What Happens When You Actually Show Up

Season 10 of HappyPorch Radio keeps returning to the same truth: technology doesn't fix things by itself. It’s the human touch surrounding it that helps realise the full potential. This episode might be the best illustration of it yet.

It all started with a soup bowl in Jakarta…

On the 14th of March 2020, Thierry Sanders dropped his spoon into a bowl of bakso at a food stall in Jakarta. The Indonesian president had just appeared on television to announce that loan repayments across the country would be suspended for six months. Thierry had 25 million euros lent to 60,000 borrowers. He had three weeks of cash in the bank to pay salaries. Within a month, he'd laid off 70 of his 100 staff.

Rather than jumping straight to the next idea, he walked up to the waste collector who came past his home in Bali each week, offered him cigarettes and lunch, and asked if he could ride along on his motorbike for a fortnight. The collector was baffled, then suspicious. Thierry persisted. By the end of two weeks, there were eight of them riding around together, and the band kept growing because every other collector wanted free lunch too.

As Barry puts it when Thierry finishes telling the story: "You're supposed to do this with a new idea. Go and really understand the space you're trying to solve first."

Thierry is more matter-of-fact about it: "The combination of healthy curiosity and acute boredom, that was the spark."

The order of operations

That curiosity became Kolekt, an app and payment platform now serving informal waste collectors across Indonesia, Brazil, Mozambique, Kenya, Vietnam, and beyond. There are an estimated 30 million of them worldwide, roughly one in every 250 citizens in countries like Indonesia, Brazil, and India. They are, as Thierry describes it, a parallel world most of us never think about.

What makes Kolekt's story unusual is the order in which things happened. Thierry didn't arrive with a product looking for a market. He arrived with cigarettes, lunch, and genuine curiosity. The technology followed the problems he discovered.

The first problem was simple: collectors were wasting nearly half their working day driving to doors where someone else had already been. An Uber-style pickup app was the obvious response, and within three weeks his development team had built one.

But the real work came once it was running.

Many waste collectors didn't have smartphones. Some had no phone at all. The first workaround was facial recognition: register at a sorting station, build a virtual account tied to your face, then log in later through a family member's phone and transfer your earnings. Workable in theory.

Then came the things nobody had anticipated.

"Fingerprints don't work," Thierry explains, "because many waste collectors have no fingerprint. They've been handling so much material that their fingerprints have just worn off."

The first facial recognition system was open source. Deployed in Mozambique and Kenya, it returned correct results only around 50% of the time on darker skin tones. Thierry doesn't soften it: "This face recognition is totally racist." It had been trained predominantly on lighter-skinned faces, and nobody had caught it until it was live in the field.

They switched to Amazon Rekognition. Accuracy went up to 98%. Then a different problem arrived: The US government demanded access to Amazon's facial recognition data, and Amazon complied. Kolekt responded by splitting face data and personal identity data across two separate platforms, so that neither Amazon nor any government could match a face to a name. When the South African government later demanded access to Kolekt's data on waste collectors, most of whom were immigrants, Kolekt refused. It cost them significant contracts.

Barry's response when he hears this: "Kudos for putting the values first. Not enough of us do that."

This is something we think about at HappyPorch too. The circular economy businesses we work with are often building in genuinely complex territory, and the gap between what looks right in a specification and what works in practice can be wide. The only way across that gap is to understand the real constraints before you start building, not try to retrofit around them once you're already in the field.

Following the problem

The pattern running through Kolekt's story is that every constraint became an instruction. No connectivity in rural South Africa? Thierry happened to have lunch with the director of Dutch public transport payment network Transdev, got curious about how their contactless travel cards hold a balance offline, and started building from there. The new system, Kolekt Pay, doesn't require a phone or an internet connection. It's a pre-announcement, Thierry says. The potential audience is around two billion people.

"If you give someone a hammer, they're always going to look for a nail to hit. One of my hammers is technology." The difference is that he went looking for the nail rather than assuming he already knew where it was. And as the conversation makes clear, the nails kept being in unexpected places.

Circularity looks different depending on where you're standing

There's a broader point in this episode that Barry draws out towards the end, and it's worth sitting with.

In wealthier contexts, circularity tends to look like optimisation: tracking platforms, reuse logistics, closed-loop systems. The infrastructure is largely assumed. But for a waste collector in Mozambique carrying bottles to a buy-back centre, circularity isn't a sustainability framework. It's the economy they live inside. Around 20% of Kolekt's 14,000 waste collector profiles belong to people who own a phone. The other 80% don't. Around 70% are women. Close to 18,000 tonnes of material has been processed through the platform.

The problems are urgent, the margins are thin, and the solutions have to be built around the specific conditions of use. A fingerprint scanner that works fine in a clean office is useless to someone whose hands have been calloused smooth.

At HappyPorch, we find this a useful reminder. When we're working with clients to build tools and platforms for circular systems, the question we keep coming back to is: who actually uses this, where, and under what conditions? The technology is rarely the hardest part. Understanding the environment it needs to work in usually is.

If your problem doesn't fit a standard solution

Thierry describes Kolekt's whole journey as one of following curiosity into places most people don't go. Barry, who has spent a decade hosting conversations about technology in the circular economy, puts it simply: too many of us lead with the technology instead of understanding the context first.

That's the thread running through Season 10, and it's what we try to hold onto at HappyPorch too. If you're building something for the circular economy and hitting the kind of complexity that doesn't have an off-the-shelf answer, we'd like to hear about it. Given our experience, we could well help. Or direct you to resources that can. 

Start a conversation with us.

Listen to the full conversation with Thierry Sanders on HappyPorch Radio. Find out more about Kolekt at kolekt.com.