Sebastián Sajoux On Innovation Helping Start-Ups Align With Environmental Sustainability
Sebastián Sajoux is an Argentinian entrepreneur dedicated to promoting environmental sustainability and rational use of resources between governments, businesses and individuals.
Through his extensive experience dealing with consumer brands' marketing and Corporate Sustainable Responsibility, he became immersed in the development of innovative solutions to help them become greener. Sebastián currently leads the Arqlite team on the commercialization of the first 100% sustainable commodity: an artificial gravel for the construction industry which is three times lighter, ten times better insulator, cost effective and made 100% from non-recyclable plastic waste. Designed as a scalable solution from the cradle, it is capable of processing mixed and other hard-to-recycle plastics at a cost competitive rate even to landfill tipping fees.
Sebastián discusses How designing sustainable building materials can lead to broader environmental impacts and Why social businesses embrace innovation as a core practice to succeed.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Indio Myles] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work in branding, social enterprise and sustainable building?
[Sebastián Sajoux] - (For) my background, I have a combination of marketing and environmental consultancy work.I've studied both things and started by offering big consumer brands a nice blend of not only sustainability, but sustainability that could also be applied to big corporations that sometimes experience different rules and are hard to transform and reshape. Coming from knowing a little bit of that area, I was able to get my first customer, which was Coca Cola. That was a great experience back in 2012, and since then I went through other partnerships with other big brands. Arqlite came up as a spinoff of that service we were providing back then.
As the CEO of Arqlite, can you tell us about this social enterprise and how it creates a positive environmental change?
What we do is very simple. Our mission is to tackle plastic pollution. We work here every day to develop new technologies and enhance technologies we already have in place to be able to pick up more plastics. We get into more complex processing and scales of impact by partnering with other third parties, licensees and partners that want to scale their technology up.
Our main KPI is tons of plastics we remove from the environment. We measure each ton of plastic we mine from landfill, and this is because we only do unrecyclable plastics, so those are currently harming the environment. One ton of those plastics gets transformed into one ton of our product (gravel for construction), and that's what we do every day. (We're) trying to multiply that KPI to increase our positive impact.
What role does innovation and technology play within branding, and how does it help enterprises balance the creation of a products value with any negative impacts it may cause?
What we do is all about innovation. Now that word is used broadly, and it's good because it means a lot of people are trying to do new things and push boundaries. This industry is one hundred percent innovation and thinking outside of the box. My background is (as I was saying) more in communications, marketing and sustainability. But we ended up building a facility through a lot of hard work. We got involved with our built environment, so now we know about concrete. Then we got partnerships within the hydroponics market, so we started to learn more and more about what our product could do for people and other companies. It's all about, learning, innovating and trying to see (in my case) if I’m not a plastic recycler, how would I solve this problem from my perspective?
That's how we started thinking very differently to other standard plastic or recycling companies in the industry, and the good thing about innovation is that it is most commonly already partnering with sustainability.
Most of the new ideas coming to the market or as new products or services already have a sustainability aspect or positive impact. I don't see any new businesses growing or being born without a sustainability leg.
Why do you think it's important for businesses to engage in creating social or environmental change alongside making a profit?
I would say it's necessary, because there's no other way we can survive in the long term without doing so. First of all, it's a real need, but I would say that companies and market don't move by future needs, but instead by immediate needs.
Usually, money (creates) immediate results. That is what’s pushing them or us to go that way is the consumer. Normal people with their daily actions are the ones that can build change and push companies to make a change and grow their impact.
Sometimes consumers or regular people at home don't know how to help. So how can we collaborate rather than individually separating the trash or doing minor things? If we push companies to align with more sustainable practices, that's where impact and scaling happens.
What do you believe is holding entrepreneurs back from prioritising sustainability when designing a product or implementing a business model?
To be honest, I don't. I see most entrepreneurs have sustainability as a priority, but if I would say why some are not making it their main subject, it is because markets are still not ready. Awareness is becoming more common and spreading, but we're still far from ideal. That impacts the investment world, so if you're an entrepreneur, investors (even impact investors) are going to be looking for a return. Sometimes, return and positive impact don't align one hundred percent.
I think with the fundraising side of business, when you have to talk to investors, they will be saying, "I like this is green, but how are we going to make money?" This is one limitation, but besides that, I see most of the entrepreneurs I know are very aligned with sustainability, the SDGs and the this new way of doing business.
What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across that are creating a positive social change?
I've seen a lot of innovation in the plastic world trying to tackle the same issues we're tackling.
Most of these initiatives have a lot of potential, but they are still green; they still need a lot of investment, time, research and development. But basically, it’s heading the right way.
Besides all these different projects or companies, what I've seen is that organisations are starting to provide resources for these start-ups. They are generating networking, providing pro bono help, legal advice and connections to big corporations. There are several, and we are engaged with a few that help compensate the lack of resources every start-up has. By being able to connect to other people in these networks, there's a lot of potential for new start-ups.
