In the spring of 2022, OS Hub held its first annual retreat for a small but growing team. Taking place in Istanbul, our Türkiye-based Community Manager organized a tour of an apparel facility, helping to make sure that strategy conversations throughout the week were grounded in the reality of supply chain production. Little did we know that the foundation had just been set for a new annual tradition—now when the OS Hub team gathers once a year to strategize, collaborate, and connect, we always include a supply chain tour in the agenda.
It’s always a standout highlight of the week and achieves the goal of helping us all—product, stakeholder, or internally facing team members—to connect more deeply with where our things are made.
This year the team convened in the state of Colorado in the USA, a mountainous area with a surprising amount of supply chain activity. In the end, it was Eagle County Recycling Facility that ended up being our destination.
This might not conjure images of being a traditional place where things are produced or somewhere that counts as contributing to supply chain production. But increasingly, companies need to think about product end-of-life as part of their Scope 3 emissions, overall circularity to keep materials in use for longer, incoming legislation like the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), producing ranges using already recycled materials, and engaging those working in supply chains as economies shift to sustainable production, to ensure a just transition. Even without any of those considerations, this recycling facility is a place of production. Individuals work there, and the materials collected on-site are separated, baled and readied for direct shipment to other end users. This is part of the post-consumer supply chain.
And so one Wednesday morning in September, members of the OS Hub team turned up energized to learn about what happens to the waste produced in this rural mountain community. The engaging and knowledgeable team at Walking Mountains led the tour, and we started with Hazardous Waste.
The passionate, captivating, and larger-than-life Mike manages the Hazardous Waste section. We learned about the ‘swap shop,’ where you can deliver unfinished pots of paint, bottles of white spirit, or unused creosote and take away someone else’s seconds; and we saw state-of-the-art machinery to safely dispose of strip lighting containing mercury. This was a powerful illustration of the challenges of safely disposing of the unknowingly toxic and dangerous things that we all benefit from every day.
Onwards to another area of the facility, where residential and commercial recycling is sorted, separated, and baled ready to be collected by companies that will use those materials to make new things. And yes, as excitable mappers of production locations, we did geekily discuss how these separate buildings and compounds should be listed on OS Hub as connected but distinctly different locations.
A number of things really stood out to us from this part of the tour, illustrating how the physical realities of a supply chain location are mirrored in the digital world of an online supply chain map:
Manual work still prevails: while machinery moves things along conveyor belts and helps to sort different types of the same material, it’s humans who are sifting through things on the conveyor and splitting things into categories. Manual work is still critical for this production location to function. We can compare this to OS Hub’s algorithm and what we refer to as “human-in-the-loop machine learning”, meaning AI but with humans involved. We know that our algorithm is well-trained and capable of determining if a submitted location already exists, and where cases are clearer cut, the algorithm is capable of doing the job on its own. However, there are frequently still cases where a human touch is needed to make nuanced moderation decisions that computers are not yet ready to take on alone.
Simple tech can have a big impact: a powerful gust of air cutting across a drop from the conveyor belt helps to determine what is aluminum (and is therefore light enough to be blown into another shoot) and what is a heavier material, which will drop down into a different shoot. Another mirror held up to us: we’ve always said that what OS Hub does is essentially quite straightforward. We confirm the name, address and country of a production location. And yet this simplicity is answering the needs of stakeholders across supply chains. We don’t need to over complicate things.
Access to information: We naturally inquired about how information is shared on where sorted material goes, and how organizations like Eagle County Recycling Centre and Walking Mountains can incentivize individuals, governments, and stakeholders to check that information—ultimately making sure that the industry is held accountable for recycling happening safely and sustainably. Just like regular supply chains, data systems are opaque and there is a nuanced web of stakeholders influencing which information is shared with whom.
The final location of the tour was a short drive away: Vail Honeywagon composting. We were proudly shown around by Chris who, with his team, is creating high-grade compost for sale using the mix of residents’ kitchen waste, commercial kitchen waste from hotels in and nearby Vail, and garden and forestry waste. Composting is wonderfully simple—a case of watering mounds of waste, leaving it to decompose, turning it seven times, and checking the internal temperature that the mounds reach.
An absolute highlight was when OS Hub’s Data Team Manager realized that Vail Honeywagon is already listed on OS Hub, showing the page to Chris and the team along with details on how they could claim their profile to add more value to the data and better connect with other suppliers who indicate that the facility is part of their supply chain. We’ll excitedly process that claim when it comes through!
2024 has been a year of steep growth for the OS Hub platform, with the volume of data input increasing fivefold—and still counting. With this growth has come a shift in the kinds of production locations listed on the platform—with a noticeable rise in data linked to recycling and waste handling. Indeed, following feedback from our Community Management team, we introduced Recycling and Waste Management (separately) as sector values in July. As of now, 70,825 production locations are tagged to these sectors.
It’s thanks to the insights from our community that issues in this part of supply chains are being surfaced to us as a team. As more stakeholders dig into the “reverse supply chains” coming at the end of a product’s life, we’re hearing that many of the same labor rights issues seen in the more traditional supply chain are present—but with far less oversight, data, or recommendations and legislation to govern affected stakeholders. For us, this just hammers home the need to keep ingesting data about waste handling and recycling so that positive and collaborative action can occur more swiftly.
As a virtual and globally remote team, it is an annual highlight and an utter privilege to get together in person and ground OS Hub’s work in reality by touring production locations. This year, in particular, will be remembered for the larger-than-life individuals that showed us around. They are the people that OS Hub was built for—individuals that deserve decent work and to be celebrated for the role they play in global economies.
Our thanks to Mike, Chris, Amelia, and Emily for taking the time to show us around and impart on us your knowledge and expertise. And thank you for fielding more questions than you knew were coming your way—when the OS Hub team is on tour, we really get to work!
OS Hub is a non-profit platform that relies on philanthropic support to sustain the world’s most complete, open and accessible supply chain map. Join us in powering the transition to safe and sustainable supply chains by making a donation today.
