The waste problem you never see and the startup sorting it out
Why we invested in Cinqo
If you have ever tried to live more sustainably, chances are you thought about your waste. You’re probably sorting that cardboard box into a different bin than the plastic packing, bringing that empty jar of honey to the glass container, and returning the juice bottle to the deposit machine at the supermarket. For most households, dealing with this (hopefully small) pile of waste is a bit annoying but not exactly difficult. But have you ever wondered how the industry handles its waste?
The difference between your kitchen bin and an industrial waste container
If the answer is no, you’re not alone. While municipal waste, such as packaging and dinner leftovers in your household bin, often comes up in public discussion, industrial waste is a far less visible issue. Yet, industrial waste makes up a huge chunk of global waste. How much exactly is surprisingly hard to tell, as global industrial waste volumes are not reliably measured. Spanning thousands of processes, materials, and sources, most countries do not track it consistently, and there is no global reporting standard. As a result, published estimates vary widely, but all suggest the same order of magnitude: billions of tonnes every year.
We extract around 100 billion tonnes of raw materials from the planet every year (that’s like pulling the mass of Mount Everest out of the ground every 18 months). Even as production becomes more efficient, almost every sector still creates excess material along the way: from the metal cut-offs in manufacturing to the scraps from food processing. Once it leaves the production line, it stops being a resource and becomes, well, waste. When that happens, all the energy, water, and emissions invested in creating that material are lost with it.
This is not just an environmental issue, but brings a set of problems for the companies creating this waste. Most of them lack basic visibility: they don’t know how much waste they produce, where it goes, or what it costs them. But reliable data is becoming more and more important for two reasons: to meet the progressively stricter reporting requirements, and to reduce the real economic cost of wasted material.
With populations and economies growing, industrial activity continues to expand, so both the volume and complexity of the issue will rise in the coming years. Industrial waste processing has quickly become one of the biggest economic and environmental challenges (and opportunities) of our time with a massive market of 80bn€ in Europe alone.
Why now is a good time to sort out this waste issue
The issue with waste management businesses is that while they have a huge volume, the margins are small. Until recently, CAPEX-heavy improvements to these operations likely weren’t profitable. But with data, software, and AI entering the picture, it’s possible to optimize these operations.
Still, for most people, the waste industry is about as unattractive as it gets. Yet when we met the founders of Cinqo, Laure and Mehdi, they saw this growing waste problem as an opportunity. With the volumes at play, they realized that optimizing waste operations just a tiny bit could significantly reduce resource loss, saving companies time and money, while providing them the insights they need to understand and report their waste.
Mehdi has a hand for establishing multiple sided marketplaces in similar “boring” industries that are stuck in the last decade. He led operations at Flixbus and founded his own ambulance coordination startup Amblea. Laure brings firsthand experience of the struggles in this industry. At Suez, she tried to solve these waste management issues but kept running into legacy systems and the pace of such a large organisation.
Building the next generation of waste operations
Cinqo operates differently from most waste management players. Instead of building, owning, and operating trucks and plants, they partner with existing waste processors. Their asset-light two-sided marketplace connects these processors and recyclers with the businesses creating the waste. They coordinate how these players work together and improve operational efficiency on both sides.
So, what does this look like in practice? Cinqo starts by mapping what happens to waste inside the site: where it’s created, how it’s sorted, and where it goes next. With AI-enabled tech, they can already optimize sorting and routing there significantly. Then they look beyond the site, where the platform coordinates shared routes between different companies in the same industrial park. Waste becomes cheaper when shared: higher volumes and smarter routing mean lower prices for all players involved. For many companies, these adaptations even unlock buyback options instead of expensive disposal.
As all these flows become digitized, they create automatic data and ESG reports, helping companies understand, report, and eventually reduce their waste by spotting new opportunities. This is how Cinqo makes recycling cheaper than landfill at scale, bringing visibility to an invisible problem to save disposal costs and environmental load.
We believe that Cinqo offers the kind of systemic modernization legacy industries like waste processing urgently need. We cannot accept systems where valuable materials fall outside the production process and simply vanish into a black box.
It’s been a while since we invested in the team, and we keep being impressed by the strong customer feedback and the dedication of Mehdi, Laure, and the whole team. We are looking forward to continuing the journey with Cinqo as they innovate this increasingly important industry.