Industry Project 2025/2026: Syklo

The IDBM Industry Project Course is a seven-month journey of collaboration, exploration, and innovation, where students addressing real-world challenges in collaboration with our industry partners. This year, we’re inviting you to follow 10 different stories as our teams move through different stages of their project journeys.

Did you know that 65% of plastics in Finland are non-packaging rigids, but a staggering 1% are actually recycled? That leaves 5 kg of valuable raw material per person ending up in incineration and mixed waste every single year. Our project with Syklo (founded by EU) started with a seemingly simple question: How can rigid plastics actually get collected from households?

I know what you are thinking" ”Just add another bin!” Or omg, did you just think, ”Wait, don't I just throw every plastic into the same yellow bin?…”

NOOO!

Site visiting Syklo

First of all, one of the biggest things we learned is that rigid plastics and packaging plastics are completely different worlds. Their chemical structures behave entirely differently during processing, meaning you can't just mix a plastic bucket with a chip bag. On top of that, money talks through the law. There is a legal framework called EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility), but right now, nobody is legally or financially responsible for collecting rigid plastic items. And btw, when we say rigid plastics, we are talking about everyday household items like buckets, kitchen tools, and toys.

With inspiration from our other stakeholder, Forum Virium Helsinki (the Helsinki city's smart-city innovation company), we packed our bags and headed to South Korea for some serious smart-city and tech benchmarking.

There, we got to meet Envac in the smart city of Songdo, where trash literally runs through automated pipes underground. We also visited Aetech, a company way ahead of the game in optical recycling recognition. Huge thanks also to professor Jooyoung Park at Seoul National University for giving us deeply critical and cultural aspects to think about! Thanks to researchers of Hayang University as well, to inspire us with their knowledge on Jeju Island Recycling Assistance Centers as well. It turns out the things we assume are simple are incredibly complex when you actually take the problem into your hands to solve.

Our team in Seoul

Behind the chemical and logistical facts, we hit a massive human behavioural bottleneck.

What we realized during the project is that people rarely recognize the difference between hard rigid plastics and packaging. Even if they do know the difference, who honestly wants to hoard broken plastic chairs and buckets in their apartment for months just to haul them to a Sortti-asema that is a 30-minute drive outside the city centre?

So, we started to think… What do lazy people do when they want something but don't have the energy to leave the house? They order a courier! 

Right now, there are tons of delivery couriers driving around the city empty-handed on their return trips. Why not fill that empty space with high-quality, rigid plastics? Syklo gets clean, perfectly separated plastic, and you don't even have to put your shoes on. Our second solution tackles the timing. Since we don't discard rigid plastics every day, usually only when moving out or doing a massive spring cleaning, we designed high-capacity seasonal collection hubs right in the neighbourhood. Alongside these, we want to launch pop-ups run by a knowledgeable crew to help you recognize your plastics on the spot and figure out where they actually belong.

This past half a year has taught us that behind a seemingly simple question lies a whole new world within the Finnish waste system. It showed us just how important and incredibly complicated the reality truly is behind the scenes.

Impact Gala pitch and our booth

Project was funded by European Union.

Learn more about the team:

Mayu Nishikawa (IDBM, BIZ)

Jonas Wendland (IDBM, BIZ)

Pinja Tiainen (IDBM, ENG)

Savva Kuparinen (IDBM, BIZ)

Niko Kärkkäinen (IDBM, ARTS)