Nehal Jain On Inspiring Behavioural Change And Progressing Towards A Circular Economy

Nehal Jain is the Co-Founder of after, an unwearable textiles collections and recycling service for households and businesses.

She is passionate about systems change, circular economy, and building businesses. Her roots have grounded her in leading with purpose and passion, and in her personal life she strives to live as sustainably as possible. It is these values that led her to cofounding after and taking on the challenge to systematically changing the textiles Industry. She brings with her a host of corporate experience from growing a community of technology startups from conceptualisation to commercialisation at Microsoft, to building SaaS as a product manager at Atlassian.

Nehal discusses the personal sustainability mission informing her methods of diverting tonnes of textile waste and growing the circular economy movement through influencing consumer behaviours.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Sarah Ripper] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led you to where you are today?

[Nehal Jain] - I was born in India, but my family moved around a lot growing up. A fun fact about me is I've studied at 17 schools and education institutes in general (including universities) across four different countries. Most of this was before I started high school, so I've been moving around a lot and I’m very open to change. I did have quite a stable high school and university experience; I studied software engineering because I always had an interest in technology. This led me to working at Microsoft where I was managing their Innovation Centre, which allowed me to meet hundreds of start-ups. That got me super excited about building things, and I then joined Atlassian as a product manager building software as a service type products and features. But I wasn't solving problems I was passionate about; it was hard to get excited or feel fulfilled about the work I was doing. I reflected on my childhood and the values my family had instilled in me. I remembered stories like my grandma who only owns five saris she wears in a rotation. Every time she gets a new piece, she will donate one, she'll keep using that limited five. Through stories like that, I learned about the concept of minimalisation, where you aim to be not materialistic and mindful of your consumption. I also remembered when I was in India for a short period of time, on the weekends we used to go to the temple. I'd have classes there interestingly, and at the end what I remember from that time was I would get a card out of a box at random and it would have a challenge for us to do on that day or during the week. It would challenge us to not eat chocolate for a day, not be mean to our sister, or avoid eating sugar for one day.

The main purpose of this was for us to realise we're in control of who we are as people, our senses, and what we do. When I thought about that I realised I've always wanted to push the boundaries and see what more I can do or achieve.

My family grew up vegetarian, but later turned vegan. All the reasons for why were that this seemed like the right thing to be doing, I know I have control over myself, and I know I can do what I set my mind too. I've noticed that just kept spreading into other parts of my life, and so I've tried to live as sustainably as I possibly can. I wouldn't say I'm extreme, there's a long way for me to go, but I'm still trying to do whatever I learn from the people around me. When I reflected, I realised I had a keen focus on living sustainably, but I never thought of turning that into my career. At that point of wanting to do more, I started exploring and realising I need to learn more first, I didn't have enough education. I started reading, watching, and learning more about the concept which eventually changed my mindset. From there, I happened in a miracle of sorts to meet my Co-founder, when I wasn't looking to create a start-up. She was working in a problem and space which was exactly what I was interested in and had been researching. It feels like it was meant to be.

As a Co-Founder of after, can you tell us more about the impact it's generating?

After is a textiles waste collection service for Australian households and businesses. What we do is partner with ethical and sustainable textile recyclers who will transform 'waste' (which we don't see as a waste but as a resource) such as unwearable or unusable items we collect from businesses and households. These recycled raw materials, such as yarn, felt and filling material and transformed into items we report back to our customers. We're aiming on our journey to be transparent while offering as convenient a service as possible. With that, the main problem we're looking to solve is the textiles waste problem. Australia is the second largest producer of textile waste. In Australia, 6,000 kilograms goes to landfill every 10 minutes. To visually represent this, one adult sized elephant is ending up in landfill every 10 minutes; that's a huge amount. We're consuming and throwing away a lot. How can we divert that from landfill and circulate it into industry? The recycled products our recyclers create get sold back into industry, so our big theory of change is if we're able to inject recycled materials back into the economy, (hopefully) virgin material usage will be reduced. Instead, we can keep it circulating instead of overexerting Earth. We want to slow down the metaphorical tap of overconsumption and overproduction. Those are our big lofty goals; I think from a more tactical perspective we are diverting some of this waste from landfill. In terms of our impact, we've been operating for two years and bootstrapping alongside other work predominantly. We've serviced about 420+ households and businesses to date and diverted over 4.5 tons of textile waste from landfill. One other thing we offer is we partner with conscious and sustainable businesses to offer incentives to our households and individual consumers. Every time they make a collection with us, they're diverting waste from landfill and will get a discount at one of these conscious, sustainable businesses. We can keep the loop going by helping you spend your money in areas where we would much rather it go as opposed to things like fast fashion.

During your journey over the last two years of building after, what have been some of the key learnings you'd pass on to change makers?

Broadly, rather than with textile waste specifically, I'd say it's all about mindset shifts. Before I even joined, I saw problems in the system.

Coming in from a systems lens, I realised we're not just tackling one specific problem where we know the solution and we will make the impact we want it to have. It's so much more complex than that.

For me, I found when I started to develop my systems thinking ability, I realised there were certain problems, especially around adoption. There's a lot of solutions out there, but there is not enough widespread adoption of them. It's not become a cultural norm to adopt the sustainable solutions out there, whether it's at an individual or business level. That has limited me; I keep thinking that's the problem to solve and there's something I can do to tackle that one unique problem. In reality, more and more solutions out there and almost oversaturating the market with sustainable solutions is great, because the more solutions that exist where competition keeps making it better and better, the more adoption that will happen over time. For me that was a huge mindset shift, and similarly, I see mindset shifts across other areas as well. A big one was with being very perfectionistic. Myself, I came into this start-up with sustainability and the idea of circular economy at its core. It was originally about how we can create the perfect circular economy and do the most sustainable things? The fact we're in recycling meant initially we got a lot of questions about, "but why did you choose recycling, could it be done perfectly in some other way?"

I came in looking for that perfection and realised that's such a limited approach to thinking. By starting with an imperfect model, you then work towards becoming closer to perfect. Just creating something is, for both of us as change makers and individuals, a big mindset shift we need to have.

Looking at perfectionism is important, because people are so deeply passionate sometimes, they wait for everything to be 200 percent perfect before they start. Getting going, learning as you go, iterating and educating the collective market about why these things are needed facilitates behaviour change in others.

Action is always better. If I hadn't joined the start-up, if we hadn't started doing this, we wouldn't have diverted the amount we have. It might not seem like a large amount, but it's better than nothing. What would you be doing otherwise?

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently creating positive social change?

Something I find quite interesting is looking at design principles. Whether it's for textiles or in general, when you think about a circular economy, we need better designs to begin with. Even with what we do in textiles recycling, it's a difficult and complicated space. Something I'm quite passionate about is how do we design our clothes in a way that is better for its end of life. If you start to apply that concept in other areas, that brings me to thinking of a company called Great Wrap. They create a cling wrap alternative made fully out of compostable and biodegradable materials. This wrap in any environment will break down, whether it's the water, landfill, or elsewhere. They're creating products and designing it to begin with in such a way where they've kept that end of life in mind. When I look at projects like that, that's where I believe the best innovations are happening.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

There are three main ones which are foundational, especially if you haven't explored sustainability. First, there is the Australian show War on Waste; I think all Australians know that one. I absolutely love it; the third season came out this year, so there's a lot of new content as well. I love that one because it provides a great way of explaining the different problems that exist from all different angles, including policy as well. My second recommendation is to look at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation or consultants like Coreo, which are organisations talking a lot about circular economy.

Right now, we're living in a linear economy. We take materials and minerals out of the Earth, turn these into products which we use before they go to landfill. How can we design our system in a way which is more circular, where waste is ‘designed out’ to begin with?

How can we keep materials that exist and have been already produced in circulation for as long as possible? That's what we're working on at after. Finally, how do we regenerate nature? Having this mindset, has been one of the biggest changes I've had. Our mission is we want Australia to become a circular economy, and we want to create that for the textiles industry. If you want to learn more about textiles and the problems associated with them, there's an ABC podcast called Threads which I would highly recommend as an introduction too this space.