Blue Cast: BanQu’s Estefania Angel Villanueva on Centering the Circular Economy on People
The circular economy will require waste feedstock for recycling. One solution to finding these inputs, according to BanQu’s Estefania Angel Villanueva, is leveraging the existing waste pickers and bringing them more formally into the supply chain.
In the third episode of our Circularity Solutionist podcast series in partnership with the Fashion Impact Fund, Tricia Carey spoke with Estefania, who is an account manager at BanQu, a blockchain solution that enables transparency and traceability to combat poverty.
The platform operates across the Latin American, Asian and African regions. This solution gives farmers and other entities SMS alerts each time they complete a transaction in their value chain, allowing them to prove earnings and access credit.
“I like to see us as a bridge, where sometimes we arrive with the brand or with the enterprise, and once we implement, [we see they] really don’t understand what are the people behind that,” Estefania said. “Maybe they know a certain part of the value chain, but especially that first mile or last mile is really invisible for them.”
Estefania was working in politics when she felt a “calling” to go into sustainability. While this was an existing interest and a hobby, she hadn’t initially considered it as a career path. She began working with bottle recyclers in Bogotá, Colombia, and this initiative used the BanQu platform.
She then went from BanQu client to BanQu employee. She started as an implementation consultant, working to address client needs. “It’s not about technology,” Estefania explained. “It’s really about service to the people that are in the first mile and last mile, invisible in the value chains of global corporations and the global economy.”
Estefania noted that some people are unsure of the future for waste pickers if circularity becomes the norm. But she sees an opportunity to incorporate the waste pickers into circularity efforts by working directly with them.
“It’s not only that they are part of the value chain as the collectors of the materials, but they are also bringing this value of recovering and avoiding that going to the landfill,” Estefania said. “And with these years of experience trying to connect with the industry, trying to recover materials, they became material experts also.”
These pickers, who are often women, have the saying that “recycling without recyclers is waste.”
“If we really want to bring circular economy and make it an aspect in all the work, the women have to be at the center,” said Estefania. “Because at the end, we also think that closing the loop is what is going to bring sustainability really to the planet.”
Listen to the episode here.