28. Circularity with Wilhelm from empower.eco

Pristine Ocean Podcast

Empower
Welcome to the Pristine Ocean podcast. I'm your host Peter Hall. In the podcast, we talked to people and projects around the world, tackling the scourge of marine plastic litter.

You may have heard the term circular economy. It means feeding waste materials back into valuable products.

But the demands of circularity create problems for the waste collectors. The waste collectors will need to document and track their work.

They will want to make the claim “I collected this material at this place and at this time”. But as in any business transaction, it comes down to trust and the only way to gain trust is transparency. You need some kind of book or ledger where you can enter your claim.

Other stakeholders should be able to look into this ledger and importantly, nobody should be able to make changes like adding or removing a few zeros.

In this episode we are talking to the founder of Empower. Empower is a Norwegian company which has created the digital infrastructure to account for collected plastics and currency transactions anywhere in the world.

It's all based on blockchain technology. You've probably heard about the blockchain, but if you still don't get it, you are not alone.

Think of it as an Excel spreadsheet somewhere in the Internet. You can add a row to this spreadsheet, but you can't change the data in the existing rows. This makes it great for recording transactions.

With different materials and currencies with different players.

All around the world.

Empower has projects in over 30 countries of the world and has gained unique insights into how to solve the plastic crisis.

Here's the interview with Wilhelm, the founder of Empower.