e-waste-recycling
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Best Buy’s Real Product Isn’t the Gadget. It’s the Confidence to Take It Home.
The yellow tag survived the internet by turning stores into service hubs, showrooms and a human help desk. Now Best Buy is adding a marketplace and an advertising business to a machine built for the awkward moments after checkout.
Alta Resource Technologies
Alta Resource Technologies is a Boulder, Colorado deep-tech startup using engineered proteins to selectively separate rare earth elements and other critical minerals from low-grade ores, mining tailings, and electronic waste. Its 'precision mining' platform, licensed from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and co-developed with Pennsylvania State University, binds individual metals with high selectivity, aiming to cut the cost and environmental damage of conventional chemical refining while helping secure a domestic U.S. supply of materials used in EVs, wind turbines, electronics, and defense systems.
Kristy Caylor
Kristy Caylor is the founder and CEO of Trashie, the first scaled recycling-and-rewards platform in the US, whose internet-famous Take Back Bag lets people stuff a closet's worth of unwanted clothes and old gadgets into a prepaid mailer and get rewarded in TrashieCash to spend at places like Sephora and Uber Eats. An industrial engineer by training who spent two decades in fashion (Gap, Banana Republic Japan, Gap's Product RED, and the ethical-luxury label Maiyet she co-founded), Caylor built Trashie out of For Days, the circular apparel brand she launched in 2018. Her bet is that sustainability wins when it is convenient and fun rather than guilt-driven, and the numbers back her: hundreds of thousands of bags sold and millions of items kept out of landfills.
Nathan Ratledge
Nathan Ratledge is the co-founder and CEO of Alta Resource Technologies, a Boulder, Colorado startup using computationally designed proteins to pull rare earth elements out of low-grade ores, mine tailings, and electronic waste. A Stanford-trained economist and environmental scientist who once ran a poverty-and-electrification research agenda across East Africa, he pivoted from policy and academia to deep tech, betting that biology - not brute-force chemistry - is the way to break China's grip on the critical-mineral supply chain. Alta has raised about $10 million in seed funding from DCVC, Voyager Ventures, Orion Industrial Ventures and In-Q-Tel (the CIA's venture arm), and advanced to the final phase of DARPA's EMBER program alongside Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Trashie
Trashie is a recycling and rewards platform that makes responsible disposal of clothing, textiles, and electronics frictionless. Customers buy a Take Back Bag, fill it with unwanted items in almost any condition, mail it back, and earn TrashieCash redeemable for rewards at hundreds of brands. Built by the team behind zero-waste fashion brand For Days, Trashie turns the chore of recycling into a rewarded habit while diverting millions of pounds of waste from landfills.