What’s in a name?

“So what does Kasu mean?” Its a question we get asked a lot. The simplest answer is usually given, which is “It’s the Japanese word for; “to lend””. But for us, its so much more than that. When I sat down with Ben in 2019, we always had a much larger goal in mind.

The challenge we discussed was what is the most efficient way to tackle climate change, and how could we get people excited about doing so? What would be something that would be a small change, but have a large impact? And how could we incentivize people to do so? What would be in it for them?

And that’s when the ideas began to flow, it started with an app that would allow people to borrow and lend items with each other, saving them from buying something, using it once then discarding into landfill or the bin. Great, we thought, make some money and save the environment. But after doing some research, we saw that this had been done before, and all but killed off. The rise of companies like Amazon saw the incentive to do so shrink, as goods had become so cheap and could be delivered so efficiently, any financial benefits became negligible compared to effort of organising to collect a borrowed item.

We took this problem away and thought about for a few weeks, then another discussion flipped our perspective completely. Every item has an associated waste value with it when its produced. These can be averaged into 3 areas:

1) Carbon Monoxide

2) Water

3) Landfill weight.

So what if we associated an aggregate score based on the item which incorporated these values?

Then every time I borrow something instead of purchasing it, I can earn points towards an eco-focused loyalty program that I can redeem with like minded companies who value quality and sustainability over sheer production volume and disposability.

Stay tuned, as we have some exciting developments in this area.