run for us? That would be amazing. Thank you so much. Thanks. So my name is Mita Ardran. And thanks for putting this panel together. I love this sector and I've done three, been heavily involved with three circular economy deals in the past. And the investment thesis I'm hearing here, which is very similar to the one that's kind of general in the impact investment space, is exactly why all three of those companies had to go outside of impact investment to get their money. Because two things, one is the lack of appetite for innovation in the impact sector. So nobody wants to fund the first commercial scale plant. And the second thing is the circularness of the impact sector, meaning you need the offtake and the sourcing agreement in order to get the money. You need the money in order to build the plant and you need the plant in order to get the sourcing and offtake agreement. So how do we break that bad cycle and get the first commercial plant of all these new ideas that we keep seeing out there? I can take a shot of that first and Emily, it looks like you want to respond too. So yes, totally agree. And that's actually part of our model. So to be clear, closed loop funds, debt financing vehicle, it's concessionary capital. So we offer below market rate loans and are willing to take secondary positions so that we can get more capital able to come in. We also, you know, our team and our investors bring together kind of the different pieces of the puzzle on the waste management recycling side, on the municipal side, on the brands and producers side. And so we're, we look at risk a little bit differently, I think, in the sense that we're willing to take a little bit more of a flexible position on what's the offtake look like, what's the feedstock look like. I will say that one of the things that I think this infrastructure will evolve around, will evolve from where we are today is paying nothing for the feedstock. Like I think if we actually start to think about the resources that are wasted as feedstock, as part of supply chains, we'll start to see that change. And I think that's actually a good thing for the investable opportunities that we have here because it's value creating for many of the business models that we invest in and that we see. That answers your question. So I spent the bulk of my career on the entrepreneur project developer side and I've complete sympathy for you. It drove me crazy because there's no money for first commercials and that still really bothers me. So one of the things that we've been looking at, so there's sort of two key gaps that I've seen and my colleagues are in the ecosystem here. One is for development capital, which is very hard to get because it is high risk and it's hard to find capital that's well suited for that other than just doing it off your own balance sheet. And two is that first commercial capital. So one of the things that we're looking at, which is in process is looking at can you find sort of a term loan or venture debt to fund that first commercial or strategic if you have a counterparty like us on the backside saying, once you hit these performance metrics, we'll acquire it from you. So that's one way we're looking at working to bridge that and it's not the full blown solution that the industry really needs but we're starting to look at that. And then the other part of your question around the painful chicken and egg dance of like, well, you need those long-term offtakes and supply contracts. Absolutely, I mean, we are still a conventional project finance model and have project finance returns that are risk adjusted to that, the risk profile that's engendered by those types of long-term contracts. But we also recognize how hard those are to get and also that this market is emerging in the sense of that's not the status quo right now with a lot of end users. One of the things that we're working on is building relationships with corporates and getting involved fairly early on with project developers and their projects to add value and help facilitate some of those offtake agreements and structures that allow you to enter into those contracts and communicate the value proposition to the corporates from a different vantage point, not just as the seller but as the financier and we're the group that's cutting the $50 million check. So there's just a different voice at the table in working to obtain those offtake agreements. Another question. My name is Louise Fox and I do a lot of labor economics so I have a question for Sam. In many low-income country cities, of course there are piles of trash that could be could be disposed of in one way or another but also there's a whole informal industry of waste pickers and there's been a lot of concern that the kind of work that you do will disrupt that informal industry of waste pickers. On the other hand, there's some good examples of incorporating them into the whole value chain. So I wondered if you had some thoughts about that from a social capital point of view. That's a great question and you're absolutely right. So Anadhi Sababa in the existing landfill which we pretty much are kind of putting out of business, there were 980 families that we actually documented that lived on the landfill and that scavenged on the landfill. Now that was never like a good lifestyle to start with but at the end of the day, it is their way of life. It is their source of income. So whenever you build a facility like this, you have to incorporate them. So as I said, we produce 27,000 interlocking bricks every single day. That goes directly to the existing scavengers that we have organized in a business format for them to take over that business. The metal that we recycle from the facility, that goes directly with them. We make a very small amount of money and they are the off-takers, they are the distributors. So we incorporated them in that business model. And as part of this facility, there needed to be institutionalization when it comes to waste collection as well. What the Ethiopian government had done and we're starting to see a lot of emerging countries doing this is having a source of income when it comes to waste collection. So what they have done is for every water bill throughout the city, they've added 50% on top of the water bill for a sanitation income and that generated over $30 million a year just in the city of Addis Ababa that has created employment for almost 20,000 waste collectors that are able to collect the waste. So that is done by the city, but from our side, we had to incorporate the individuals that were working at Scavengers on the landfill and everywhere we go, actually a lot of people that have seen what we have done in Ethiopia, we're starting to see a much larger number of people that are just coming over to top along into kind of the new jobs that we would create, but it is a must, you really have to incorporate them. Thank you. Any other questions? Okay, so let's go here and then back there. Hello, my name's Nikki. So I focus a lot on plastic pollution prevention. I'd love to hear your opinion on not using plastic in packaging, but my main question that I really wanted to ask was how much of recycling actually gets done in the United States and how many of these small scale infrastructure projects take the number sevens and the number sixes and ship it to the informal recycling sector? And how, sorry, I'm nervous. How are these small scale projects dealing with cleaning up all of the junky plastic, like the yogurt containers? How are we dealing with that so that China will take it? Great questions. So the, let's see, where do I start? So absolutely, prevention and reuse and other models that are more service oriented have to be part of circular economy thinking. And ultimately, when I think about the work that we do at closed loop, we're addressing an incremental step for the largest consumer goods companies in the world who at the very least need to think about how the single use packaging they're putting out there gets back into single use packaging that they can use and remanufacture. But I think there are interesting trends that we're seeing at small scale and at large scale. So small scale on the venture side, we're investing, we have a broader mandate there again, as I said, different investors where we're looking at edible packaging that truly is like building on the idea that it doesn't have other options that you may have seen in the marketplace or like things that you could eat but you'd never want to. But these are, it's actually like part of their brand or reuse models or repair and refurbishment models like an apparel renewal workshop is a great example of that in our portfolio. And then on the large scale, we are also seeing things happen like Pepsi buying soda stream. And these different models of, we're looking at a company right now actually that is like bulk purchasing options for household cleaning products. So if you think about the bulk model in a typical Western grocery store, that's applied to some certain category of food items but it's never fully been explored for other categories of goods. And I think it's really interesting that we're seeing interest from the largest food and beverage companies in those models. It starts to suggest to me that we're making some progress and I would be the first to say that closed loop is on the cutting edge of that incremental step but there's more to be done for sure. Just really briefly to talk about the mix three through seven. So these are the categories of plastics that generally have low value or no value in the market today. So anything that's like a plastic bag, films. The, actually PVC falls in that category by compostable plastics, which I know there are a lot of here at Socap. So that's something that I am cautious of. You all should be too. And the solutions for those I think have to incorporate a lot of different options. So within those you also have polypropylene which is your yogurt containers which actually when isolated have quite a bit of value in the market. Right now it's probably about 300 dollars a ton. And the opportunities there really have to do with a legacy infrastructure that is not set up to deal with all of these different plastic types. And the challenge then for us as infrastructure investors is how do we invest to sort effectively and efficiently and extract as much value as we can for highest and best use. So I think it's a combination of you gotta improve the existing infrastructure incrementally. Gotta look for innovation for sorting and processing. Chemical recycling of plastics is another area where you might see some innovation where it's actually processes that break down the polymers back into monomers. And then you also have models that in certain contexts will work to incorporate those materials into a waste to energy like situation. It's not something that clothes that personally would invest in but it's definitely out there. Thanks and actually my question was very similar to that but it's just got to get a quick opinion for me if possible. Ideally if I could see a paradigm where we have from a design perspective at the very beginning we, it is the main idea to design a product so that it can be reused somehow and maybe modularized or something like that. So I think you know what I'm getting at there. So what have you seen in that space? And that's probably big corporates and when I drive down the street and I see everyone's TVs and refrigerators and old junk out there that just gets, you know what can we do about that? Great, great question. So let me just jump in and if others wanna address that too I'd love to hear. So on the design side it's critical and if you think about where designers get their training they are not necessarily focused on the material like it would be really unusual for a product designer today to go to your local Recology or the material recovery facility where all of our material gets sorted and see how things travel through the system. So when we started our accelerator at the beginning of this year we were very much focused on there are designers who are gonna have amazing ideas they don't necessarily have the exposure to the brands to understand how consumers are using this category of product or packaging today. They don't necessarily understand the recovery system that will make use of that. Like there are so many different aspects to and then what's the cost structure and how do you actually make money from it? There are all these questions that we wanted to help folks better understand. So we actually just launched an innovation challenge on Accelerator around hot cups, coffee cups sponsored by Starbucks and McDonald's where there's an issue with the cups actually not being able to be recyclable or compostable uniformly across municipal systems around the country and reusability is one of those aspects that could come out of this challenge that would be really interesting to see as part of that. All right, last question I think goes right here and maybe you'll just introduce yourself as well. I'm Marocchi, I'm Sam's daughter and I have a question for him. If nobody wants to work for you how would you do waste to energy by yourself? Oh wow. Well, you have to make the product great so that people will be inspired by what you're doing so that they will work with you to make it happen, right? Are you hiring? Yeah, we've been hiring a lot. But I also wanted to add kind of the points that you're raising on top of that. So for us I think design is critical to encourage reuse and also reduction. So I think that's a good point. Reuse and also reduction. So if you were to buy a kilo of cheese in Ethiopia you're gonna get it in one plastic bag. If you're buying a kilo of cheese here in the US each layer of cheese has a plastic cushioning in it and it's just, it's abysmal, like the entire thinking, mentality, like we have to move away from that. Kind of the first place reducing it and second when we create products creating them for a multi-purpose focus so that they could be very easy to be reused. Having pride that your product is being used for some other kind of container within the house kind of it is a recycle as much as possible. So those are the things with the design. When we are hiring we try to get kind of the young generation inspired. I don't think I've done that job at home. Maybe you need a spokesperson. I do, I do. Terrific. All right, well thank you all so much for being here today for this conversation. I think when we do this again a year from now which I hope will happen we'll have much more to talk about in terms of trends and real capital going into the space and I hope you all will join us. Thank you.