REUZEit Co-founder Justin Andrews on Confronting Overproduction

When we first started, it was just Ryan and me, buying used equipment, fixing it up, and reselling it on eBay. But once we began to see the amount of equipment that large companies waste and to understand why waste happens, we developed a simple way to enable companies to easily make space in their labs and just as easily reuse equipment from other labs in their organization. 

It’s always been a dream of mine to create something that makes a major difference in the world. I wanted to make my mark and make the world a better place.

I saw that we could develop a triple bottom line company at scale and across all major industries by creating a platform that connects all the key shareholders in this circular economy. We created a business model that would cost our clients nothing (save the world’s most precious technology, natural resources) while reducing waste and, of course, making a healthy profit margin for REUZEit.

The team started with me and my brother. I am five years older and already disliked my career in corporate finance. My brother was an entrepreneur with his own bar but didn’t like working nights and weekends. We remembered that our father used to fix and resell lab equipment that he recovered from projects he worked on in the ’90s, and that made pretty good money, so we started with a simple buy/repair/resell model. 

Also, when we started this company, our father had been recently diagnosed with early onset dementia. We couldn’t afford adult day care, so we knew we needed jobs where we could work and also take care of him. From 2010 until he passed in 2015, our father was with us at work every day. He loved taking machines apart and organizing the pieces. He also drew a lot of beautiful pictures that hang in our company office. It was nice having so much time with him.

Our first official salaried employee (in 2012) was my cousin, who was the only one of us with warehouse/operational experience. My mother and sister also worked with us for the first several years, and we hired more cousins and close friends as we went along. Our chief sustainability officer is my best friend from college. Years after we graduated, inspired by my company, he went back to school to study sustainability, even completing his case study and thesis on REUZEit. When he received his Master of Business Administration, I couldn’t think of a better person to grow with our company.

REUZEit puts sustainability first. We even published our first in a series of papers, sharing our real world data, proving that circular economic surplus asset management works. 

REUZEit makes it easy for global life science companies to integrate a robust surplus asset management (SAM) system. Our key ingredient is that we maintain financial sustainability through circular economics, making REUZEit a no-brainer for our large clients, which already includes some of the largest life science and pharma companies in the world. 

We are also already in three international locations, and our business model can be scaled easily through branded partnerships (kind of like franchises), so we can serve more clients in more countries without needing to invest in facilities, engineers, branding, etc.

Until recently, there was nothing that could even be considered competition. Today, some companies are trying to copy our model, but no one offers the enterprise-level service that we do. We know the challenges of our clients and remain focused on solutions, rather than just equipment sales like our competition.

I would like to achieve three milestones in 2023:

1. I aim to secure a new REUZEit branded partner on the U.S. East Coast. 
2. I want to add another major keystone client. 
   1. We are selective about who we add to our program. Our clients should be dedicated to sustainability and be capable of implementing top-down initiatives throughout the organization.
3. I plan to complete the new version of our cloud platform.

Our published white paper shows that our SAM program is up to 99.7% more effective at reducing greenhouse gas equivalents by reusing instead of replacing equipment our clients already own.

With these figures, at scale, REUZEit would transform the world as we know it. Pollution and landfills will be reduced to manageable levels, and our natural resources will be utilized more efficiently because businesses will reuse equipment again and again. 

Our world needs to slow down rampant overproduction. We can’t just keep buying new and throwing out old. Those days are coming to an end. But first, big businesses need a platform that enables reuse on a large, international scale, and that is exactly what REUZEit does. 

Yesturday, I returned from a client location in the European Nordic region. (We recover equipment all over the world.) REUZEit recovered four trucks of valuable equipment and recycled seven truckloads of equipment that would have ended up in the landfill without REUZEit professionally managing and executing disposition strategies. We always apply our “landfill last” policy, and when we must recycle, we always use top-tier recyclers like Kuusakoski, recovering 96.8% of metals and plastics.