Trash Talk: Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli with Becky Yang
Becky Yang, Venture Partner at Everywhere Ventures chats with Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli, co-founder and CEO of WATS.
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Episode 48 of Venture Everywhere is hosted by Becky Yang, venture partner at Everywhere Ventures, previously an operator in high-growth startups, with 20 years of experience in finance, tech, and climate investing and consulting. She chats with Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli, co-founder and CEO of WATS, a waste data management company driving cost savings and waste diversion for multi-site businesses. Meredith shares her journey in co-founding WATS and its innovative solutions to create more sustainable systems. Meredith also discusses the future of waste management, promoting best practices for zero-waste operations while supporting sustainability and local economies.
In this episode, you will hear:
WATS' mission to drive cost savings and waste diversion using data.
The complexities of zero-waste operations in urban environments like New York City.
Utilizing AI and automation to enhance recycling processes and boost operational efficiency.
Challenges in the waste management sector such as time constraints and insufficient incentives.
Measuring the impact of waste management on carbon emissions and sustainability.
If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:22 Becky: Hi everyone, and welcome to the Everywhere Venture podcast. I'm Becky Yang, a venture partner at Everywhere Ventures, previously an operator in various high-growth startups and investing and consulting at the intersections of finance, tech, and climate for the last 20 years.
00:00:37 Becky: I'm thrilled to be here with Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli, co-founder and CEO of WATS, a waste management data company driving cost savings and waste diversion for multi-site businesses. So let's talk some trash.
00:00:50 Meredith: Happy to be here. Thanks, Becky.
00:00:51 Becky: So let's just dive right in. Meredith, love to hear more about your background. Walk us how you got started with WATS.
00:01:00 Meredith: Yeah, my co-founder Laura and I have been working at the intersection of commercial waste and sustainability between the two of us for more than 20 years at this point. We both found waste through composting.
00:01:12 Meredith: For me, it was when I was in grad school in 2011, I was in the middle of a master's degree program at The New School in New York. My master's degree is in urban policy and sustainability management.
00:01:25 Meredith: And that summer of 2011, I was lucky enough to get to travel to Beirut in Lebanon. I was placed with a nonprofit organization called Souk El Tayeb, which means the good market.
00:01:36 Meredith: They have a farmer's market and a farm to table restaurant. And my professor told me that, past spring, I know exactly where you should be stationed as a volunteer intern for the summer with this program that we were all eight students were going on this summer to Beirut.
00:01:52 Meredith: And I trusted her and I'm really glad I did. There were two students full-time and one part-time that were with this organization. We got to eat really good food all summer.
00:02:00 Meredith: And the first three days, they asked us, what do you want to do this summer? And I said, I didn't really know. What do you need? What do you need help with? And they said, well, we've always been curious about zero waste. How much of our waste is compostable?
00:02:13 Meredith: We know that a lot of it is food, potentially compostable scraps, but no one has ever been crazy enough to help us figure it out. And I was like, oh, I'll try to help. I went online, learned how to do a waste audit.
00:02:25 Meredith: And it turns out that the executive director of the organization, Kamal Mouzawak, has a friend named Ziad Abichaker. He's an agricultural engineer and a mechanical engineer in Beirut who runs a compost company and makes materials out of plastic. He does a lot of unbelievable things there.
00:02:43 Meredith: And at the time, I just had never really seen the nutrient cycle in such magnified beauty, I guess. And I came back to New York and realized, first of all, like how can I do this here? And it really catalyzed my interest in organics recycling.
00:03:03 Meredith: I had one more semester to go in my master's program, and I ended up moving back to Beirut. Started an organization there with my now husband, Naji, who I met at that organization. So a lot of different things happened as a result of my finding composting that summer. And that was really what led me in this direction.
00:03:22 Becky: That's amazing. What a great story. Love to hear it. Full circle.
00:03:26 Meredith: Yeah.
00:03:27 Becky: Completely. So, I mean, there's so many inefficiencies in this area, and it's just such a massive problem right now. Tell me more about specifically WATS, what you're working on now, and the impact you're hoping to make.
00:03:43 Meredith: I probably break this question down into a couple parts. When we launched, we were focused on data management and reporting. That was really our core competency. Because in order to drive the waste reduction outcomes that our clients were coming to us for, we needed to be able to ingest their data and be able to tell a story with that data.
00:04:05 Meredith: And we had access to all of this data. We needed to be able to map all of their waste streams, all of their sites, all of the stakeholders across their sites. So for the first probably 18 months of WATS' existence, that was really what we were focused on. We've now transitioned to building on top of that foundation, to being able to really focus on insights.
00:04:27 Meredith: And WATS is focused on building over the next, let's call it 12 months, is the beginning of our recommendations engine, which is really a big part of our vision. This is WATS being able to automate the steps that businesses need to take to be able to identify what they can do to reduce waste, what they can do to divert waste, and how they can save money by doing those things.
00:04:52 Meredith: So WATS is identifying the insights that come from that data, from those operations, from their waste profiles. And then beyond that, the overall impact, if we distill those things that WATS is doing, what we're really talking about here is normalizing best practices in waste diversion for businesses.
00:05:13 Meredith: And that looks like a couple things. It's improving access to services and resources. While WATS isn't opening new waste hauling and waste processing service providers, those things are happening in the economy.
00:05:28 Meredith: Legislation and also just simply demand across different markets are leading to those things happening. But businesses don't always have access or enough information to know that those service providers exist. And WATS is helping to create those connections. And then the delivery of the insights that we're offering can drive ongoing improvements and action.
00:05:50 Meredith: And then the last thing I would say is just that in doing the work that my co-founder Laura and I have been doing for the last decade, we recognize that a lack of time and the lack of incentives are frequently the things that cause folks not to take action on waste management.
00:06:09 Meredith: And WATS is solving for both of those things by saving people time and by offering them, showing them the incentives to do or to take action. So maybe that's a quick recap.
00:06:23 Becky: Yeah, no, that's perfect. Tremendous amount of work you're doing. I know when we first met actually must have been close to two years ago now. I mean, there's so much that has changed in the industry, not just in New York City, but nationally. Time incentives you mentioned, saving time for clients and customers. Can you talk a little bit about those incentives? I'd just love to hear more about that.
00:06:46 Meredith: Sure. A recent case study that we just published on our website is that, for one of our customers who is a quick serve restaurant, mostly on the West Coast, we've saved them about 70% of the time that they were spending on their waste invoice ingestion.
00:07:03 Meredith: And what they're able to focus on now as a result of those time savings is cost savings. They're able to focus on waste data invoice analysis. WATS is surfacing the opportunities that exist for them to save money.
00:07:18 Meredith: A couple other examples, I wanted to speak to one of them with one of the questions that you were going to ask later. One of the things that we're focused on with an airport that we're working with is compliance with their waste management plan. So WATS has digitized how materials are moving through their building and has organized all of the concessions that exist within their terminal.
00:07:40 Meredith: There are a lot of stakeholders that exist in an airport. There are janitorial service providers, all of these different businesses that exist and serve food to the people that are traveling through the terminal. And each of those concessions theoretically should be participating in the waste program – recycling, composting, separating their cardboard, their cooking oil, if that's one of the waste streams in their particular space.
00:08:04 Meredith: And this compliance process that we've supported putting in place helps the waste management director and his team assess the compliance of those concessions. Are they separating the recycling correctly? Is the trash can lined with the right color bag?
00:08:24 Meredith: Trash cans should have black bags in them as opposed to clear bags because once those trash bags make their way to the loading dock, they have to be black in order to get into the right compactor.
00:08:35 Meredith: If they're clear, they'll go into the recycling compactor instead of everything has to follow the right system so that the system doesn't break down on the many, many stages that it takes to get through such a complex space as an airport. And WATS is putting tools in place along those different stages so that the system can function at every stage.
00:08:58 Becky: Wow. I really love that. I did a lot of travel this summer and you see these everywhere, different bins for everything. So it's such a massive problem and it's just so important that you're clarifying it for, whether it's the worker, whether it's managing it from a software perspective. Anyways, it's impressive to see how you do it.
00:09:18 Meredith: And one other thing I would add is that it gets really complicated for the individual traveler, for example, because I just explained, you know, a black bag in a trash can. And then you might want to think, oh, well, that's the norm. So okay, every trash bag should be black.
00:09:33 Meredith: That's not true. Depending on the system at a particular site, trash bags might be blue or trash bags might be clear. So you can't expect that if you go somewhere and you see something because it was one way somewhere that it's suddenly broken somewhere else.
00:09:50 Meredith: And this is one of the things that we're trying to, again, normalize with the WATS platform is that every site really does have a unique ecosystem and that those sites just need to be mapped and organized. And the folks within those sites need to be trained to be able to participate in the unique operations at their sites.
00:10:10 Meredith: And then those sites and operations can function correctly and efficiently. And that ideally, then those materials can be separated efficiently and can make their way to their processing destinations.
00:10:21 Becky: Yeah, I love that. The clarity is definitely key. What keeps you up at night? There's just so much to it in education. Everything is education and training. Is that one of your biggest challenges?
00:10:34 Meredith: What keeps me up at night? It depends on the day or the night, I should say. Right now, it's probably related to sales. If I'm in fundraising season, it's probably related to that. Running a startup is hard. I mean, that's probably the shortest way to put it.
00:10:46 Meredith: And that I'm working on methods to keep an even keel. Training is an essential piece, for sure. The way that we are baking training and education into the WATS platform, we have two categories or two tiers.
00:11:03 Meredith: One is how to use WATS. So that happens through our customer success team. And we have essentially a Wiki with videos and processes. And then the other is more of a templatized resources and methods for stakeholders to engage with their… I'm calling them ecosystems. Because every stakeholder has a different responsibility for how they engage with waste within their site.
00:11:32 Meredith: So it really depends on who that person is and what their role is. For example, if it's a janitorial team member, what they're going to need to do and who they're going to need to talk to and how they're going to need to engage with a particular waste stream is going to be very different than if they are the director of sustainability.
00:11:53 Meredith: And WATS has educational resources, communications templates, email templates, for example, training videos for both of those stakeholders in the platform. So if it's a janitorial team member, the training resource would probably be a video.
00:12:10 Meredith: Whereas if it's a sustainability director, it would probably be an email template that they would be copy pasting so that they could really easily email their waste hauler to request something that they need. Or to push a process or a communication forward.
00:12:27 Becky: Got it. Love that.
00:12:28 Meredith: I actually have one other story I want to tell on the education front. Another way we can think about education tangential to the WATS platform. This is a story that I heard Ron Gonen tell about his time when he was at the New York City Department of Sanitation.
00:12:43 Meredith: He's at Closed Loop Partners now. He was talking about the rollout of New York City's compost program in its earliest days when he was speaking with someone at a home in Staten Island. And the person he was talking to was self-proclaimed hater of sustainability. And the person said, there's no chance I'm going to use this compost bin.
00:13:06 Meredith: And what Ron says happened is that he told the person, oh, well, this compost is actually going to a compost facility on Staten Island where it'll be composted by local people from Staten Island instead of this material ending up on a truck or a train or whatever and being shipped hundreds of miles away on a taxpayer's dime to be landfilled in someone else's backyard.
00:13:33 Meredith: And overall, it'll actually cost less to compost it than it will to landfill it. And apparently the guy said, well, why didn't you just say that in the first place? Give me the bin. I'll use it. And the moral of the story here is that you have to meet people where they are.
00:13:49 Meredith: So whether we're talking about the resources within the WATS platform or education overall, it's really important to know who you're talking to and why they need the information that you're giving them, if you expect that information to land. And that's one of the most important lessons that I've learned over my time doing this work.
00:14:08 Becky: Absolutely. Definitely love that. Meeting people where they are is definitely key. Let's dive into a little bit about technology and the role technology plays in enabling zero waste operations. Talk about the technology you're using and how that's grown since we first met two years ago to now.
00:14:31 Meredith: Yeah, I admit this question is a hard one because there are so many roles that technology plays. But again, if we try to break it down into some of the core components, I mean, a super obvious one is digitization. Waste is a little bit, a little bit.
00:14:46 Meredith: Waste is very behind. If we think about where energy systems are in terms of digitization or maybe adoption of technology, waste is further behind. In commercial buildings, energy metering exists. Waste is not metered in commercial buildings in the same way.
00:15:05 Meredith: So when we think about digitization of waste, that is mapping the physical infrastructure. What actually are the bins that are on site? How many dumpsters are there? How big are they? How often are they collected?
00:15:18 Meredith: It's about education, information sharing, communications, improving operational efficiency. So the combination of those two things. I also think that it plays… There's a major role in data analysis. That's a big part of what we're doing here and delivering insights.
00:15:36 Meredith: But where I think there's a lot of technology coming into play here is on that physical infrastructure side. There's a lot of automation happening and evolving, use of artificial intelligence in the infrastructure being used in recycling facilities. Really exciting stuff.
00:15:53 Meredith: Improving both the efficiency of recycling and the safety of the workers at recycling facilities. Infrastructure changes on the equipment on trucks. It's doing the same thing in terms of efficiency and safety. And then actual machines that are changing the way that materials are being processed.
00:16:12 Meredith: Things that are making it easier to de-volumize and dewater organic waste so that it can be made essentially inert, dehydrating food scraps so that they're not putrescible, so that they can be transported more easily and then theoretically either composted later or amending soils closer to home, closer to where they're generated. There are tons of technologies being generated, being manufactured, not just for food waste processing, but for all kinds of materials processing.
00:16:42 Meredith: I could talk forever on this. I think there are also lots of other people who are probably better to answer this question about the evolution of technology in the materials space. But I would say, the last thing I would add here is just that it isn't in the same way that the circular economy is a never-ending cycle.
00:17:01 Meredith: The fact that it loops back again is what's exciting. And that's how I think about WATS, is that there isn't really an end to the value of the platform. Once an action is taken, the idea is that the user is brought right back to the start again to see what else they can do, to see what other impacts there are to make, what other optimizations can be made, and what other waste reduction opportunities or cost savings can be found from those outcomes.
00:17:28 Becky: Super interesting, Meredith. I love that full circle again. I'm on the board of the Rainforest Foundation, and carbon emissions is obviously top of mind for lots of organizations out there right now. How does WATS measure the impact of its zero waste operations on reducing carbon emissions? Maybe you want to share some stories or metrics that might highlight the platform.
00:17:51 Meredith: Sure, yeah. So the shortest way to put it is that WATS is using the weight of waste to calculate carbon footprint. So we're ingesting waste data through invoices and through other data sources from the entities that we're working with. So that includes the weight of waste, like trash, recycling, cardboard, but also specialty streams. I think I mentioned cooking oil earlier. You can think of mattresses or really any waste stream.
00:18:20 Meredith: WATS is agnostic to the waste stream and also agnostic to the data source. If no data exists or if no weight was included, WATS can support entities in gathering their own data, and WATS can estimate using extrapolations and using assumptions.
00:18:39 Meredith: And weight is super important because it allows WATS to calculate the diverted waste from each site that the business operates. So that's the amount of waste that was not sent to landfills and incinerators. And WATS automatically calculates a carbon footprint associated with that diverted waste.
00:18:57 Meredith: And it applies that footprint or essentially, it applies that footprint to the behavior of the diverted waste. So as the business increases diversion by, for example, starting a composting program, adding a new waste stream, WATS can track that increased diversion and the associated carbon footprint reduction.
00:19:17 Meredith: So in a recent example with one of our customers, they'd been working with WATS for about six months. Their immediate goal was to build a baseline. They have more than 100 offices across the country. And what they came to us with was, we have this diversion goal, we really want to be able to improve recycling across our entire office portfolio.
00:19:40 Meredith: And we know that we want to do better in terms of, yeah, starting to compost in a bunch of our offices, figuring out where we can add new waste streams, what else can we do? But what we know as a starting point is that we don't even have data in a lot of our buildings.
00:19:56 Meredith: So what they knew when they came to us was, we actually have pretty bad data. And in order to get to point B, which is improving waste diversion, we have to start at point A, which is improving data quality.
00:20:09 Meredith: And so after six months, which is right where we are today, we have this first mini case study, which is that when we started, they were at about 40% data confidence. And today we're at 72% data confidence, which is really huge. 72% is a very high data confidence number for waste data.
00:20:30 Meredith: So we're thrilled. And we were able to achieve that by identifying missing data sources and improving the availability of data where it didn't exist before.
00:20:40 Becky: Yeah, Meredith, that's tremendous. The data improvements and the diverted waste and how that relates to carbon emissions is just phenomenal, really. I'm a native New Yorker. New York is such a densely populated area.
00:20:55 Becky: There's just so much going on in New York all the time. People are consuming so much. Given your experience here, how does implementing zero waste initiatives in populated urban areas differ from other areas?
00:21:08 Meredith: New York City is really unique because it was designed without alleyways. So there's literally nowhere for trash in New York to go except in the basement or whatever storage areas of buildings, which we know there aren't any, or on the sidewalk. Yeah. Which is why we see so much trash in New York City sidewalk.
00:21:27 Meredith: I actually heard that the people that were originally designing New York City's grid system were distracted because they were designing the Erie Canal at the same time. I don't know if that's an urban legend. Maybe somebody, one of your listeners can call us out on that, anyway.
00:21:43 Becky: Amazing.
00:21:43 Meredith: Yeah. All right. So again, categories of thought here, opportunities that exist in dense urban areas. Number one, the one that I'd say I'm most excited about, Laura and I geek out about this all the time is the opportunity for decentralization, innovation and new methods for managing materials.
00:22:03 Meredith: Clare Miflin and the Center for Zero Waste Design is doing awesome work in containerizing materials. Clare Miflin has just really amazing writing and design work. She's an architect focused on how materials could be better, how space rather could be better utilized for temporarily storing waste before it needs to get collected.
00:22:29 Meredith: Because storing it on the sidewalk in pedestrian areas is not a good use of our space, but we do still have to do something with our waste in the in-between space before, between when it leaves the building, before it gets collected by a vendor.
00:22:44 Meredith: This idea of decentralization though, is for example, what we were doing at Common Ground Compost, which was the company I was running before WATS, it was running a bike-powered compost pickup service and it ran a hub and spoke model where there were electric assist cargo trikes that were picking up food scraps from commercial office buildings in New York and they would pick up small amounts from office buildings and then drop those materials at hubs in bins and loading docks basically.
00:23:14 Meredith: And then trucks would actually pick up from those hubs. So the bike was never hauling more than 800 or 900 pounds at a time, but we would consolidate thousands of pounds at these hubs and then trucks would come and pick up from the hubs. Those hubs could also host machines that could de-volumize materials. You could do this with any type of material. It doesn't have to be food waste.
00:23:41 Meredith: It could be shrink wrap, it could be textiles. And so the opportunity that exists to be able to centralize materials in a decentralized fashion in cities by cooperating and sharing information is massive. And then theoretically a lot of these materials have value when they're aggregated.
00:24:03 Meredith: So there builds an opportunity to be able to create true economies out of these materials. I could talk about that one for literal hours, so I'll move on. But regulatory is another opportunity, just essentially that in super dense urban areas they have to regulate how materials are managed just because they can cause problems.
00:24:27 Meredith: Politics does also play another role where, if there's a question as to whether infrastructure should be funded at all, zero waste probably isn't going to make it into the budget. And then equity is another really big one. Waste infrastructure is cited often as a contentious issue.
00:24:43 Meredith: In New York City, we've seen organizing in support of residents to support change, which is often a lot harder in rural areas. So New York City, New Jersey have really been at the forefront along with many other places of driving equity in reducing the impact of waste infrastructure on marginalized communities. So there's a couple of things.
00:25:06 Becky: Super interesting to hear that answer. Just to add to that, how do you see the field evolving over the next few years and how do you envision the future of commercial waste management and sustainability to be? And where do you see WATS playing a role in that future?
00:25:23 Meredith: Yeah. One of the biggest things that we're seeing businesses ask for is greater data transparency. We already talked a little bit about data quality. That's one of the areas that we're really focused on today.
00:25:36 Meredith: I think part of the demand for data transparency is coming from a need for reporting, improved reporting both because of corporate reporting ESG requirements, especially for businesses that have multinational footprints, especially those that have European footprints, that have to submit annual data for their European data submission requirements.
00:26:00 Meredith: What we're also seeing is a demand from consumers for greater supply chain transparency. And what that's leading to is a growth in the availability or the existence really of vendors that are offering new types of services.
00:26:21 Meredith: An example, just something that popped into my head is, in some cities there are now companies that are offering reusable coffee cup programs. That's a totally new thing, right? That's more of a consumer service than a business service, but it's an example and it is something that in theory would exist within the WATS platform as a service provider.
00:26:41 Meredith: And these are all little opportunities for connectivity that relate to how materials flow through systems. And this connective tissue is what WATS is digitizing. All the waste streams, all the vendors, all the stakeholders and all of the related data points are the things that the platform is mapping into a digital ecosystem.
00:27:08 Meredith: While today we are building on top of that initial digital scaffolding focused now on insights and on the recommendations over time, the platform is becoming an ecosystem that can further drive that connectivity, that can help to create the connections between the businesses and the new service providers, that can help them to take more and more steps towards further waste diversion and towards further waste reduction.
00:27:39 Meredith: So this idea of decentralization of relocalizing materials, maybe that does look like more localized manufacturing, growing and refueling of local economies. I'm not saying that a hundred percent of manufacturing is going to be able to be relocalized, but we know that there's demand from consumers to be able to feel like their products come from closer to where they live and being able to keep the materials supply chain closer is a part of that. And that's a piece of what WATS is working to build.
00:28:17 Becky: No, that's great. Super interesting future of waste and trash. Such a complicated and immense topic. So.
00:28:25 Meredith: Yeah.
00:28:26 Becky: Last question before we just wrap up, how has your work in sustainability impacted your personal life? Are there practices or habits you've adopted in your own life as a result of this professional experience?
00:28:43 Meredith: Yeah. I mean, there are definitely too many to list. I mean, I started composting as a result of that trip to Lebanon many years ago. So I'd say it definitely led me to where I am today and it's been gradual.
00:28:58 Meredith: So if I'm giving advice to anyone, I'd say like, don't let yourself get overwhelmed. Don't try to change everything overnight. When it comes to, zero waste lifestyle, I'd say the first thing not to do is, do not follow the influencers. Don't go out and buy a bunch of stuff just to like go, zero waste.
00:29:18 Meredith: Start with what you already have at home. Go from there. Google things, try to figure out what to reuse, repair the things you already have, try to buy secondhand, share with your friends and neighbors. Those are the best first things to begin with. Extend the life of the things that you already have. That's the best thing you can do.
00:29:36 Meredith: Shop in your closet, shop in your friend's closets. I know that that sounds really boring because we want to buy things, but I've been trying to force myself to buy less and less and less every single year. And now I find it to be pretty rewarding when I do know that I need something to really, really look for the thing that I really, really want.
00:29:55 Meredith: And it ends up being really great. I've taught myself how to make things. There was a hurricane a couple years ago and I made some napkins out of old sheets. So these are our napkins.
00:30:05 Becky: Oh, I'd love you made them.
00:30:07 Meredith: Little things. The hurricane didn't end up being that bad, so we still had electricity, hence why I could use a sewing machine. And I started gardening. That's something that I really enjoy. So like making my own compost out of the food scraps from my mill. I have a mill that I really like.
00:30:22 Meredith: That's one of the home food waste dehydrator machines. It produces the first ever FDA-certified chicken feed out of food waste, which is really cool. Anyway, there's a lot of really, really awesome stuff in this space. And there's a lot of rabbit holes to dive down.
00:30:42 Becky: Super cool. Super cool. I'm getting into the gardening myself and I have my own compost and I'm someone that has composted my entire life. So, and even in New York City with the compost bins everywhere now, I didn't realize the differences in the bins and then the drop offs and all of that. And that's a whole nother topic, another time. But yeah.
00:31:05 Meredith: I won't get political.
00:31:06 Becky: I love less consumption. Use what you have and make sure you find joy in really finding that thing that you really like. Wrapping up quick, quick last couple of questions for the speed round, just for fun, what's a book you're reading or podcast you're enjoying right now?
00:31:25 Meredith: I am currently listening to two oldies, Cradle to Cradle and Braiding Sweetgrass. And I recommend that people pre-order a book that's about to arrive called, What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. She's amazing. So definitely put that one on your list. Her… the quote that I quote from her is this, “What if we get it right?” The idea of just how great could it be? So think about that.
00:31:57 Becky: So good, gonna get it, definitely get it. If you could live anywhere in the world for one year, where would it be, Meredith?
00:32:04 Meredith: Oh, I actually didn't think about this one before. It would probably be in Europe.
00:32:08 Becky: Yeah.
00:32:09 Meredith: They do waste really well.
00:32:10 Becky: Last, where can listeners find you, Meredith before I wrap up?
00:32:15 Meredith: You can find me on LinkedIn for sure. And then you can search for, Waste Expert on YouTube. I did a pretty fun Wired video a couple of years back.
00:32:23 Becky: Okay, well, thank you so much, Meredith. Love this trash talk. Trash talking with you has been fantastic. I hope you've had fun with it. Thank you so much for spending the time and I look forward to hearing all about what WATS does next.
00:32:39 Meredith: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. It's a good time.
00:32:42 Becky: Thanks, Meredith.
00:32:45 Scott Harley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We're a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We're a community of 500 founders and operators, and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we'll catch you on the next episode.
Read more from Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli in Founders Everywhere.