167 HaPPE Earth: circular, compostable PPE systems

Lisa and Mary O’Riordan are co-founders of HaPPE Earth, a circular business providing compostable Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) with an end-to-end waste management system that creates a nutrient rich fertiliser using this PPE, combined with the client’s food waste. The HaPPE Earth solution is ideal for a range of sectors including healthcare, food processing and other manufacturing industries. HaPPE Earth is replacing a highly problematic product made from single-use plastic, and helping to bust big myths around plastics and hygiene, which were strengthened during the pandemic. I met HaPPE Earth’s co-founders when I did some work for last year’s CIRCULÉIRE Circular Ventures Accelerator, funded by the Irish Government. HaPPE Earth was one of the supported ventures, and I’ve been super-impressed by how Lisa and Mary have used their systems-thinking, technical and entrepreneurial skills to win their first clients and set out bold ambitions for their business and the value it creates for people, planet and local economies. We’ll hear about their detailed criteria for the choice of raw materials, the systems they’ve created to make sure this circular solution is super-easy for clients, and how all the different users and decision makers are reacting to compostable PPE. Mary and Lisa tell us more about their career backgrounds and what led them to start HaPPE Earth, how they’ve overcome those misperceptions about the benefits of plastic, and how they plan to develop local supply chains to avoid PPE posing a major risk to resilience, as it did across many countries during the pandemic. And we hear about some of the shocking, unethical practices that encourage unnecessary consumption of plastic PPE.