In this episode we talk about Re-Cooperiamo, the cooperative marketplace created to meet a concrete and increasingly urgent need for businesses: giving value to unused assets, extending their life cycle and turning them from a cost into a resource. The platform allows cooperatives to exchange equipment, furniture and materials that still work, reducing the volume of waste generated, cutting the cost of buying new goods or of disposal, and promoting a genuine circular economy approach within the cooperative system.
Gianluca Cristallo: Do you know what I think when I see a piece of equipment abandoned and unused inside a company? I think about how, in our everyday lives as individuals, we have understood the value of second-hand. I think of furniture, clothes, books, and how normal it is to give everything a second life.
In companies it happens a bit more often that a piece of equipment which still works but is no longer useful is considered to have run its course.
Francesca Montalti: That’s true, and yet the logic is the same: what is a surplus for one person could be a resource for someone else.
Gianluca Cristallo: An opportunity. That’s what we learned with the Riusoo project, where we created a system that lets us reuse equipment that works but is no longer in use, and it’s also what we are trying to test with the Re-Cooperiamo project, together with cooperatives that work with each other.
Francesca Montalti: Re-Cooperiamo is the evolution of your project, Camst’s Riusoo project, but I wanted to ask you… if you had to identify what really defined the Riusoo project, the most important things it left you with, the lessons it taught you and also the concrete results, what would you highlight?
Gianluca Cristallo: First of all, what is Riusoo? Riusoo is an internal marketplace platform implemented at Camst that allows a colleague anywhere in the country – there are 11,000 of us – to post a listing and make an item available to someone else, somewhere else, who can use the equipment. What results have we achieved?
We have drastically reduced costs, above all avoiding 2 million euros of purchases by making new use of assets we already had in-house.
Francesca Montalti: That’s a really important result, and it’s probably also because of these results that the association, Legacoop Produzione e Servizi, immediately welcomed the idea of developing the Riusoo project into something bigger, a project involving a wider range of businesses: moving from Camst’s marketplace for managing unused assets, an internal platform for internal asset management, to a cooperative marketplace. In a first phase, together, we listened to our businesses, our cooperatives, and gauged their interest in the project. We found a great deal of interest, and at that point the testing phase began. Our goal is to create a platform that responds to our cooperatives’ needs and creates an impact: first of all an economic impact – you mentioned the 2 million euros saved at Camst, so lower costs for cooperatives; an environmental impact, because this project allows us to reduce waste and cut the waste that all our businesses ultimately produce; and a social impact, because it is founded on cooperation, collaboration and the logic of giving. I believe this is an important element of social innovation worth supporting. What role does innovation play at Camst in developing sustainability?
Gianluca Cristallo: From our point of view, innovation goes hand in hand with sustainability: it’s as if sustainability tells us why we need to do certain things and innovation is a tool for getting them done. The key element of the modern approach we have adopted is open innovation, so start-ups, research, universities and companies that can bring value certainly allow us to be innovative in order to achieve sustainability. But I wanted to ask you, Francesca, what role does cooperation play in a project like Re-Cooperiamo?
Francesca Montalti: For the cooperative movement, cooperation between cooperatives is a value, a founding principle, set in stone for us: we must cooperate among cooperatives, which is not easy and does not always happen.
The real issue is that it is not always easy to cooperate. With Re-Cooperiamo we think we have done something in this direction, that we have tried to provide a solution by creating a digital infrastructure that makes it possible to connect cooperatives, including from very different sectors.
If you had to think of a precise moment when this happened, when this spark appeared and set things in motion, what would it be for you?
Gianluca Cristallo: I remember that spark very well: it was at a bootcamp organised by the League of Cooperatives that brought various cooperatives together. There were about twenty of us from different sectors, and the League of Cooperatives encouraged us to learn about, study and put innovation into practice, but above all to build projects, and the main project was to create shared supply chains and strengthen the cooperative supply chain.
From there it was easy to bring Camst’s existing experience with Riusoo and share it with the other cooperatives, which did not know about it. So we immediately found ourselves around a table in the project we were taking part in, imagining how the value that had stayed inside each company could also be shared with the other cooperatives.
