Fresh Perspective

Eva Wallack

Co-founder of Ouro Circularity

Eva Wallack first found herself at the intersection of finance and environmentalism as an analyst for Regeneration.VC, a Los Angeles-area early-stage venture fund investing in circular solutions, though her journey into the recycling industry came later.

Initially, Wallack was poised to work for a tech company after earning a degree in symbolic systems from Stanford University, but she soon returned to earn a master’s degree in earth systems to merge her background in technology with environmental services.

“I was a little uninspired by my tech opportunities,” she says. “I didn’t really want to be a small cog in a very large tech platform company [when] the missions didn’t align with my goals.”

At Regeneration.VC, Wallack learned about a variety of companies developing circular business solutions for environmental issues. While many proposals worked to fight the climate crisis through creating alternatives to plastic, Wallack instead identified an absence in logistics solutions.

“I felt like, ‘OK, great, we can replace [plastic], but why is the operationalizing of all this so bad right now?’” she says. “What is the actual problem?”

"The small business owners in the recycling value chain really need to be considered.”

In Wallack's estimation, the problem across the plastics value chain is the absence of data.

“There’s no data in the space, and the data that [is there] comes slowly and is few and far between,” she explains.

Enter Ouro Circularity, which Wallack co-founded in 2023. The track-and-trace platform for waste management, starting in plastics, attempts to provide visibility into a company’s recycling streams through real-time data, accessible through an online dashboard.

“Something that has surprised me [about starting a company] was the receptivity of various industry professionals,” she says. “People are really willing to talk to you more than you think they are.” In the following interview, Wallack discusses current challenges in plastics recycling and the potential to increase demand for recycled-content products through regulations.

Recycling Today (RT): What challenges have you identified in the plastics recycling space?

Eva Wallack (EW): A big problem I’ve seen has been that regulators in the space and business owners do not appropriately speak to each other.

Look at the regulation coming down in California. While it’s great, and I’m totally on board with trying to make companies take responsibility, the people who are falling by the wayside are actually the recyclers and the recycling value chain. We really need to focus on having more intersectionality between those industries. It’s something I see myself sitting in between; focusing on how we bridge the gap between regulators and the recyclers and the brands.

RT: What regulations do you see posing issues for recyclers and what are some solutions?

EW: We see ourselves as a potential technological solution to satisfy a lot of these EPR [extended producer responsibility] requirements. Tracking and chain of custody is going to be critical to be able to effectively report.

Something we really could be focusing more on are recycled-content laws because it would be such a simple way to drive the market toward recycled content if you required the brands to purchase it. Right now, the big issue is that virgin materials are cheaper, right? And so very few companies will make that decision … but that’s a much smaller, easier thing to tackle than the Goliath that is EPR.