Rheaply’s platform is helping scale the circular economy — an economic model that emphasizes keeping resources in constant circulation rather than discarding them and adding to landfills. Through its resource exchange platform, Rheaply empowers organizations to better manage, exchange, and track their material resources, helping them save money and eliminate waste while allowing employees and users to understand the sustainable impact of their procurement decisions. Rheaply’s climate-forward solution is already being leveraged by Fortune 100 companies, state, local, and federal governments, small businesses, and nonprofits ready to adopt the model and practices of reuse and circularity. Thus far, Rheaply has enabled organizations to divert over 14.5 metric tons of material waste and save $1.5 million by recapturing valuable resources internally.
Rheaply’s beginnings trace back to when Rheaply’s co-founder and CEO, Dr. Garry Cooper, was working towards his PhD in neuroscience at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and contributing to the ongoing Parkinson’s disease drug discovery efforts. During his time at Feinberg, he discovered silos within the university when it came to sharing physical resources. Some departments had a surplus of materials and would discard excess resources that were perfectly appropriate for reuse. Other departments were using outdated spreadsheets and incomplete listservs to source needed materials from peers, but due to a lack of resource location visibility and quantity knowledge, they purchased new ones instead. This observation sparked the idea for Rheaply, the name of which is a combination of the words “research” and “cheaply.” The platform began as a solution for higher education/research institutions. Dr. Cooper soon realized that this same problem exists in many other industries, and the company has since been continuously expanding into other verticals.
The innovative nature of Rheaply’s platform has been recognized by companies, cities, publications, and awards committees. Recent honors include the Social Innovator Award from the Chicago Innovation Awards and the top prize, a $1MM investment, from Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Equity Tour Pitch Competition.
The Rheaply team continues to push its platform forward, enabling new, practical applications that help people save money and reduce landfill waste. Some of the most exciting recent examples are related to government partnerships that address waste issues in the built environment. In particular, Rheaply is partnering with governments
and government agencies (including the City of San Francisco and the Environmental Protection Agency) to develop infrastructure to feed data-driven deconstruction and material reuse policies. By keeping physical resources and building materials in circulation, Rheaply can shape a more competitive, resilient, and climate-positive future.
As a Chicago-based company, Rheaply believes in the City of Big Shoulders. The team is committed to driving a culture of sustainability and innovation in Chicago, helping make the city a model for circularity. Adopting circularity drives economic opportunity and recovery for communities; through its platform and new partnerships, Rheaply is working to transform Chicago into a circular city and improve the lives of all Chicagoans, especially its underserved communities.
Going forward, Rheaply’s team looks forward to continuing to find new ways to spread the benefits of the circular economy to businesses, governments, and individuals. Rheaply aims to continue developing its platform to make possible a world without waste.
