[00:00:12] Barry O'Kane: Welcome to HappyPorch Radio, conversations about the circular economy and technology. This is season 10, “Technology Isn't Magic.”

This episode story starts with curiosity. Thierry Sanders, my guest today, found himself in a tough spot in 2020. COVID had caused a major rollback of his business in Indonesia. But I really love what he did next. He became curious about the waste collectors that were coming to and past his home. So he offered to buy one of them some cigarettes and lunch, climbed on the back of his motorbike, and spent the next two weeks riding around Bali collecting bottles, plastics, and cans.

Out of that experience came Kolekt, an app and payment platform serving informal waste collectors. Thierry estimates there are around 30 million waste pickers globally, roughly one in every 250 citizens in countries like Indonesia, Brazil, and India. And Kolekt now operates in these countries and more.

Let's hear the full story from Thierry.

[00:01:08] Thierry Sanders: I'm Thierry Saunders, founder of Kolekt, and that is spelled K-O-L-E-K-T. And the reason why it's spelled that way is because it all started in Bali, in Indonesia, and Indonesians can't pronounce the English “collect”, they say “choleckt.” So we spelled the company name K-O-L-E-K-T so that an Indonesian waste picker would be able to pronounce it properly. I'm a bit of a tech nerd and also someone who's always lived in developing countries from Ecuador to Pakistan & Indonesia. And I love making technology and finance work for poor people.

[00:01:53] Barry O'Kane: And that's really exciting. I'm quite looking forward. We chatted before, and you had some amazing stories. 

And so before digging into and talking about what Kolekt is and some of the mission, I thought it might be fun to start with the story that you shared with me about where Kolekt came from and how you spent some time literally with waste pickers.

[00:02:11] Thierry Sanders: Yeah, it all started on the 14th of March, 2020. It was 7:00 PM in the evening in Jakarta, and I was having a bakso, which is an Indonesian soup. And there was a TV on in the warung which is a little food stall where I was eating this soup. And the president of Indonesia came on TV. The pandemic, Corona pandemic has just started, and he announced that for the next six months, no one would have to repay their loan because people don't have money at the moment with the pandemic. And I dropped my spoon into the soup bowl, splashed my shirt and my jaw dropped because I had about 25 million euros lent to 60,000 borrowers in Indonesia. I literally thought, " Oh my God, my company's gonna go down the drain in the next two or three weeks." We had about three to four weeks of money in the bank to pay salaries And we had to keep the business going, otherwise Yeah we could basically close the business. So, this is how it actually all started.

Within a month I had to lay off 70 of my almost 100 staff. I had to keep a few on to keep the lending company going. And yeah, with nothing really to do after that and I was living with my family in Bali of course, as I am got very curious about the next thing. What am I gonna do next? Because I'm not gonna wait for these lenders or borrowers to repay the loans. It's gonna take too long, and we don't how long the pandemic's gonna last. Yeah, I got curious about these waste pickers that were driving around Bali, around my house with their baskets on the back wondering what their life and what the economy of waste is all about since I really didn't have a clue.

I soon discovered that one in every 250 citizens in countries like Indonesia, India, Brazil, Pakistan are waste pickers or waste collectors, as they prefer to be called. As scavengers or ragpickers. But yeah, I prefer informal collectors or waste collectors is maybe a better name. Anyway, one in 250, so that means in Indonesia you have 1.2 million waste pickers. In Brazil, 1.1. In India, you have six and a half million waste pickers which is about, I think a third of the population of Australia. It's huge. And I just got curious, what do these people live from? How do they live? What are the margins on buying and selling? 

So I walked up to the waste picker or waste collector that was at my house who came by once a week to pick up a bag of PET bottles or cans, and I asked him if I could offer him some cigarettes and lunch every day for the next two weeks. And he looked at me dumbfounded, thinking, "Is this man stupid? Why would he want to do that?" And then he got suspicious. So I said, "Look I just want to ride around with you on my motorbike, since waste collectors in Indonesia all go around on motorbikes and I will help you with the collecting, but I want to know everything about how everything works in the waste picking scene."

I spent two weeks with him, and the band got bigger and bigger because all the waste collectors got curious about this bule or foreigner, gringo who was riding around with their friend. And of course, they all wanted to have free lunches as well. By the end of the two weeks, we had around eight of us riding around, collecting tires, bottles, PET, aluminum cans, cardboard, paper if there was nothing else to be found.

And so what I discovered during those two weeks was that almost half the time they are driving around, knocking on doors and there's nothing to be collected because someone had been there an hour before or the day before. They are wasting about half of their fuel and time looking for recyclables that were not available.

I then thought, oh it's quite straightforward then. We need to have an app like Uber. In Indonesia you have Gojek and Grab, which are very big apps for ride-hailing. And I decided, okay, let's develop an app like Uber for waste. And within about three weeks, I had my team in India who does all the software for me, developed an app, and it was basically a pickup service so that a hotel, a restaurant, a school, a house could post, "We have a bag of aluminum cans," or, "We have a bag of PET,” and the waste collectors could then see where it was being offered and go and pick it and block it and reserve it so that it would be theirs to pick up. And this way they wouldn't have to spend so much on fuel and time looking for things. So that application grew. We used the Green School community in Bali to announce the app and get households and expats to start using this in restaurants and hotels, and there was no business model.

We just wanted to understand how everything works. Then at a certain point, I got a call from Tetra Pak. So these are the manufacturers of the milk cartons, either milk, yogurt chocolate milk, strawberry flavored milk, everything. Juices come in very often in Tetra Pak cartons. Everyone thinks that Tetra Pak is not recyclable, but it is with some difficulty. 70% of a Tetra Pak carton is paper, so 75% paper, 25% is plastic and aluminum. So it's difficult, but the paper recyclers like it because the quality of the paper is really good. Anyway, Tetra Pak had a problem that everyone believed that it was not recyclable and it smells because the yogurt goes sour, maggots start festering inside the cartons. 

Waste collectors really don't like Tetra Pak cartons because they're smelly, they goo and yeah, you have to squeeze them because they take up a lot of space, and also they believe there was no money in it. So what we did is Tetra Pak asked us, "Can we somehow channel money to the waste pickers so that they get an incentive to actually collect these cartons?” And the word gets out that Tetra Pak is worth money. So what we did is we set up a payment system in Kolekt so that money could be channeled from this Swiss bank account where Tetra Pak's headquarters are through Kolekt, the company, and then for every kilo that a waste collector picks up and sells to a middleman or a buyer or a sorting station they would receive so many đồng, which is the Vietnamese currency in extra funding, and they would receive a little bit more than PET.

So to really incentivize them, we had to make them realize that there's more money in it per kilo than the commodity that they're always looking for, which was PET. Aluminum cans are, let's say, the gold standard, but they're not always available, so PET is the most frequently collected. 

Anyway what we did is in the app initially we issued points to a virtual account because the waste pickers very often didn't have a mobile phone. So they appeared at the collection center. The guy at the collection center would register the waste collector with face recognition onto our app. This would ask him his name or her name. This would automatically create a virtual account, and we then registered the amount of kilos sold, and for every kilo sold, we would give them one đồng of Vietnamese currency. It wasn't exactly one, it was a bit more than that. 

So the virtual account then has all these points in it. So what does a waste collector do that doesn't have a phone? Usually the children and the wife of the waste collector will have a phone, or the neighbor will have a phone. The waste collector remembers the name Kolekt, downloads the Kolekt app onto the phone of his son and daughter and then logs in with his face and his name.

So, by logging in to the app without a phone he gets access to his points. He can then transfer his points to his wife or to the collection center in exchange for cash. This is the way that we got a workaround because many of the waste collectors don't have a bank and therefore don't have an e-wallet or an e-money account. So we had to think of a workaround which we applied for our lending in Indonesia in the past using basically points.

[00:11:27] Barry O'Kane: It's such an amazing story. But the thing that I wanted to start with was, as you know, the theme for this season of the podcast is “technology isn't magic.” And so I'm really interested in the fact that you didn't go into that space with "I have a solution," or, "I have technology," or, "This is what it is." First of all, it was just interest, right? You wanted to join those pickers And as, is obvious with the story you've told, you learned a huge amount and it sounded like in each case, the technology, you know, it's solving the problem or attempting to solve or get involved rather than leading with it, rather than saying, " Here, I have a solution. I'm trying to sell it into this market." 

Is that fair? And is that kind of the thing that continues to motivate the work that you're doing with Kolekt?

[00:12:05] Thierry Sanders: I think a lot of people experienced acute boredom during the Corona pandemic. The combination of, you know, healthy curiosity and acute boredom, that was the spark. So for me, I was looking at, okay what's a problem that I could try and help solve? And yeah, because, the story is that if you give someone a hammer, they're always gonna look for a nail to hit. So one of my hammers is technology. I knew nothing about waste pickers, and I thought this is something that is really interesting. It's a sort of parallel world. It's almost beggars on the street. People hardly ever talk to beggars, but they live in a parallel universe to us. Same with waste pickers. I'm always very curious to know what the lives of the people that we don't talk to are like. 

[00:12:58] Barry O'Kane: I love the fact that you didn't just think about that or get curious about it, but actually spent two weeks eating and smoking with them and seeing literally what their lives are like, which I think is-- it's a very sort of interesting and fun thing to do, I imagine challenging in some ways.

But also it's what you're supposed to do with starting with a new idea, is to go and really understand the space that you're trying to solve first. 

[00:13:18] Thierry Sanders: In the tech jargon, this would be called the “customer journey”. An anthropologist would call it participative observation. In my case, it was just curiosity, and I knew what they liked, which was cigarettes and lunch. So in exchange for cigarettes and lunch, I got information.

So we've been doing this now for four and a half, five years, and recently I got a similar question from South Africa. So there, one of the largest recycling associations of the country called Petco, they recycle the PET bottles, so water bottles. They said, "We have a problem.” Many of the buy-back centers, which are the buyers of materials that waste collectors sell the recyclables. They are in locations where there's no phone connection and no internet. This lack of connectivity is something that we have baked into the Kolekt app from the start, because I knew that it was very patchy in Indonesia for sure.

So working offline with the app is there, but doing a payment offline and being able to know 100% sure that the waste collector got his money and he was the one that received it. So you need to have a digital trace of the payment. That was like one level up from what we had.

So this is almost a similar situation. So I got really curious, how can we do that? A digital payment where Google Pay, Apple Pay doesn't work M-PESA, which is very common in the west side of Africa works with SMS, USSD protocol. That doesn't work either because there's no phone connectivity.What do you do? 

Now, by chance, I was having lunch with the director of the Dutch Public Transport Payment Network, as one does yeah, this is also a result of curiosity. So my tip in life is be curious, because it brings you to places. So I was having lunch with the director of Transdev, which is responsible for all public transport payment systems. And I asked him, "Do you know how we can do this kind of offline payment?" And he says, "Yeah, our card works fully offline because we assume that public transport will go down, electricity will go down, the phone lines will go down, internet will go down. But there's someone who has just checked in to their train ride and needs to check out. So the balance of public transportee, a passenger is actually on the card, and the protocol on the chip on the card is without a battery, of course. And it's an NFC chip, a very advanced NFC chip. And most phones these days will have NFC capability. We have just developed something called Kolekt Pay, which is still not available.

This is a premier announcement.

[00:16:21] Barry O'Kane: Pre-announcement. Yeah.

[00:16:23] Thierry Sanders: So this NFC capable payment system allows payments to, let's say microfinance borrowers, to waste collectors, to refugees in Gaza, wherever. And yeah, will be a solution soon for people that have no phone or are offline and have no bank. So I love these things because this is an audience of almost two billion people in the world.

[00:16:50] Barry O'Kane: Yeah, I was just about to say, similar with what you described with the waste pickers and using facial recognition, and then going to somebody else's phone or getting access to the app in some other way because they don't own a phone or a smartphone.

It's a similar sort of thing, I guess, “cutting edge” is the wrong word, but it's high tech, like it's new, relatively new technology. And then saying how can this be made practical in an environment where it's wasn't originally, sort of, envisaged for?

So you can't assume that everybody's got a phone, you can't assume that there's connectivity and power, reliable power, and so on. And I feel like - that's a bit of a theme in what you're talking about there, and I'd love to explore both of those in a bit detail, but I feel like it's worth acknowledging or asking.

I mean, a lot of people, I think, look at that context and “Oh, many of those people don't have smartphones, so therefore I can't do something for them with technology." Whereas it sounds like as you said, led by that curiosity, you're trying to, or you've found ways to make that work or work around it.

Is that fair?

[00:17:45] Thierry Sanders: That's right. And so initially we thought, okay, everyone has a phone but not everyone has a smartphone. Everyone has a feature phone. So this is, let's say, the M-PESA thinking. M-PESA is assuming that everyone has the old Nokia that you can throw on the floor and it still works. And therefore they used USSD, which is just basically many SMS messages sliced and then re-pasted together at the other end.

Now as soon as we realized, Oh yeah this is not gonna work because not everyone has a phone we then looked at other forms of simple biometrics. So fingerprints don't work because many waste collectors have no fingerprint because they've been handling so much material that their fingerprints have just worn off or they're just calluses.That doesn't work. 

Then we introduced the first face recognition system, which was an open source system. We realized because we're operating in Africa a lot, in Mozambique and in Kenya, that this face recognition is totally racist. It doesn't recognize Black people properly. And obviously this open source system, and I'm not gonna name it because I don't wanna shame or blame anyone, at least they're doing their best to make it open source, was probably just tested in the US among white communities And therefore, the machine-learning had only learned how to deal with, let's say Caucasian white people rather than the Afro-American communities. I didn't know that until we were getting only 50% correct response rate on face recognition. 

So we then had to shift to our current which is a paid system and which is the Amazon Recognition platform or Recognize. It functions very well. We have 98% hit and to maybe one, one and a half percent error on faces. It's not racist, which is good. 

However this last year we faced the problem, this is another technology issue, is that the faces were all in the Amazon cloud, AWS system. And along comes this guy called Donald Trump, who demanded to have access to all face recognition data from Amazon. And of course, Jeff Bezos, wanting to be in his favor, agreed. So Amazon, AWS has basically shared all face recognition data with the Homeland Security Department of the US. When we heard that this was gonna happen, we kept the faces in Amazon, but we shifted all our data to Google so that there was a unique identifier between the face ID number versus the data ID number which is, for example Barry O'Kane in Australia.

So if Amazon shared the face data with the Homeland Security Department, they wouldn't be able to match it with Barry O'Kane in Australia. So we've separated it by separating the data across two platforms so that we don't get these governments demanding data. And the same happened in South Africa, where the government demanded us to share the data with them of the waste collectors, because most of the waste collectors are immigrants. So we refused, and as a result, we've lost significant contracts in South Africa because we're just not willing to share that data with the government.

[00:21:24] Barry O'Kane: Well, kudos for putting the values first. Not enough of us do that. 

But that touches on something. You've mentioned so many different countries there. Today, the day of recording the Kolekt annual report has come out, and I thought it would be interesting, in the context of all the stories you've told there to talk about the scale, you've touched a little bit on the scale of the number of waste pickers and waste collectors and how big a slice of the population is and how big and unseen, in many ways, role they play in economies in many different parts of the world. 

But then also with the Kolekt, sort of, impact on that, do you know the numbers?

Can you share a little bit to give us a sort of an idea of the scale of what you have now after five, six years?

[00:22:02] Thierry Sanders: Yeah, we have around 20,000 users of which we actually have 15,400 people with a waste collector profile, but we have about 1,000 test users, so I would say about 14,300 waste collector profiles. 

We do about 200, 250 transactions a day on our system which is now getting up to almost 100,000 transactions and have processed around 18,000 tons.

Some platforms will say 18 million kilos of waste materials because it sounds bigger. But anyway, 18,000 tons of mainly plastic, some mixed waste. We do everything, tires, e-waste, glass, paper, you name it. 

What's interesting about the waste collector population in our system is that 20% of them have a phone and 80% don't. We also have around 70% that are women. And our, let's say, our nationalities are Brazil, Mozambique, Kenya, Vietnam, Indonesia, Ghana. And then we have a few spotted around because they are doing trials, like in Bhutan and Nepal, these places. Then we have around 60 recyclers that are using the Kolekt app to register everything that's coming in, and we have about 200 to 300, 400 that are buy-back centers. So they're like the middlemen that are buying from the collectors and then sorting and then sending the sorted materials to recyclers.

[00:23:45] Barry O'Kane: What's the sort of chicken before the egg? When a new place, is it a case of you need those middlemen or the recyclers before there's somebody for the waste pickers to engage with? Or is it when you're starting a new place, is it an introduction from a government body or something like that?

How does it get started, and what's the chicken and egg scenario of getting that off the ground in a new area?

[00:24:05] Thierry Sanders: We always start from the demand side. We look for the recyclers. The ideal recycler is one that opens its gates to waste collectors to actually queue up at the gate, because then the recycler, although usually they prefer just to deal with large trucks with baled material. The ones that open up their gates to collectors understand who their audiences really are and at least have an open mind about the waste collector community.

So the biggest recycler we work with of that characterization is Topack in Mozambique. They buy PET and HDPE, and they have very long queues every other day at the gate and mainly women that are carrying huge bags of bottles to be sold, so it starts with the demand. So we need to know, okay it's, let's say 20 dollar cents a kilo at the gate. Then to transport it from the buyback center, collection center or aggregator, there isn't one common name, that's why I'm always naming them, the middleman, they need to transport from their location to the recycler, so you deduct a few cents. So let's say if it's 20 cents, then maybe it's 17 cents being sold from the aggregator plus the transportation cost. Then the aggregator, the middleman is probably purchasing at 15 or maybe 12. So the collectors that are going to the aggregator are getting 15 or 12 cents a kilo.

Now in Mozambique, the distance is maybe three, four thousand kilometers all the way up north. So the price at the gate of the recycler is double the price that is paid up north because the transportation is such a nightmare to get materials all the way from the north to the recycler.

So for example, with Tetra Pak in Vietnam what we'll do is put a big sign up on a wall saying, "If you bring your Tetra Pak carton squeezed with the liquid out of it and all the maggots and the germs and everything, then we'll pay you," I think it was three, three and a half thousand dong. Whereas if the packages are still full of air and they're not flattened we would pay them 2,000. They're getting almost a 50% markup on the material if it's squeezed or not, flattened or not. Because otherwise you're spending about 20% of your money on liquid which you don't want.

[00:26:39] Barry O'Kane: It's like you say there's a whole other world I think is the word you used in that. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on the reasons these systems exist, I guess it's a big systems thinking thing. So you've created this app and you're actively looking to help and support both the recyclers and the waste collectors.

Is it a case of - this is a world that stuff just needs to exist, in parts of the world where there's no centralized collection process and where the economy, I was gonna use the word enable, but probably forces people to be saying, "This is the choice I have for an income."

Like, how challenging is this a situation for you to be working in, saying you're providing a service trying to help these people in those contexts, but the contexts are pretty challenging?

[00:27:17] Thierry Sanders: Let's see. The first time I really noticed it was during the pandemic because there were so many more people that had no income at the time. They had been fired, they lost their jobs and the only thing really going for them, at least in Bali, was fishing coconuts or waste. Or farming. If you, for example, go to the US in New York, the US is desperate. There's so much poverty in the US. There's, I think 15% of the country is living under the poverty line. There's a lot of people that are collecting recyclables as their only source of income. The reason why the waste picker, let's say, community exists, which is now I think around 30 million people around the world. Economist published a number 20 million about 10 years ago. So let's assume it's a bit higher now. The reason why they exist is because this stuff does have value and because they can earn money from it.

There is a serious trade happening in these kinds of materials. So for example, in Mozambique, in Brazil, in Indonesia, you will find a lot of Chinese traders that are purchasing this material. And although a lot of people might know that China has closed its doors to waste, so it doesn't import waste anymore, it is still happening. So there's many Chinese traders that are purchasing PET, HDPE, and it is then being sent on ships to India, to Vietnam, and then through a backdoor in Vietnam, it will enter the Chinese recycling economy.

So the price paid, let's say, in wherever the recycler is in China, in Beijing or in Mumbai, that includes the waste picker, the transport to the Chinese trader, the trader's fee the shipping all the way to Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, and then the train ride and the truck ride all the way to the recycler in China.

So there is a lot of demand for this material, and the only unfortunate thing is that the fossil fuel industry has realized now because, we're all switching to electric vehicles and electric-powered machines that the best alternative for the fossil fuel industry is plastics and synthetic textiles.

They are really pumping cheap plastics onto the market, so it means that the recycled materials end up being at least 25% more expensive because of all this collection and transportation and sorting costs involved. But it still provides a very good income. In Indonesia, the income earned, if waste collectors collecting full-time is around 60% of minimum wage.

In Mozambique, because the prices paid are higher, a waste collector can earn one and a half times minimum wage. In Brazil, it's very low, so they're at a 50% minimum wage. In India, I'm not sure. I think it's probably around 50, 60% minimum wage. But if you're considering a career shift, at least you know roughly what you could be earning. And Mozambique has the best shrimps in the world, so you know, you're earning more than minimum wage and you're getting good shrimps. Yeah.

[00:30:38] Barry O'Kane: I'm sold on the shrimps definitely. 

There's so much there I would love to explore, but just from a time point of view, just quickly segue into something else that I know that you're heavily involved in, and that's the conversation around EPR in many of these countries.

So do you wanna just touch on that a little bit?

[00:30:51] Thierry Sanders: Yeah as I said until five years ago, I knew next to nothing about the waste market. Because I let my curiosity lead me through this maze and labyrinth of the waste sector. I ended up advising the Mozambican government on their EPR legislation. And because of the tech side in my previous career. I developed or Kolekt developed the online platform for EPR in the country. 

That led me to try and figure out how much can a country actually earn from EPR. By doing the maths, as one does, I discovered that a country can earn about 0.2% of GDP up to 1.2% of GDP, depending on how it's defined on EPR fees. Now, the wonderful thing about EPR is that it helps the taxpayers in the countries because the EPR fees are paid by the consumer goods companies for the packaging waste that are put onto the market. So it's a polluter pays principle. So it means that the Nestlés, Coca-Colas of this world will have to pay a fee per kilo of plastic or aluminum or cardboard that they put on the market. That fee is then going into a, sort of, central fund, and those funds are then used to finance the waste collection and the whole waste recovery process. 

Having done that calculation, I then realized that this is a huge market. The developing world or the Global South, as it's called these days, could raise $100 billion a year in EPR fees, which could potentially pay for 60, 70% all waste management costs in the country.

So EPR is currently introduced in around 50 countries in the world, or at least not introduced, but actually implemented and running. So there's 150 countries out there that got this polluter pays system. And therefore, they're having to pay for waste collection from the government budget, which is stupid. They should stop doing that and start charging the companies that are putting the waste on the market. 

The argument that is always thrown at the, let's say, the EPR advocates is for example, the price of Coca-Cola is gonna go up. But our calculations show that the price of a bottle of Coke should only go up by 0.01% if we introduce EPR on PET and HDPE. So basically, Coca-Cola has no excuse to increase the price of a bottle of Coke. Now, if we look at the deposit return schemes in Europe, many European countries, you're having to pay 10 cents to 20 cents per bottle that you purchase or per cup that you are given at a coffee dispenser so that you get the money back when you return.

So those fees are way higher than the actual cost because a lot of people don't return these bottles. The companies that are selling the materials are actually pocketing a lot more than what the cost of EPR would be. 

As a result of doing all this research on EPR, Kolekt was asked to actually train the governments of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Nepal, Maldives on what it means to actually implement EPR, how could it be done in a simple way, how to make the calculations. India, of course, has been doing this for quite a while, and the Indian scheme is solid in theory. The structure is solid. The only problem is there's no floor price on the EPR fee, so it means that, waste collection industry is not getting a fair pay for every kilo collected under the Indian EPR scheme. So one thing I would recommend in the Indian situation is that there should be a minimum fee that is paid for waste materials and also those fees should not just be dispensed to recyclers, but should also go to waste collectors. And the other thing that most governments forget to introduce with EPR is the infrastructure needed to collect and recycle and dispose of waste responsibly.

Generally, the cost of collection of waste is around, 70% is operating expenses. On top of that, there should be a 30% markup for the replacement of old infrastructure and the investment in new infrastructure, so that the collection rates can go up in most countries. I hope that is understandable. It's quite a complex field.

[00:35:45] Barry O'Kane: It is, yeah. Thank you. It is a complex field and comparing that conversation that we had earlier in the season talking a little bit about EPR in the UK and in Europe and it's interesting to compare. 

But I realize that we've kind of come to the end of our time for this conversation. We've touched on so much, I really appreciate you coming and joining me on the show, and I hope other people listening enjoyed hearing, one, the stories and the variety of different things that Kolekt are involved in. But also as somebody who feels passionately that technology is important, but that too many of us lead with the technology instead of understanding the context and getting the right solution in the right place.

So your stories, I think, are a brilliant example of that.

And for anybody listening who wants to find out more about Kolekt and maybe reach out, where should they go?

[00:36:25] Thierry Sanders: Kolekt, K-O-L-E-K-T.com and otherwise send me a note at info@ or Thierry, T-H-I-E-R-R-Y [email protected].

[00:36:36] Barry O'Kane: Wonderful. Thanks again!

[00:36:37] Thierry Sanders: Thank you Barry. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to tell a bit more about the background of Kolekt

[00:36:43] Barry O'Kane: I feel like we've barely scratched the surface, definitely a huge amount there. It's fascinating. Thank you so much. 

As usual, all those links and everything will be on happyporchradio.com for anybody listening in a full transcript. 

Thanks again, Thierry

[00:36:53] Thierry Sanders: Thank you, Barry, and good evening to you.

[00:36:57]  Barry O'Kane: Thanks again to Thierry for joining me in this episode. If you want to find out more about Kolekt, go to kolekt.com. That's K-O-L-E-K-T.com 

Now, we're planning an in-person event in the UK to celebrate Season 10, and we're looking for partners to help make it happen. If you're interested, drop us a line at [email protected].

And remember, head to happyporchradio.com and join the email list. Make sure you don't miss future episodes. Thanks for listening.