The Value of Recycling with Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao Today, less than 10% of packaging plastics are recycled. The rest is sent to landfills or becomes pollution. Our special guests today are long-term friends who are working together to change that statistic. They are entrepreneurs, environmental advocates and inventors, Miranda Wang and Jeannie Yao, are co-founders of BioCellection, a company that turns unrecyclable plastic waste into valuable chemicals. Their work with BioCellection has earned them many accolades, including Rolex Awards for Enterprise Laureate, and the Forbes 30 under 30. Join us every other week on Women's Wealth: The Middle Way®, a radio show aimed at helping women navigate questions about work, money, and family. You can find us on your favorite podcast app, including , , , . See you in two weeks! Helpful Links: Women’s Wealth: The Middle Way® Glen Eagle BioCellection 2019 Rolex Awards Laureate Documentary: Miranda Wang Forbes: BioCellection cofounders named Forbes 30 Under 30 for Social Entrepreneurship Interview Transcript: Susan Michel: Welcome back to Women’s Wealth: The Middle Way®, the show that answers your questions about work, money, and family. My name is Susan McGlory Michel and I am the CEO and founder of Glen Eagle, a wealth management firm in New Jersey. Today, less than 10% of packaging plastics are recycled. The rest is sent to landfills or becomes pollution. Our special guests today are long term friends who are working together to change that statistic. They are entrepreneurs, environmental advocates and inventors, Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao, are co-founders of BioCellection, a company that turns unrecyclable plastic waste into valuable chemicals. Their work with BioCellection has earned them many accolades, including Rolex Awards for Enterprise Laureate, and the Forbes 30 under 30. Welcome to the show, Miranda and Jeanny. Miranda Wang: Hi. Thanks for having us. Susan Michel: Miranda, I'll begin with you because you both have such an impressive career and it's very unique, that you're both close friends, which I think is probably a great goal to have when you're starting something and have similar goals and aspirations. Miranda, can you start by telling us a little more about your inspiration as co-founder of BioCellection? And what is your primary goal? What was the idea that launched this as friends and then as a career? Miranda Wang: Yeah, we founded BioCellection when we were still students in college. And Jeanny and I had met each other when we were still in high school. So we go way back for more than 10 years of working together and being friends with each other. And we first came across a plastic pollution problem and realized that less than 9% of plastics produced annually are actually getting recycled. That’s a really shocking statistic for lots of people. And so, so realizing this, when we were 15 years old, really shaped the way that we decided to pursue our education in college. And then in 2015, when we decided to talk about this problem again, we realized that this was really something we wanted to get back into and do something about. And we really believed in using mission-driven for profit-businesses to create market-driven solutions. What we identified is that there was a gap. There's a gap today in the world of recycling and that the reason so little plastic is getting recycled, is that we actually lack economical recycling technologies in the world. For most of the packaging that we produce, that packaging usually gets highly contaminated with food or dirt or grease by the time it gets to a recycling plant. And it's actually cheaper today to landfill those plastics than it is to recycle it. We came together and decided there has to be a technology solution that is embedded in a business that allows us to take in plastics that are not recyclable today and use these plastics as a resource so that we can actually build...
