Rodrigo Oliveira is a Founder and CEO of Green Mining.

He was working for his family’s consulting company near São Paulo, Brazil, on waste disposal engineering projects like landfills.

Unfortunately, 75% of Brazilians do not separate recyclable material and municipal selective collection affects only a small part of the population.

He started thinking about how the concept could be adapted into a cost-effective recovery solution to reduce the amount of recyclable waste that was winding up in Brazilian landfills. Along with Adriano Leite and Leandro Metropolo, Rodrigo developed a construction waste destination tracking software.

Green Mining has developed an Intelligent Reverse Logistics technology to efficiently retrieve post-consumer packaging and bring it back into the production cycle. Their traceability system ensures that all collected material is sent for recycling. The startup formalizes work for people with few job opportunities and uses non-motorized vehicles, such as tricycles, to make collections, avoiding CO2 emissions.

Green Mining is one of the startups selected worldwide by AB InBev, through the 100+ Accelerator program. Member of the UN Global Compact (the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative) and Top 3 of the “Better World Award”, held in Belgium. Also won the Climate Ventures Green Business Ideas Competition, which enabled the startup to represent Brazil on the worldwide Climate Launchpad program in Holland.

In 2021, the startup was awarded in the Ranking 100 Open Startups, entering the Top 10 in Cleantechs category, and presented the intelligent reverse logistics project at COP26. Since 2018, it has collected and sent for recycling more than 4.5 million kilos of post-consumer packaging, avoiding the emission of over 750 tons of CO2.