Transformative Projects
As part of their Master’s degree in Sustainable Management and Technology, students work on a sustainability challenge provided by a company to propose new perspectives or solutions that can have the potential to transform an industry or societal practice.
With an 80% collection rate but a lower 69% recycling rate in 2022, cardboard and paper recycling in Switzerland is well-established but also presents challenges. In particular, the project assesses the cardboard ecosystem’s complexity, the lack of incentives for SMEs, and the possibility of improvement in the recycling process.
In collaboration with Swiss Post, the GreenLoop project aims to understand the cardboard recycling system in Switzerland in order to evaluate whether there are opportunities for Swiss Post’s logistical expertise to improve recycling rates for SMEs on the example of the cardboard ecosystem in an economically and ecologically feasible manner.
Switzerland faces significant municipal solid waste management challenges and has with 125kg/year one of the world’s largest per capita waste volumes. The waste management system in the country is sophisticated, with an emphasis on enhancing recycling. The Federal Council’s Waste Ordinance of 2016 emphasizes Switzerland’s commitment to sustainable and circular raw material use. Notably, with an 80% collecting rate but a lower 69% recycling percentage in 2022, cardboard and paper recycling presents challenges. While Switzerland has a robust cardboard collection infrastructure, improvements are needed, particularly for Small and Medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with limited economic resources and storage capacity.
In this context, Swiss Post’s potential solution is a new service that provides SMEs with a comprehensive alternative for managing their recyclables such as, for example, cardboard in an environmentally responsible manner. The potential solution involves the collection of recyclables directly from the customer’s site during the regular delivery rounds conducted by Swiss Post. Subsequently, the collected recyclables are transported to Swiss Post facilities, where they undergo consolidation and compression. The consolidated recyclables are then sold to recycling companies in Switzerland.
The GreenLoop project reveals the existence of three problems related to the cardboard recycling system in Switzerland, notably, the high complexity of the recycling ecosystem, the SME’s lack of incentives to innovate in terms of waste collection, and the improvable collection and recycling rate. After interviews with potential target markets as well as an economic and environmental analysis, the project concludes that the analyzed solution itself does not provide sufficient impact for Swiss Post to pursue it further. However, the existence of other ways to improve circularity provides Swiss Post with alternative opportunities to leverage its logistics expertise.
These can be manifolded.
- Establishing a partnership with cardboard recyclers for the internal cardboard waste, which leads to economic and efficiency gains compared to the current system.
- Larger-scale solutions for cardboard collection in two sectors, namely education centers and retail centers, could be established based on convenience gains for potential customers. This is based on the large quantities of cardboard to be collected and the economic and ecological incentives such a solution could offer customers in these two segments.
- Collaborating in niche sectors, such as verified destruction, could be beneficial in leveraging Swiss Post’s logistical expertise as well as trusted reputation and secrecy of correspondence.
Overall, the project concluded with the aforementioned opportunities and additionally an outlook into further circular opportunities such as cardboard recycling in international markets with less established systems, other circularity actions besides recycling such as re-use and other material waste streams such as electronics, aluminum and plastics.
The well-established logistics system of the Swiss Post offers a solid base for circular initiatives, which should build on thoroughly understanding the complex system at hand, engaging in multidisciplinary stakeholder collaborations, and enforcing an iterative project design.
Students: Jad El Harake, Rita Ghilardi, Claas Klatte, Emilija Vukasinovic
Company’s Supervisors: Eric Imstepf, Michael Gasser
Academic Supervisor: Olivier Gallay
