When Trust Does the Work: Green Pulse and the Human Side of Circular Tech

Season 10 of HappyPorch Radio has been asking a consistent question: when circular economy technology meets the reality of actual businesses and actual people, what really happens? We called it "Technology Isn't Magic," and each conversation this season has added another layer to that idea. This one is no different, and it comes with some welcome history attached.

Lieke van Kerkhoven is no stranger to the podcast. She joined us back in Season 5, when she was working with FLOOW2, a company building sharing platforms for circular economy networks. We talked then about the hard work of explaining circularity to people who hadn't yet made it their business, and the stubborn gap between good ideas and real-world adoption. A lot has changed since then. Lieke and her co-founder have started something new, which has seen them take a decidedly hands on and human first approach to making circularity work. 

What Green Pulse does

Green Pulse is based in the Netherlands and helps hospitals decommission used medical equipment in a way that is sustainable, circular, and financially worthwhile. In under two years, they are already working with more than 25 Dutch hospitals, which represents over a quarter of the market.

The model is straightforward but took real clarity of thinking to arrive at. Hospitals replacing equipment face a familiar set of bad options: trade it in with the original supplier (who, given they won’t likely bring it back to the market,  will usually destroy it), sell it to a traditional broker (who will cherry-pick the most valuable items and offer a poor return), or let it accumulate in a basement until someone decides to clear it all out. 

Green Pulse removes all three of those options and replaces them with a single, managed service. They collect everything, photograph it, check for residual patient data, and sell it to the best buyer through their own platform and a network of international auctions. They work on a commission-only basis, which means their incentives are completely aligned with the hospital's. If the equipment sells well, everyone benefits.

Crucially, and this is where the "technology isn't magic" theme comes into sharp focus, hospitals don't get another platform to manage. They get a partner who handles it for them and reports back. As Lieke put it, hospitals have a core job. Decommissioning medical equipment is not part of it, but it is still work that has to be done. The insight that unlocked Green Pulse was recognising that technology alone could not solve that.

A well-designed platform sitting idle because hospital staff have no time or appetite to use it is not a circular solution. It's just digital clutter.

The role of technology, used well

There is technology at the heart of Green Pulse, but it has been chosen and built to serve the work rather than to define it. The most striking example is an AI tool they developed for warehouse inventory. Cataloguing used medical equipment is genuinely difficult: every device is different, serial numbers are long and error-prone, and the process requires enough technical knowledge to identify what you're looking at and photograph it usefully. Previously, a worker might get through four or five devices an hour. With the AI tool, a student who had been in the warehouse a short time was processing twenty per hour.

That is a significant operational gain, but the more interesting question is what it frees people up to do. Which brings us to trust.

Trust as the real infrastructure

Green Pulse has around 500 registered buyers worldwide, and reaches thousands more through other platforms. The buyer base is genuinely international: newer, higher-specification equipment tends to stay closer to home, moving to Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, or Poland. Older equipment travels further, often to markets in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, or Africa, where buyers may be sourcing for local brokers that employ medical technicians who can repair, upgrade, and resell the equipment with training and service contracts attached. The equipment gets a genuine second life rather than a symbolic one.

One of the stories Lieke shared captured this well. A buyer she had assumed was German arrived with a truck, loaded between ten and fifteen thousand euros' worth of equipment, and turned out to be Syrian. The funding had come from Qatar and Dubai, and all of it was going to be donated to Syria. The relationship that made that transaction possible was not built by the platform. It was built by WhatsApp messages, warehouse visits, detailed photographs of software versions and critical components, and the willingness to answer questions properly rather than at arm's length.

Buyers on the other side of significant purchases, sometimes tens of thousands of euros, want to know who they are dealing with. Platform features can support that, but they cannot replace it. The same is true on the hospital side, where the commission model, the compliance handling, the patient data checks, and the consistent transparency have built relationships deep enough that hospitals are now sharing their replacement schedules with Green Pulse in advance. That is a shift from transactional to genuinely collaborative, and it matters.

A note on donation

Lieke is direct about something that deserves more honest conversation in the circular economy space. Donating medical equipment to developing countries sounds generous, but it often is not. She has spent time working in Ghana and visiting health facilities across Africa, and what she has seen repeatedly is well-intentioned equipment sitting unused because staff haven't been trained on it, spare parts aren't available, software licences have expired, or it could be as simple as the plug doesn't fit the local electrical supply. Her phrase for it is "waste dumping 2.0." Beyond that, every container of free equipment undercuts the local entrepreneur who is trying to build a viable business servicing, repairing, and supplying that same market. Selling to a local trader creates economic activity. Donating potentially disrupts it.

Integrative business

This is the part of the conversation that requires a little patience and an open mind, but it is worth staying with.

Lieke trained as a doctor before moving into the sustainability space, and she draws a parallel between two ideas: integrative medicine and what she calls integrative business. Integrative medicine tries to take the best of Western clinical practice and the best of evidence-based traditional approaches, treating a person as a whole rather than a collection of systems, and repositioning the doctor as a coach rather than a hierarchical authority. Some would say it works because it stops treating competing frameworks as mutually exclusive.

Her argument is that something similar is needed in business. The sustainability world and the commercial world tend to talk past each other, often quite literally using different language. Sustainability gets treated as soft, as something that belongs at the conference rather than the board meeting. It is the first thing cut when the numbers get tight. Meanwhile, commercial frameworks that focus purely on quarterly growth ignore the human and ecological costs in ways that, as Lieke observed, would in medicine be described as either cancer or a parasite.

The opportunity she sees is to stop treating these as separate domains and start designing businesses where the commercial and the circular are integrated from the outset. Green Pulse is her working example of this. The commission model aligns financial incentives with sustainable outcomes. The AI tool handles repetitive cognitive work so that the people running the business can focus on relationships. The circular mission is not a values statement bolted on to a conventional business model; it is the model.

Where this connects to AI is sharper than it might first appear. Lieke's observation is that businesses are currently adopting AI almost entirely for efficiency: reduce headcount, cut process time, save money.

What they are missing is the more fundamental question of what a business should be if machines are handling the cognitive load. If AI takes over the repetitive, rational work, that should free people to do the things machines cannot: build trust, exercise judgement, develop real relationships, bring their whole selves to their work rather than leaving their values at the door in the morning.

The software question

For a technology company like HappyPorch, one part of Lieke's story is worth pulling out directly. Green Pulse started by trying to use existing auctioning services and marketplace platforms. They found they didn't fit. The platforms didn't allow direct communication with buyers before or after a sale. The level of service they wanted to offer wasn't possible within someone else's product. So they built their own.

That is a decision many circular businesses face and often delay, usually because building custom software feels expensive or complicated compared to signing up for an existing tool. But for a business where trust is the primary asset, where the way you communicate with a buyer is as important as what you are selling them, a platform that constrains that communication is not a neutral choice. It is a constraint on the business itself. The right software for a circular business is often not the software designed for a conventional one. As we put it in Enabling Circular Innovation, “…the wrong software or software wrongly applied is like a smoke machine in the fog. It makes things worse. Under these conditions, exploring circular opportunities becomes harder or even obscured completely.”

What comes next

Lieke's near-term ambition is clear: reach 50% of the Dutch hospital market and establish Green Pulse as the standard. She knows healthcare moves slowly, but she also knows that once something becomes the standard in that sector, it tends to stay that way. After that, expanding to neighbouring countries using the model they have already built.

The longer view is harder to pin down but more interesting. She wants Green Pulse to be a working example of what integrative business can look like, not as a concept to be discussed at sustainability conferences, but as something that makes the idea feel normal and achievable to people who currently treat commercial and sustainable as incompatible categories.

The relationship with hospitals deepening to the point where replacement schedules are shared in advance is a small but meaningful sign that the shift is already underway. That kind of trust takes time and it takes consistency. It is not something a platform can generate by itself.

But with the right technology, thoughtfully used, it becomes a great deal easier to sustain.

You can find out more about Green Pulse at greenpulse.health or connect with Lieke on LinkedIn. The full episode, transcript, and links are here. You can dig deep in our catalogue at happyporchradio.com.