The South African Polyethylene Terephthalate Recycling Company (Petco) is driving the rollout of technology called BanQu to recycling buyback centres, in an effort to revolutionise how recyclable materials are traded, tracked and traced.

The digital platform will help buyback centres accurately record and track their recycling transactions with waste pickers, and trace the origins of recycling, while providing a real-time business management tool for buyback centres.

The BanQu technology rollout is being funded by The Coca-Cola Foundation.

The system will be rolled out to 100 buyback centres across the country over the next year.

There are already ten centres in Gauteng, Limpopo, the Western Cape and the Eastern Cape equipped with the technology. The centres have, collectively, more than 1 400 waste pickers registered and have recorded more than 2 300 t of recyclable material.

Once registered on the BanQu system, a buyback centre can capture the quantity of recyclable material bought from waste pickers, as well as the price paid for it and where it was collected.

This allows buyback centres to know the quantity of all materials within their centres at any given time. The waste pickers, in turn, receive an SMS receipt for each transaction and can keep track digitally of their income earned through sales to various buyback centres.

“BanQu is helping to integrate the informal sector into the recycling value chain, which Petco has been working at for many years and is now a requirement in the Extended Producer Responsibility regulations of the Waste Act,” says Petco CEO Cheri Scholtz.

Because informal waste collection was based largely on cash transactions, the majority of the estimated 52 000 waste pickers in South Africa typically had no record of their earnings and so remained largely unbanked and unable to access the kinds of services available to others who were self-employed or who have a record of employment in the formal sector.

The benefit of the technology was that both waste pickers and buyback centres were able to build up permanent digital financial records, which could be used to access credit to grow their businesses.

Scholtz explains that recording and analysing aggregate data at collector and buyback centre level will be a step-change in understanding market dynamics, pricing and collector behaviour, and ensuring a more equitable earning for the informal sector.

BanQu founder and CEO Ashish Gadnis says the platform uses secure blockchain technology to track and trace recycled material across the recycling value chain, ensuring price transparency for both buyers and sellers.

“It takes less than an hour to set up the system and train a buyback centre team. The platform works on any device that can connect to the Internet and is cloud-based. Nothing is saved to a device, nor are smartphones necessary.

“BanQu was built to empower smallholder farmers in our food supply chains and the informal waste collectors who are the true heroes of the circular economy. This incredible partnership brings major scale to that vision.”

Coca-Cola Foundation president Saadia Madsbjerg remarks that this innovative platform helps waste reclaimers and buyback centres find value in waste, while supporting a circular economy that helps protect the environment and create a better shared future.