Summary
Waste management becomes a critical factor impacting the achievement of circularity in any major value chain, based on the high volumes of consumption, even at the household level. Our team of experts took this criticality and turned it into a competitive advantage for our client with a focus on agility in the evolving market of waste management through this project. In the vein of growing research and development towards decarbonization solutions, our client had already developed a proprietary waste management technology and was looking to understand the market for its implementation.
the Challenge
Our client, a global leader in renewable energy solutions, was looking to identify opportunities to access mixed waste feedstock for their proprietary waste management technology. The opportunities were to be identified with a focus on household waste arising across their target regions as well as to ensure suitability for their technology. In addition, they were also looking to ascertain play areas in the waste value chain, identify prospective partners across the value chain, and associated cost economics.
Client Requirements:
- To help them better understand how the waste flows across their target geographies from collection to disposal points such as transfer stations, recycling facilities, energy from waste (EfW) plants, landfills, anaerobic digestion plants, compost facilities etc.
- To develop insights around key waste contracts at each node of the waste value chain along with details such as gate fees, scheduled expiry, parties involved, minimum tonnage obligation, etc.
- Identification and benchmarking of key waste opportunities that could be accessed by the client with respect to waste composition, true cost of disposal, suitability for their process.
- Finalising prospective partners and strategizing a value proposition for them to engage with those partners to help our client.
- Key regulatory changes and changing waste market dynamics and its impact on the EfWs and value proposition of our client in terms of waste availability, cost economics, play areas, etc.
Our Solution
The client’s requirements led us to leverage our team’s expertise in creating insights to support decarbonisation initiatives at each stage from strategy formulation all the way to market execution. Our team of experts first generated the following insights to have a fair assessment of the available waste market opportunities that could be accessed by our client:
- Identifying and illustrating all the nodes of waste flow from waste collection to end-of-life across all key geographies of interest
- Assessment of waste contract landscape including true cost of disposal
- Performing waste compositional study for all geographies to understand their suitability for our client’s proprietary technology
- Develop insights on key waste management related regulations that are under discussion or proposed and its possible impact on waste business across target geographies
- Generating a long list of prospective waste supply partners and identification of various opportunities, on which our client could capitalise within the next 5 years
Our client wanted to further pursue opportunities which are within 100 km (~65 miles) of their existing (or proposed new) facility with certain other prerequisites on composition, waste availability, cost economics, to ensure identification of suitable best-fit avenues. Our experts conducted a detailed parametric benchmarking exercise of the identified opportunities and prospective partners identified earlier. Based on the benchmarking exercise, our experts provided specific recommendations on viable play areas (or opportunities) where our client could start the engagement process to source waste at optimised cost. In addition, our team also recommended prospective partners with sufficient waste availability and suitability to meet our client’s requirements.
Our team of experts worked closely with our client’s in-house waste commercial managers to develop a tactical strategy to pursue the prioritised opportunities. This included:
- Identifying the right fit representatives or potential leads from the city councils as well as prospective partners, who could be contacted by our client for feedstock supply discussions.
- Engagement support such as first-level contacts with those identified opportunities to assess whether those potential leads would be open for discussion with our client.
- Understanding the pain points of those identified leads and equipping our client with the suitable material or strategic insights on the value proposition to offer.
Our experts are now working as part of full-time engagement model with the client’s internal stakeholders to provide last mile business model alignment to best suit today’s dynamic waste market requirement as well as in helping them in their expansion to other geographies and other play areas. This includes the following assessments:
- Evaluation of the future cost of waste disposal including penalties from regulations
- RPI inflation assessment
- Future gate fees trends
- Levers which our client could utilise
Business Impact
Using this methodology and powered by the Evalueserve mind+machine™ needs-tailored process, the team delivered on the following high impact areas for our client:
Recycling Opportunities
Assisted in identifying right-fit waste market opportunities that would act as a waste feedstock for our client’s proposed new plant and highlight the recycling impact it would bring in.
Focussed Market Landscape
Helped client to develop an enhanced understanding of business and regulatory environment across their target geographies and value propositions that could help them win.
Potential Partners
Identification of key potential partners along with verified business representative with whom our client has started discussions for long-term waste supply agreement. Our client has already started receiving trial loads from some of the finalised partners.
Future-ready Approach
Our experts worked closely with the client’s in-house strategy team to enhance intelligence coverage across waste value chain and waste dynamics and helped them in understanding what could be the potential waste market look like in 2035 and 2045 in terms of waste availability, gate fees, and cost economics, amongst others.
Growth Avenues
With sufficient waste availability secured across their conventional priority markets, Evalueserve has been helping our client in their future waste market expansion avenues and what value proposition they could offer in those markets.
Process Optimisation
Facilitating the client team to spend more time on strategic aspects, such as insights-driven decision making, rather than dealing with the tactical challenges of market and competitive intelligence, hence freeing up client bandwidth.