Chicago-based Rheaply, a cloud-based resource exchange technology application for connecting people and organizations with resources to those who need them, has announced its acquisition of the Austin, Texas-based United States Business Council for Sustainable Development’s (US BCSD’s) Materials Marketplace.
Rheaply will leverage the Materials Marketplace’s network of 2,200 partners and expertise in the upcycling of building materials, improving the company’s efforts to divert building waste from landfills, as well as generate significant cost savings, energy savings, new jobs and business opportunities.
Up to 40 percent of emissions come from the manufacturing, construction and demolition of materials within the built environment. The Materials Marketplace has listed and found end markets for many of these materials. Rheaply says integration of its technology platform will elevate the circular economy to transform how building and manufacturing waste is recovered and reused, creating a system in which one organization’s hard-to-recycle waste and byproducts become another organization’s raw material for furnishings, new development projects and product fabrication.
“It’s been exciting to see how much the marketplace has accomplished since the days when company reps were sitting around tables poring over spreadsheets of inputs and outputs,” US BCSD Executive Director Andy Magan says. “The software that’s automating those connections now needs the kind of expertise that a company like Rheaply can offer to take it to the next level.”
While the Materials Marketplace focuses on upcycling building material waste from small businesses, nonprofit organizations and government agencies, Rheaply brings circularity to furniture, fixtures and equipment for large corporations, such as Google, Target, AbbVie and Nicor, offering sustainable procurement and investment recovery through a combination of internal and external reuse.
Rheaply’s platform is designed to help leaders of large organizations locate what they need from other divisions of their companies, avoiding both the long wait times associated with global supply chain disruptions and disposal of usable materials. With the acquisition of the Materials Marketplace, the waste streams available for reuse and exchange are exponentially larger when factoring in construction surplus, deconstructed materials and byproducts from manufacturing operations.
To date, more than 50,000 items with a value of $19 million have been upcycled through Rheaply’s platform, diverting more than 20 metric tons of waste from landfills. Since the second quarter of 2021, the company’s growth is up 185 percent.
“We are very grateful that Andy and the US BCSD have entrusted us with building on what they’ve created with the Materials Marketplace,” Rheaply founder and CEO Garry Cooper says. “With around 20 percent of all U.S. waste headed to landfill coming from commercial construction projects, we must think about the next wave of buildings to be built with the things that we already have above ground and the things that are already in our community.”
Cooper says empowering reuse can create more jobs than traditional waste management practices, including landfilling and recycling.
“If those jobs can actually make our communities more [reliant] on their own supply chains and not global supply chains, and, if we can also do that by reducing the things that go to landfill, it’s at least a triple-bottom-line win,” he adds.
The Materials Marketplace currently operates in Texas, Tennessee, Ohio, Ontario, Michigan and Washington.
With this acquisition and additional product advancements, Rheaply plans to develop next-generation technology, making asset reuse more accessible to organizations of all shapes and sizes. Additionally, Rheaply recently introduced a tool that allows users to view the estimated embodied carbon avoided by reusing items, contextualizing the environmental benefit in hard data.
The acquisition includes mutual success factors to incentivize continued growth and scale of the program. The terms of the deal are not disclosed.
