In this episode of HappyPorch Radio, Barry O'Kane is joined by Robin Atkinson and Cash Acrey, the husband-and-wife co-founders of Upkept, an online repair and alterations business based in Northwest Arkansas. Robin didn't set out to build a repair company. After years in sewn trades education, she realised the people she was training didn't want repetitive manufacturing jobs. They wanted creative, skilled work solving unique problems. Repair turned out to be exactly that.

In this episode of HappyPorch Radio, Barry O'Kane is joined by Anastasia Dellis, CEO of Orbisk, a food waste intelligence platform that uses AI and computer vision to help commercial kitchens understand exactly what they are throwing away, when, and why.

In this episode of HappyPorch Radio, Barry O'Kane is joined by Chris Lucas, founder and CEO of Secondsense, a platform building what he calls the Google Flights for luxury resale, pulling scattered secondhand handbag listings across dozens of vendors into one place and telling you what they're actually worth.

In this episode of HappyPorch Radio, Barry O'Kane is joined by Tom Passmore, CIO and co-founder of Disposal, a company that has spent 10 years building technology for anyone who interacts with waste in the UK. Tom starts with an observation that cuts to the heart of it: the moment we decide we don't want something, we stop caring about it. It goes to the bin, to the "magic away place," and that's it. Yet every single thing we've extracted from the earth ends up as stuff, and then probably ends up as waste. Understanding what that was and what it could become is where the data gets interesting.

In this episode of HappyPorch Radio, Barry O'Kane is joined by Thierry Sanders, founder of Kolekt, a platform that connects waste collectors, buy-back centres, and recyclers across the Global South using technology designed around the realities of the people it serves.
Thierry shares how Kolekt began during the pandemic, when curiosity and boredom led him to spend two weeks riding around Bali with waste collectors, learning how the informal waste economy actually works.

In this episode of HappyPorch Radio, Barry O'Kane is joined by Amelia Woodley, a sustainability leader with 25 years of experience across construction, rail, nuclear, and retail, and Vin Sharma, a researcher whose doctoral work examined why the social dimension of circular economy transitions so consistently gets left behind. Amelia introduces her "logic versus magic" framework: strategy, systems, and KPIs are only half the picture. Vin's research adds a structural lens: organisations tend to bolt the social layer onto circular models rather than build it in, and it takes either a crisis or a genuine internal shift to change that.