Garry Cooper wants to help slow climate change by making it easier to recycle construction materials.
Rheaply Inc.It’s a safe bet that the subject of fighting climate change by recycling used construction materials won’t come up at the next cocktail party or backyard barbecue. Unless Garry Cooper is invited.
Cooper, CEO of Chicago-based startup software-maker Rheaply, speaks passionately about this arcane corner of the battle against global warming and about Rheaply’s newest acquisition — an online marketplace for items such as salvaged steel, recycled rebar and cast-off concrete. The aim is to make it easier to trade those materials and, in the process, reduce the construction industry’s disproportionately high contribution to the carbon that’s warming the planet and to the waste that’s filling up landfills. This all is to help the industry reach net-zero emissions.
“At the very end of the day, we didn’t start Rheaply to create technology,” Cooper told Forbes. “We created Rheaply to have an impact.”
The construction industry is responsible for an oversized chunk of the carbon emissions that cause climate change. More than a quarter of the total carbon comes from operating buildings — things like heating and cooling — and about 10% of the world’s emissions originate in the process of creating building materials, such as making steel and concrete. Part of Rheaply’s mission is to improve the secondary market for building supplies, thus reducing emissions and doing its part to save the planet.
“The amount of waste that comes out of businesses, especially the construction industry, is just enormous,” said Eric Law, CEO of Urban Machine, which uses computer vision technology and robotics to locate and extract metal from deconstructed wood. “Most people don’t see it, but it’s ridiculous.”
Rheaply offers an inventory management system and online marketplace for business equipment such as desks and chairs. To expand into building materials, Cooper told Forbes that the company recently acquired the Materials Marketplace, the largest of its kind, from the nonprofit, nongovernmental U.S. Business Council for Sustainable Development, for an undisclosed amount. The marketplace, created in 2015, was hamstrung by limited funding but managed to attract 2,600 users. Since some local political jurisdictions want to incentivize developers to use recycled materials in construction projects, the marketplace had five government entities subscribing to the site. Cooper said Rheaply’s goal is to grow that to 50 cities by the end of 2024.
Andrew Mangan, the founder and former executive director of the Council for Sustainable Development, said the Materials Marketplace needed to change ownership in order to grow. “We had a small team of software engineers and developers,” Mangan told Forbes. “But we needed a more sophisticated and stronger team to be able to move forward to the next level, which is what we were hearing from our customers.”
“They had a lot of clout in this space,” Cooper said. “We had a lot of passion and a lot of product know-how, so I think it was just a really good match.”
Earlier this year, Rheaply closed a $20 million funding round led by Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, chaired by AOL cofounder Steve Case and dedicated to investing in startups outside traditional venture destinations like Silicon Valley, New York and Boston.
Rheaply likely has some hard work ahead, said Chet Geschickter, a vice president and analyst specializing in sustainability at technology consulting firm Gartner. While software makers like Rheaply will be essential for managing the movement of used construction materials, business growth may be limited by the logistics of users moving of hard-to-ship wares such as giant slabs of concrete and heavy timbers.
“Where are those located?” Geschickter said. “Is it economical to get them? That’s the friction in what might otherwise be exponential adoption.”
Still, Cooper remains optimistic. Society has “done a lot of work with certifying big buildings to get them more operationally efficient, but we’re still at the very beginning of understanding how to avoid or reduce the carbon that’s embodied in the materials that make up these structures,” he said. “Until we have reuse at the center of that solution, we’ll never get the buildings to net zero.”
