96% of Americans are confused about recycling rules
Nicole Sewell · #124 ECGO: Turning Trash Into Treasure With AI · Mar 4, 2025 · at 2:07
Nicole Sewell, founder and CEO of ECGO, is pitching her AI recycling app to venture capital investors on The Pitch.
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“96% of Americans are also confused on how to recycle.”
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More from Nicole Sewell
Universities pay up to $150K annually in recycling contamination fees
“Universities actually pay contamination fees on the recycling bills. And so these are fees that they have to pay on top of what they already pay in recycling. So this can be anywhere between 75 to 150,000 dollars a year just on contamination.”
ECGO acquires campus users for $1.50 using cookies at tabling events
“Our user acquisition cost is only a dollar 50 because like, we just put like, we have cookies and whatever to get students to download the application.”
US spends $200B annually sending recyclable waste to landfills
“Two hundred and nineteen million tons of recyclable waste enters our landfills every year. We spent over two hundred billion dollars just to send it there.”
ECGO uses OpenAI's CLIP model for waste identification
“Right now we're using OpenAI's clip model, which creates a caption for every item that you take a picture of through the platform. And then it looks for that item in our database of materials.”
ECGO converts $5K semester pilots into $20K annual university contracts
“Georgia State and the Georgia Institute of Technology are our first customers. So we started them off with a semester pilot that cost 5000 dollars, which I know, like no one negotiated. Yes, it was too low. And then it rolled over into a full year implementati…”
ECGO reaches 33% monthly active user rate among 1,500 students
“Yes, so right now we have 1500 students on the platform who use it. We have a 33% monthly active user rate, and on average students recycle 35 items each month, and the fraud was like less than one percent. We had like 10 students who were ridiculous and then …”