We have to close the loop.
The loop is still wide open. Most of what we make is used once and thrown away.
The belief
Packaging gets burned because nobody can prove what it is made of. A laptop gets replaced after four years because the battery feels tired and nobody can say whether that is actually true. Machines, materials, buildings, phones: the limit is rarely the physical thing. It is that the information needed to keep something in use either does not exist or sits somewhere nobody can act on.
We think that is the problem worth working on. Not recycling more, but knowing, item by item, what something is made of, how it is holding up, and what it would take to keep it going. Measurement first, because every honest decision after that depends on it.
What we want is unglamorous and quite large. We want people to expect the things they buy to last, and to know when they are being sold something that will not. We want companies to build for repair because the alternative has become the expensive option. We want throwing something away to feel like the failure it usually is.
None of that shifts through good intentions. It shifts when the information is there, in front of the person making the decision, at the moment they are making it. So we build the tools that put it there.
Where the work happens
What we are building
One problem at a time.
PPWR check
A free pre-check of one product against the recycled content rules in Article 7 of the EU Packaging Regulation. It cites the article behind every result and shows which requirements do not bind yet. Where a result depends on part of the regulation we have not finished encoding, it says so on the result itself instead of presenting it as settled. It is a pre-check and not a compliance assessment.
Tribograph
Most hardware is replaced long before it stops being useful. Tribograph watches how a device is actually holding up, its performance, its age and the wear it has accumulated, so that repairing, keeping or replacing becomes a decision about the machine in front of you instead of a guess. It has its own site at tribograph.com.
Writing
The rules are new, widely misread, and mostly explained by people selling something. Working notes on circularity, regulation and measurement, published here as they are written.
What should we build?
What is stopping you?
Every tool on this page started as somebody's specific, irritating problem. A number nobody could produce. A form that could not be filled in honestly. A decision that could not be justified to a customer.
If something is keeping you or your company from being more circular, tell us what it is. Not a brief, not a specification, just the problem in your own words. If you already know what would fix it, better still.
We read everything and answer personally. Some of it will turn into the next tool, and the rest tells us what we have wrong.
Writing
Recent writing
ClosedLoop
Built in Europe. Used wherever the problem is.
ClosedLoop is the umbrella for this work. Each tool answers a specific problem for a specific person, and the company exists so that they add up to something rather than staying separate.
Europe is where we are and where the rules bite first, so it is where the packaging work starts. The habit underneath it, replacing things that were never finished, is not a European problem. Neither are the tools we build for it.