20 - Laurent Canneva

Today we’re joined by Laurent Canneva, co-founder and CEO of Spare It. 

Trained as a pharmacist with a business background, he spent 17 years at Sanofi leading commercial operations across France, Belgium, and the U.S. Five years ago, he made the leap from human health to planetary health, founding Spare-it, a company using data and technology to help organizations cut waste, lower carbon emissions, and drive real sustainability impact.

Connect with Laurent on LinkedIn. 

Concepts, Terms, & Certifications mentioned: 

• TRUE Zero Waste Advisor Certification
• EPA Waste Stats
• Materials Recovery Facility (MRF)

Transcript

[00:00:00] Kiersten: Good morning POD people and welcome. Today we're here with our guest, Laurent Canneva, trained as a pharmacist with a business background. He spent 17 years at Sanofi leading commercial operations across France, Belgium, and the US. Five years ago, he made the leap from human health to planetary health, founding SpareIt, a company using data and technology to help organizations cut waste, lower carbon emissions, and drive real sustainability impact. Welcome Laurent!. 

[00:00:27] Laurent Canneva: Hey, good morning. Thank you for having me.

[00:00:29] Kiersten: Thanks for being here. Jumping right in. In your career, you've worked in very diverse industries, as we heard in the intro. I also read an interview you gave previously that said, though the company SpareIt was founded in 2017, you didn't start work before 2019 and you were working alongside your full-time job until 2023. So we'd love to hear about your professional journey, what it was like in your past role, what made you transition, and what it was like balancing two before switching all the way over to SpareIt.

[00:01:02] Laurent Canneva: Sure. So, you said it in the introduction. Hi everybody. I was trained as a doctor in pharmacy, and then I did a business school and started my career at Sanofi right away. I had the opportunity. It's a fantastic company. I had the opportunity to work in the vaccines, you know, on vaccines, on, oncology, fighting cancer, and, and fighting rare diseases. It's a wonderful purpose. Uh, and I did this in, uh, multiple roles, geography, mainly in the Commercial organization. And this is what brought me actually to Boston because Boston is, as you know, the center point for biotech. So spanning, I spent like 17 years, but I changed roles so many times and I have four kids and I think that's important in the story. Uh, my wife and I are, you know, raising these children on this planet and I think we love this planet very much. We love the nature around us very much, and they love it too. And we want to protect it and, step by step, something in my head, um, asked me to do things and this is how it started. I was just, I mean, the five first years you mentioned were just a side game. You know, just trying to understand how we can do better with the waste we are generating every day and starting to try to monitor it, but more as a game than anything else, and then one day become more serious.

[00:02:18] Aparna: Nice. So it sounds like the reason that you went from working in pharmaceuticals to working in sustainability, working for the planet is really inspired by the kids and the desire to maintain what you have around you and give them the same opportunities that you had growing up. Is that right?

[00:02:34] Laurent Canneva: Sure. I mean, couple of things happen when you arrive in Boston from from Paris. Um. First you arrive along the Charles River, everybody's running, rowing. Uh, MIT is here, it's so full of energy and entrepreneurship spirit, um, that something is, you know, awakening in you. I knew I had this, somewhere most of my managers were telling me, “Hey, you know, you are creative. You are more a creative guy,” so that's something that was triggered by my arrival in Boston. The second thing is that nature is pretty accessible and the wilderness is absolutely amazing in North America and in the US in particular.  You know, and I think accessing these huge landscapes, untouched landscapes was also a wake up call for like, wow, this is beautiful.

And, and, and, and it's also full of paradox when you arrive in Boston, you know, it's the consumption, but in the middle of a beautiful wildness. So not just the kids. I think, the energy around Boston, the access to wilderness also, plus the responsibility we have, towards the next generations.

[00:03:40] Kiersten: I love that! Having lived in Boston for a couple years, that esplanade, along with Charles, definitely is inspiring to be active and to watch the ducks and sometimes the swan. Very nice! I'm curious about, what was it that made you feel ready to make this jump from playing around, as you said, and, and treating it kind of as a game for optimization to actually being a company and making it your full-time job with SpareIt?

[00:04:05] Laurent Canneva: Yeah. So this is an adventure that you start as an idea, then as a game. Uh, I remember beta testing, the, the idea of measuring our general waste and recycling in households, right, in families, uh, across, uh, 15 families in the US. So until, this is just a side game, then people are getting interested and, uh, I'm not alone in this adventure.

I have a co-founder. Uh, his name is also Laurent. He's also a French American like I am. He's been living 17 years in Boston, and, he made the most, he must have jumped first, and as I saw him, a pretty talented software developer, jumping in out of his main boat without a safety rope and just saying like, this is it.

I'm doing this for the next, you know, 20 years I was next. Uh, so maybe I'm not even the most courageous here, but still I can talk about this. Uh, with four kids growing, it takes a lot to jump out of the big boat.

[00:05:01] Aparna: Big boat analogy. Laurent, you've talked a lot about SpareIt. It's a game, it's a solution. So I'm hoping you can describe the solution that was inspired by this game, that that inspired your career transition and really the solution that it offers from the typical waste disposal model.

[00:05:21] Laurent Canneva: Yeah, so I think to describe this, the most important for our audience today is to understand the data gap that exists today in our world when it comes to waste and data, right? The only thing that every leading organization access to today when it comes to waste data point are the bills from the haulers.

So it is hauling truck data, dumpster data - in the best case - and you don't own this data. It comes from, the company, you are, working with. So, so the idea is how can we give access to all these fantastic pioneers, S&P 500 leaders, access to their own data and to their own mattering platform?

So now, enriched or loaded with this data, they can manage better their waste streams and their circularity efforts.

[00:06:11] Kiersten: You mentioned S&P 500 leaders, and when we think of those companies, we think huge companies. So I'd like to ask what you think the scale of opportunity is in the waste space, and maybe a little bit about what our current waste system gets wrong.

[00:06:25] Laurent Canneva: Yeah, so it is huge. So I think, uh, the Environmental Protection Agency, is telling us that we are, uh, throwing away close to five pounds per person per day. So the size of the problem is huge. Uh, this is, industry, Waste Management is, investing heavily in technology right now because they realize that they can be more efficient. Plus the regulatory environment is putting pressure on them to do a better job at sorting, diverting from the landfill and incinerators. Nobody wants a new landfill in the neighborhood. Nobody wants a new incinerator in the neighborhood. So we can do great efforts, um, and, and can improve the situation tremendously to divert.

And so all the States, and especially on the two coasts, but also in Boulder, Colorado, you know, you have nests like, like this, that are pushing strong towards, helping people, do better.

So the scales we mentioned, according to EPA, close to five pounds per person, per day. Is true for North America, but everywhere, Europe, I mean Southeast Asia. I think the people don't realize, really well, people think the system is broken, but recycling is broken often. Um, it's true that until January, 2018. Both North America and Europe were sending all their recyclable to China and, and Asia to be recycled in containers. 8,000 containers per day leaving Manhattan to China. Just back to the size of the problem, right? China says, alright guys, we have enough of this plastic. We are not gonna buy it anymore. And, and you're gonna keep it. Now you have to reorganize. Back to your question, what do we get wrong? Well, we didn't invest in recycling. In fact, we had glass recycling capabilities, but we moved to plastic that have also great advantages. Uh, but that killed glass recycling and we didn't really invest in the infrastructures, which is happening thankfully, a little bit more now, that the polluters or the producers, the people at the origin of the problem will have to financially contribute and there are some interesting business cases that are raising everywhere in, in North America.

[00:08:38] Aparna: Yeah. Fascinating. Thank you for walking us through that and also hitting one of the biggest question marks in our minds. Of course, where is our recycling going, who takes it? Why do they take it? So along that line and, also thinking about moving into the future, exactly what you were saying, holding folks who are polluters more responsible than they have been in the past, are there any emerging trends or other innovations that are exciting to you? And do you think we can actually shift the waste model away from a linear economy into a more circular one?

[00:09:08] Laurent Canneva: Oh, definitely. I mean it's interesting. So the size of a problem, we understood the amount of waste we're generating the gap of the data gap we talked about. Right? And now, this leading organization we started the conversation with, you have to know that they're investing a lot. So a PepsiCo, a Starbucks, a Google, they're investing so much in sustainability.

So people can look at them like, “Hey guys, you have these big data centers generating so much CO2, you are producing all these Pepsi bottles,” but they're also investing a lot in the solutions. And I like to look at the bright sides, even if the bottle is not half full, I would say it's half full. And just continue to encourage them, continue to have them invest even more.

And I can take some, some examples. So the problem they have is that: Hey, Pepsi, do your bottle in recyclable plastic. Sure, but the recyclable plastic is not coming back to me because you guys are trashing it away. The system is not fully organized to bring back this material at the source.

Plus then after, and thankfully, the technology is helping right now to, in the MRF, in the recycling capabilities to accelerate recycling with robotic arms and AI. And, and it's fascinating.

Thankfully, some very interesting organizations like for example, Eastman, are doing chemistry around plastic to constantly innovate on how to recycle it better. And I think these are super encouraging efforts that are that, that are conducted every day.

[00:10:37] Aparna: I wanted to go back to one of the terms that you just mentioned, a MRF. So what we like to do on the pod is just making sure we're defining any new term for ourselves, for the listeners. So could you tell us what a MRF is and what it stands for?

[00:10:49] Laurent Canneva: These are the recycling centers. So the places where all your plastic or whether it's a single stream recycling, it gets into a big building. It's dropped onto a machine that will line it up and, and sometimes now robots are helping to sort better and we try to put paper on one side, plastic on one side. And this, these are the MRFs, the recycling capabilities. 

[00:11:13] Kiersten: Thank you. So yourself, Laurent, and your partner Laurent, are entrepreneurs, founders of SpareIt, and I think that entrepreneurs tend to be good at dreaming and envisioning another future.

We're gonna ask you to imagine a little bit with us, how do you see the intersection of waste, software, and sustainability evolving over time? And here's where you get to imagine, what would a utopia look like when it comes to waste software and waste systems?

[00:11:40] Laurent Canneva: Yeah, at the origin, as we started to deploy, you know, a full building or two or three full buildings and connect everything, we realized that this utopia could be real. 

What we are building here is really the first waste intelligence platform. We know how to monitor energy, by building, by floor, by appliance, and turn on and off. Um, switch on and off this consumption. We know how to measure water by floor, by building, but for waste, we have nothing. We didn't concur that capabilities and that's, that's where we are, what we are after. 

We're gonna crack that nut, giving the organization the ability to see first, you know, to to, to understand how much general waste, recyclable, plastic, compost, food waste, paper, metal, glass is generated where in their real estates in the organization and with clear dashboards, they can see this on their floor plan and now that they see they can plug the sustainability team, the real estate team, the facility management team, they can challenge their bills and so, I'd say the future is becoming less and less in Utopia.

It's to be that piece of software that enables a leading organization to see at scales the quantity and the quality of the waste you're generating close to real time.

[00:13:01] Aparna: Speaking for myself. I feel like that would be a phenomenal ability for a human, for a corporation, really for anybody to like have a tangible scale of what is my impact on the world around me and you can't manage what you don't measure, right?

So this is the first step in making any change, actually getting visibility and understanding the context of why we need change. So I appreciate that.

[00:13:23] Laurent Canneva: Yeah. And if I may, we didn't talk too much about how it works and I think one of our goals is to connect thousands of organizations, millions of people to their waste intelligence so that they learn, we learn together how to do a little bit better every day.

Not, not too radical, but just a little bit better every day, and that power of millions of people doing a little bit better every day is gonna have a huge impact. 

[00:13:48] Aparna: Totally. One of the most inspiring images, I think, is everyone taking a small step together as opposed to one person trying to take a leap all on their own, right? You have power in numbers. You have a community to fall back on. I like that. So moving a little bit from SpareIt back to maybe more about you as a person and your career I am interested in what a day looks like for you. If we followed you around for a day, imagine us as your little shadows. What would we see? What would we witness? Who do you speak to? What kind of conversations are you having right now?

[00:14:20] Laurent Canneva: So what's amazing in a startup, it's changing very fast. Uh, at the beginning, year two. So you're doing everything. So you're talking about everything and you're talking to everybody basically. You are talking to your investors, you're talking to your customers, you're talking to your developers, your contractors, and, and everyone.

So my role today, I'm a little bit interactive, some would say. You know, I jump a lot, uh, around different topics trying to keep everybody, because we've been doubling the size of the team in the past four months, with the same spirit, with very strong human values. Making sure that we place the customer first, that the data is accurate, that's gonna be the key for the next, for the future, for sure. So, accurate data, excellence in execution. I think that the what is as important as the how. So my head is constantly shifting between the what we do, what we do today, what we will do tomorrow, what we will do in two years, and the how we do it. And I think the how is as important as the what, because our customers know it. Zero churn 2024 in the US, zero churn in 2025 in the US will feel that "how", I don't want to give you like my, my, agenda every day. One thing is sure that as the organization is growing, you are less opportunistic, you are more strategic. You have to be more and more strategic, so anticipate! 

[00:15:52] Kiersten: Entrepreneurship, it's often likened to trial by fire, right? And as you've said, it's changing rapidly, you're growing, you do a little bit of everything every day. Do you think there are any key skills that would make someone really successful? Maybe something you gleaned from your old role, or maybe something you didn't know you needed until you had to develop it?

[00:16:14] Laurent Canneva: Yeah. Resiliency. Resiliency in what you do like, if you run, don't run fast, run long, you know? Uh, if you draw, even, so I like the, the sketch, the devils in the details and the precisions. So whatever you like to do outside side of work is a good indicator of your capacity for resilience and, and it's, it's an extreme sport, right? It's not just a, I'm runner. It, it's not just a jogging, it is not a marathon. It is a ultramarathon. So you, you gotta be ready, and you get to stay in shape. That's super important. The other thing is. It's my case- I started with the children, you know, have a family. And the, the work life balance is extremely hard to manage because it takes you over, it's like an additional baby, which takes a lot of time in the day.

[00:17:08] Aparna: In addition to, you know, having your fifth child with the other partner, Laurent, you also had to learn pretty much everything about waste, right? Did you come in with any kind of a waste background or was this all learning on the fly? So can you talk us through that?

[00:17:24] Laurent Canneva: Sure it's, uh, learning on the fly. And I'm not at all the best in the team. Thanks, God. We have now professionals on that topic. There are also some good trainings that you can follow. I would recommend, uh, you know, TRUE advisors through from the USGBC originally. It's probably the best training you can find if you want to learn all about waste. so these are the things you do. Then the rest you learn on the fly, and I think the best learning you can do is just go and do some manual waste audit, which I did a lot. And once you did this, you understood better what's, what's happening. And it's, it varies a lot from one spectrum to another in terms of types of company and, and Ss on. But the problem is usually the same. Very high contamination, very low attention to what we do. No data to close the loop and connect things upstreams and reduce things upstreams. So to your question, I mostly learned on the fly doing manual waste audits.

[00:18:24] Kiersten: Great answer. We are both TRUE Zero waste advisors and can attest. That's a great certification, great knowledge base. So learning all of this on the fly, now you've acquired all of this waste knowledge. Is there anything that you feel like you've changed personally now that you have this greater awareness of the waste ecosystem.

[00:18:42] Laurent Canneva: Oh yeah. Oh, oh yeah. Day one. But I still, I am super frustrated. I'm far from being perfect. That's why I am, I believe, you know, small step after small step. But yes, I mean, the biggest impact I think my, my wife and I, because we are both in this adventure, is whatever you buy. Uh, it's just, you know, whatever you buy is potential waste in the future.

So, it has changed completely the way we are purchasing things and I think for an organization it's exactly the, it could be exactly the same, right? And it has changed the, the attention and the, respect I'd say all the, the attention I have for, uh, haulers, uh, people that are doing this every day. It has changed things very deep and way beyond waste.

[00:19:25] Aparna: I love that it's a waste and also just how you connect with people around you. So thinking about these connections that you're forming, thinking about the company and the impact you're hoping to have, what kind of a legacy are you hoping to leave behind through this work?

Small question, I know. Haha!

[00:19:40] Laurent Canneva: No, I mean it's, uh, I, I really want to be humble about this. It's nothing about me really. It's more about that team that we have. I want us to be successful. I don't want to be successful myself. I want us to be successful. So all legacy will be, our adoption by the best companies and the best organization.  It's already the case, you know, working with some of the university, I'm super connected when I'm working with a university, and the reason is that have such a leadership role to play. This sustainability team in universities are usually front runners.

Boston University, for example, we're from Boston, you remember. They have to manage the move in and out of the students, uh, every six to 12 months. And they have TRUE zero waste goals. So how do you, um, manage a crowd of students that here for six months? 12 months? and all the, the waste that, goes beyond it?

Plus, as we work with university, another thing that we do all the time is we open the data to their students, so that they can work on our data, they can do data crunching. The example of BU is a good one. We have connected the entire center for computer and data science, and the data scientists are working on our data.

They are gaining grants based on the work they're doing, and I love that.

[00:21:01] Kiersten: That is so cool. It sounds like a dream, when I was a student to actually partner with a real company and potentially make a real difference. Very cool that you all have that partnership. Speaking of students thinking of maybe, part of our intended audience is folks that have not yet entered the industry, but are interested. If someone heard this episode and they were like, SpareIt, I'm on board. I love the mission, Lauren seems so cool! I wanna work there! What would you be looking for on a resume for a fresh grad or in their personality and aptitude?

[00:21:33] Laurent Canneva: So it's interesting 'cause most probably, uh, they will work with someone from my team. So I will leave it to, to the team. And in fact, usually when I do, uh, the interview, I just do the final interview and I'm not gonna talk too much about their capabilities because the team did this already. So we're going to focus on what's outside of work and what's keep you motivated and happy in life.

Because if you come on board, we take this as a responsibility. Some of us in the team recently had babies. Some of us recently bought their house, you know, so this is a life story. The human values, we are, you know, we, we both come from very large organizations that sometimes, lose sight from that aspect.

So, the conversation, the candidates and I would have, would be more focused on this and maybe some sports or arts or passion they have to see how resilient they are. You know? 

[00:22:33] Aparna: For example, are they a Manchester United fan that has suffered multiple seasons of defeat, and are they still a fan?

[00:22:40] Laurent Canneva: Uh, for example.

[00:22:42] Aparna: Yes, self-proclaimed. I like that though. It's so important to focus on the whole human being as opposed to just who they are at work, right? Because you're coming into work every single day with so much context, so much story, and that's the fun part of it, to bring all these diverse perspectives together, all these people who think slightly different and have a really beneficial workplace.

So I'm happy that y'all are focusing on more than just capabilities and aptitudes.

[00:23:07] Laurent Canneva: I think, I think to all the students that are working, um, on sustainability in general, would it be, uh, on waste, but energy and water or helping the world do better agriculture or anything? This is a bright future. I'm super optimistic. The number of jobs and the gap in competencies we have today is huge!

So embrace it. And we can see the best university in the US - Would it be Stanford? I, I had a podcast at Stanford also. You can listen to this one, but they have an MBA on sustainability. They have a full grade and these people that are gonna come out with these capabilities, they will find job pretty quickly because as it is true for waste TRUE, uh, certification and everything, it's not easy. And so you need to learn and it is bigger than what you think. So, learn, learn and there will be great job at the end of the journey.

[00:24:00] Kiersten: Laurent, we usually have more puns than we've snuck in this episode, so I have to get at least one and say, though, we were talking about waste, this episode was certainly not a waste of time. And I think our listeners will agree. Thank you so much for being on, for sharing a little bit about your journey, your path, and your take on being a business owner, leading and changing our waste paradigm. It was fantastic to have you.

[00:24:23] Laurent Canneva: Thank you, Kiersten. Thank you, Aparna, for having me. Lovely, uh, chatting with you today and see you soon.