Pandemic forced firm to think bigger about recycling efforts on campus
Colin Hively, head of strategy and co-founder of Cycle Technology, gave us an update on the startup that gamifies recycling.
The business provides both hardware and software that allow users to pair an app with Cycle Technology recycling bins. Users get points each time they recycle and can use rewards to buy recycled products.
The business won the trade and logistics category of the Miami Herald Startup Pitch Competition in 2020.
MIAMI HERALD: How did your business change over the past year?
COLIN HIVELY: When we initially won, we were really focused on universities
and now we’re heads down on stadiums and events. We’re confident that stadiums are going to come back and people are going to want these kinds of solutions that feel more sustainable, less wasteful and more mindful.
MH: How did COVID-19 impact your business?
CH: With colleges shutting down, we’ve had to go back to the drawing board. Net, we’ve done well. Ironically with everything happening in California post Covid, there’s increased interest in turning Miami into more of a tech and venture city. We attended round tables with Mayor [Francis] Suarez and talked about what we’re doing and how we can improve Miami.
MH: How did winning the Miami Herald competition help your business?
CH: The exposure and getting our name out there and people reaching out was very validating. Telling our story and being featured in a publication like the Miami Herald has been a really big deal for us.
American investors may be excused for suffering from chronic shorttermism. This is a persistent condition reinforced by the financial industrial complex of stock market television, websites and Internet memes. Scouring quarterly financial statements to discern the health and prospects of a company seems quaint and luddite-like when an Instagram ice cream photo can cause a multibillion-dollar swing in the market value of a struggling video game retailer.
(Yes, this actually happened last week to GameStop shares. No, the GameStop #stonk story is not over.)
And while there is plenty of important short-term data for investors in the week ahead — February jobs report, dozens of quarterly earnings reports, another COVID-19 vaccine — China’s long-term planning bear notice.
The rubber-stamp Chinese parliament is scheduled to begin its annual meeting on Friday. Its 14th five-year plan will be released. These plans primarily are blueprints of China’s economic ambitions over the next half decade.
This edition of its half-decade long goals comes amid a backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and Trump-induced trade tensions from which President Joe Biden has not backed away.
China’s economic ascendancy over the past generation was fueled by its desire to be a lowcost manufacturer, industry’s willingness to chase after lower costs as it fed the global consumers’ appetite.
As this latest five-year plan was being crafted Chinese Premier Xi Jinping has made clear his aspirations. Traveling in China in the early days of the Great Recession in 2008, I heard economists, business leaders and others talk about “turning inward.” Instead of relying on exports to Europe and America, China was recognizing its own internal economic opportunity.
Today, the Xi government calls it “dual circulation.” The concept — focus on stoking China’s own 1.4 billion population domestic consumption in addition to global trade — may not be new. However, it is as clear of an expression that American investors probably will get of China’s increasing ambition to move up the global supply chain, flex its technology muscle and complement its trade-dominated economic growth with more internal combustion.
The implications for American investors will last longer than any frozen dessert meme.