The future of multiple use with Muuse ♻️
Plus more than you ever wanted to know about air conditioners
Greetings everyone,
In the inaugural issue of The Cool Down, I sat down with Muuse founder and CEO Brian Reilly to discuss his company and its mission to end single-use plastics. Muuse is a system of reusable cups and food containers for the to-go economy (coffee, food delivery, etc.) working to build a waste-free world. We talk about the inspiration for the company, the product today, operating a startup in different countries, and more!
I also became strangely interested in air conditioners and decided to run some math on their environmental impact. I share my learnings below and offer some advice on AC best practices.
Brendan
The future of multiple use with Muuse founder Brian Reilly 🎙️
Can you talk a bit about your background and what got you involved in climate tech?
In undergraduate, I studied physics and took a class on climate change at Middlebury. At the time, I was going in the medical school direction; but I ended up convincing the physics department to let me do my thesis on wind energy and just got super passionate about it. At the time, the industry was still in a nascent stage. After I graduated, I helped start a wind company then went on to work for two other companies in the space. Altogether, I ended up putting seven years into that industry. I saw it go from true-believer hippie-types to a major industry. In 2009, the wind energy industry had really grown up. At that point, my attention went to solar energy. That was the time when it was just really starting and in the vulnerability stage. I then spent the next six years in solar building out the renewable energy team at NRG.
How did you come up with the idea for Muuse?
I really wanted to start my own company and go live abroad. I went and did a year in both India and Shanghai working on solar projects there. At the time, India and China were the most attractive solar markets. In 2017 or 2018, China built more solar than the rest of the world combined. To see it happening at that scale was super inspiring. Around this time I was noticing, and I think we all were, that the world was really starting to get concerned with the state of our ecosystems with regard to single-use plastics. I was on an airplane traveling from Shanghai to Hong Kong and had just read an article about a supermarket banning single-use items and thought, “What are they going to do?” I realized we use the same cups and plates in a restaurant and if you zoom out and look at a city, it’s really just a big restaurant. You now have delivery drivers running around. We have QR and RFID technology. We all have mobile devices. There is underutilized cleaning infrastructure. The only thing preventing us from using the same cups and plates across the city is coordination. The pieces are there. Once that idea set, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I started sending it to people who were business advisors and right away the response was go, go, go.
How does the product work from a consumer perspective?
This is a system where the network effect is really important. As it gets bigger, it get easier for everyone. In Singapore, we are in 50 restaurants. A year from now let’s imagine we are in 500 restaurants and cafes. So you go to your favorite coffee shop or restaurant and take either your food or coffee to go. Let’s take coffee as an example. You order your cappuccino and when you’re checking out with the barista you say you would like to take it in a Muuse cup. At that point you’ll scan the bottom of the cup with the Muuse app which will keep track of your order. The barista will serve your coffee in that cup. You now take your drink in a nice stainless steel, sleek, black cup and enjoy your coffee for as long as you want. Maybe you take it back to your office or home. Maybe you just drink it on your quick walk there. As soon as you’re finished with it, you open up your app again and you can see any of those 500 places to return it. You simply walk into one of those places and there will be an area for you to return it. You scan your QR code and you’re finished. The software is just recognizing that cup A was in location 1, then registered to user X, and returned to location 2. On the back-end, we are tracking this inventory across an entire ecosystem — whether it’s to go-to containers, coffee cups or eventually bottles as well. That’s where we are at today, which we think of as phase one.
What progress has the company made to date?
Our first non-tech pilot was reusable cups and containers as-a-service in Bali. Now, two and a half years later, we have done 50 projects across four countries – Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong and the US. We’ve done reuse projects at large scale events. We’ve done corporate offices. We’ve done university campuses. We did a project at the airport in Singapore. Increasingly we are doing open city networks. In Singapore, we’re in 50 restaurants and cafes. We are doing a big partnership with one of the larger food delivery and ride hailing services there. And we were ramping up our operations in San Francisco pre-coronavirus but have paused business there for now. We are also doing a bunch of cool partnerships with teams in other countries. We are going to bring the Muuse brand and products and operational procedures in a partnership format. It’s been a wild two and a half years, but it’s a testament to this movement. It’s coming so fast. When we started there were two other teams working on it and now there are hundreds. It’s cool to imagine what the next couple of years are going to be like.
What is the long-term vision for the product?
Phase two is where we start having return stations — trash can-like infrastructure — laid out across a city. Then it is going to get even easier. You will be walking down the street and on the corner there will be a return station specific to reusables. I would argue phase three, which is five years from now, is where reusables have popped up in so many places in our life — like supermarkets, convenience stores, places you don’t even think of like at an automotive store — at that point you have a separate bin in your home for reusables which will put out on your curb. In this phase, the resuables will go to a central location to be cleaned, washed, sanitized and redistributed out in your community.
What are some of the differences you’ve seen from operating in a variety of geographies?
From a lot of travel in life, I always see commonalities before I see difference. Bali and Indonesia are pretty different than Singapore, Hong Kong, and San Francisco; but we’re finding more similarity than difference. HK is a very space-constrained place. Often times the restaurants there don’t have cleaning infrastructure, so it’s more of a centralized third-party washing model. Jakarta you have lower costs of employment, so they are super happy to do the cleaning in-house. But in terms of the consumer, people everywhere are excited about something little that’s allowing them to feel like they are taking action against a broad challenge.
Muuse recently started offering zero-waste food delivery. Can you talk about that product and how it’s going so far?
This came about as a result of COVID-19 because so many of us were stuck at home ordering more food than ever and seeing all the single-use packaging. We started by running our own food delivery service. Our COO was actually the one delivering the food to customer’s houses and we did it where you would scan the bag to register it to the customer. Then we would either pick the container up the next time they ordered or they could drop it to any of the participating cafes in our network. How it’s working now is you order through the Foodpanda app and in the comments section you specify you would like to have your food brought in a Muuse container. The challenge we are having is we really want to take that container and link it to a specific user. We really like to have accountability for each cup and container — to know exactly where it is and how many rotations it’s been through. We are actually developing an app specific to the cafes so that when they get an order, they will be able to link directly to that user. The cafe will quickly scan the product in conjunction with a membership number and that will link the container to that person. Right now, we don’t have the capability for the delivery company to take those containers back although that is very much part of the plan. Otherwise, it would be your responsibility to bring the container back in the next two weeks.
Besides Muuse, how do center sustainability in your daily life?
I think about this all the time as someone running a reuse project and asking other people to change their behavior. How can you do that and not be hyper-focused on self? I constantly ask myself, how am I handling my trash? How am I spending every minute of my day to be attentive and appreciative to my environment? From an early age I felt called to love, honor, and protect this Earth. That was fundamental and easy. I pretty much don’t eat meat anymore which was a big shift. I also try to appreciate the people. My biggest shift is I used to be so Earth-centric. I had a mindset that I needed to be a warrior to protect the planet, almost overstepping people. Now I try to really meet the people I’m with, and share love and compassion. I really try to be more of an example than someone preaching to others. Especially with trash. It’s hard. No one is going to figure out a solution and then it will be fixed. It’s going to take all of us to humbly do the work.
If Muuse isn’t currently operating where you live, feel free to add your email to the mailing list on their website to receive updates.
More than you ever wanted to know about air conditioners 🌬️
We’ve had a spell of autumnal weather in the northeast lately and it reminded me I should take out my window AC unit for the approaching cool months. That thought led me down a rabbit hole of reading about the environmental impact of ACs, so without further ado…
A brief history of refrigerants
A refrigerant is a compound that readily absorbs heat and, when paired with other components such as compressors and evaporators, can be used to provide refrigeration or air conditioning. In 1987, the United Nations ratified the Montreal Protocol to phase-out the use of ozone-depleting substances, including two widely used refrigerants – chloroflurocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochloroflurocarbons (HCFCs). The phase-out of CFCs and HCFCs paved the way for the rise of a group of non-chlorine containing refrigerants known as HFCs. While HFCs do not damage the ozone layer, they do warm the planet anywhere from 1,000 to 9,000 times more than carbon dioxide emissions.
The problem
According to the EPA, the United States alone disposes of six million air conditioners per year. The EPA also estimates that releasing the greenhouse gasses in a single air conditioner is roughly equivalent to driving 3,000 miles in a car. There isn’t a good estimate on the percentage of AC units improperly disposed of each year, but if we assume it’s only 5%, that’s still equivalent to emitting ~200,000 metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Sequestering that quantity of carbon would require approximately 250,000 acres of forest (more than half the forest land in the state of Rhode Island) to be exclusively dedicated to this problem for an entire year. I ran the math here if you want to take a look at the assumptions and sources.
What you can do
You probably already had an idea that ACs and other refrigerant appliances are bad for the environment. Hopefully this can serve as a reminder why it’s important to make the extra effort when disposing of sensitive appliances. If this information is totally new to you, here are two actions you can take going forward (note this advice is biased to those with window AC units):
Perhaps this is obvious but…dispose of your AC appropriately: Most municipalities have clear guidelines on how to get rid of old appliances. For example, the NYC guidelines are here. In general, you should be able to search “AC disposable [XYZ city]” and figure out the procedures. Sometimes, local utility companies will even pay you to recycle an energy inefficient model. On the off chance your locale doesn’t have clear protocols, there are typically private businesses that can collect old ACs from you, however it’s important to use a reputable provider.
Make your AC last: I’ll admit I’ve never even thought about cleaning my AC up until now. I also didn’t appreciate that with proper maintenance, they can last as long as 15 years. At a minimum, I recommend doing one deep clean at the end of the season (I just did mine!!) and storing it away if you have space for it. On the cleaning front, you can use simple household products (water, vinegar, dish soap) and follow a short tutorial on YouTube.
Thanks for reading 🙏 If you have any feedback or want me to research a particular topic, please leave a comment below or send me a note. Also if you’re not a subscriber yet, you know what to do 👇