Biography
Violy Purnamasari is the co-founder of Sirsak, an Indonesian startup that addresses waste management challenges through technology and community development.
Sirsak helps large companies recuperate and recycle their plastic packaging waste, while financially incentivizing local communities to participate in the effort. Since its launch in 2024, the company has recycled 12,000kg of low-value plastic from over 250 collection points. Sirsak has raised $660K from a mix of angel investors and VC.
Violy holds a masters degree from the University of Cambridge. She previously founded her own startup (an online career counseling platform) and worked for Delterra, an environmental non-profit founded by McKinsey.
What problem is Sirsak solving?
In Indonesia, companies will soon be mandated, by law, to recuperate and recycle at least 30% of the plastic waste volume they produce. However, the waste recycling industry in Indonesia is an operational mess. There are a vast number of players, from the informal waste picker to the large recycling plant. The entire supply chain isn’t transparent, nor is it well integrated.
The current status quo makes it difficult for companies to recover plastic waste at scale. Sure, they could do ad-hoc beach cleanups and other events but those won’t cover the volume they’re required to recuperate. They need a systemic solution.
We saw an opportunity to help companies comply by improving our country’s plastic recycling supply chain. A win-win.
Before we dive into Sirsak’s product, can you explain the different players in this supply chain?
There are four main actors.
First, informal waste pickers. These are individuals who pick recyclable waste in landfills, and then sell it to aggregators (another player we’ll cover shortly).
Second, community recycling points, which we call waste banks. These are community-based initiatives that usually occur once a month, to whom households sell the waste they’ve accumulated.
Third, you have aggregators: these companies buy the waste from waste banks, waste pickers, and other businesses.
They then sell it to our fourth actor, the recycling companies.
You might wonder why the aggregator is needed. Couldn’t the waste bank sell directly to the recycling companies? The answer is no, because recycling companies (due to their size) don’t make purchases under a certain volume of waste. Aggregators, as their name suggests, collate that volume from various waste banks to then sell it to recycling companies.
What is Sirsak’s product?
We get waste banks and aggregators to log the volume of waste they’re buying and sending to recycling plants onto our platform. We then get the recycling companies to log the volume of waste they recycled.
Once we have the recycling companies’ numbers, our end clients (mostly big FMCG companies) “buy” a certain amount of that waste data, meaning they send us money, which we distribute back to the waste banks, aggregators, and recycling companies which we work with. We take a cut in the middle.
This equates to our clients funding the local plastic recycling supply chain, an easier solution than getting each company to set up their own waste recycling processes.
This is adjacent to the way carbon credits work, right?