When co-founders, CEO Ashley Etling and CTO Chantal Emmanuel, first started LimeLoop, they shared a frustration around single-use packaging and its effects on not only the environment but the economy, too. To combat single-use packaging waste, LimeLoop raised $100k, within its first month of its WeFunder campaign, in hopes of improving the supply chain.
“From a funding side, we’re definitely an early stage startup. But we have seen very early growth.” LimeLoop trialed its business model in partnership with Toad&CO, an outdoor retail apparel company based in Santa Barbara, to “test the logistics and the supply chain, and really understand the data infrastructure to add value to brands,” says Etling.
Adding value to brands and consumers’ e-commerce experiences is exactly what Etling and Emmanuel pitch to host, Manuel Bleve, in this episode of Angel Notes.
Profit & Planet
To understand the added value in LimeLoop’s Profit and Planet pitch, we must first identify Profit and Planet.
The Added Value – Brands
The feat of changing the current supply chain infrastructure, designed 150 years ago, from linear to circular is a daunting one. And while the nonprofit sector continues to make great strides in this area, the scale needed for any long term solution will require us to take the double bottom line into account. But how?
The Roadmap
Shipping is expensive, particularly in e-commerce, when considering the consumer experience. Returns drive up the costs of goods and communications between brands and consumers (and vice versa) are often lagged and inefficient. With LimeLoop, profit may result from the value added to a brand’s shipping and logistics. This, then, translates further to their relationships signaled by the brand’s environmental values and the connectivity offered from timely insights into the Shipper’s journey.
A LimeLoop Shipper may be reused up to 200x, making it the perfect host for BLE (bluetooth low energy) sensors. Not only do brands save up to 40% in shipping costs by implementing reusable Shippers (Profit), while being able to quantify environmental savings (Planet), they also may begin to leverage reverse logistics.
Reverse Logistics & Returns
E-commerce returns rose to 70 percent, with 1.8 million returns initiated daily with UPS, in 2020. It costs a brand anywhere from $10 to $20 to process an item’s return. Not to mention the added waste – 5 billion tons of it.
“A lot of integrating and changing the work systems of third-party logistics involved getting the shippers back as quickly as possible, so that you’re able to put those back into rotation quickly. And obviously, minimize the loss of the cost of goods,” explains Emmanuel to Bleve.
When a brand uses LimeLoop’s Shippers and logistical data, the return process is seamlessly incorporated into the reuse process. Customers need only to place their returns inside the Shipper, place a pre-paid, already printed shipping label inside the outer pocket, and wait for it to be picked up. Then, specific to a brand, data is continually collected as the package makes its way to its necessary destination.
Data – the package’s temperature, open-rate, and location – are collected and shared on a web-based platform, allowing brands and consumers the experience of brick-and-mortar due to the end-to-end visibility LimeLoop provides. This aids in eliminating return waste from the very start, but of course that can’t always be the case.
The Added Value – Consumers
LimeLoop’s pitch of Profit and Planet applies to consumers both indirectly and directly.
Indirectly, consumers shopping with brands using LimeLoop Shippers have access to similar data as enterprises and SMB brands would – their environmental savings of CO2, water, trees, and oil. Directly, consumers have access to tracking and customer service features; moreover is the access to knowledge of an alternative way, a sustainable way, to consume goods.
“The information that’s available today is just not sufficient for people to be able to plan their lives around it, and so we wanted to get more granular in that data about where the package is and then therefore, learn more about how to streamline the delivery process to make that easier,” explains Emmanuel.
LimeLoop’s technology allows consumers to seamlessly fit reuse into their lives by interconnecting them with the brands they shop with and by streamlining e-commerce so that it is as if stepping right into the store. Yet, there’s another reason for consumers to consider reuse.
Reuse vs. Recycling
In Minnesota, taxpayers are taxed 9.75% of their total recycling bill – a bill calculated and sent to residents to cover the collection, transfer, storage, or disposal costs of recyclable items.
In Indiana, 37% of taxpayers’ dollars are used to cover municipal recycling programs, which are still forced to shut down due to the volume of recyclables and the decreased market value of said materials.
Thus, consumers are paying for their recycling – plastic, metal, glass, and cardboard – to be processed when the reality is that only 9% of plastic packaging is actually recycled, while only 68% of cardboard is recycled. There is legislation in place to shift the costs of recycling to businesses producing the waste rather than to the taxpayers attempting to live green. But the real problems remain: volume and decreased market value. Problems only reuse and circularity can solve.
Because there’s little demand for recycled products, but an uptake in e-commerce, the surplus of material lands in landfills along with the returned items and all the single-use packaging. Purchasing or renting Shippers from LimeLoop, or shopping with brands who use LimeLoop Shippers, decreases the amount of packaging needed to be recycled or disposed of for both brands and consumers through reuse of the Shipper for not only deliveries, but returns, too.
WeFunder
In raising $100k on WeFunder, LimeLoop plans to illuminate the ways in which the system can become a seamless marriage of Profit and Planet. Integrating reuse into the lives of consumers and into the business models of brands provides a bridge between sustainability and convenience.
“To get to a billion dollar company, we only have to capture 0.05%. So it just shows when you look at it from that perspective how large the market is and how ripe it is for change,” Etling points out to Bleve. She adds, “To make this systemic change, multiple companies [will need] to be big players within this whole system.”
LimeLoop is ready. Are you?