Plastiks and the Case for Verified Recovery

André Vanyi-Robin, founder and CEO of Plastiks, joined Let's Talk Cardano alongside COO Ana Aguilar Meca and Head of Methodology Delfina Achinelly to discuss how the company is using Cardano as the core infrastructure for plastic recovery, recycling, and reporting. Together, they laid out what it takes to bring genuine transparency to one of the world's most fragmented industries, and why blockchain is the only architecture capable of doing it at a national scale.

What drew Vanyi-Robin to the problem six years ago was a fundamental lack of transparency in the waste management industry. The company he built around that observation introduces a third revenue stream for waste operators alongside collection and material sales: the ability to monetize verified recovery data in the form of digital certificates, which can:

• support extended producer responsibility compliance,
• meet environmental law requirements, and
• generate carbon avoidance credits.

Choosing Cardano for government-scale infrastructure

Plastiks began on the Celo blockchain before making a deliberate shift to Cardano as the company moved from a consumer-facing model toward institutional and government clients. The reasoning behind that decision was grounded in three properties that matter enormously to public sector partners:

1. environmental footprint,
2. cost predictability,
3. and longevity.

Governments do not plan on short cycles, and the infrastructure they adopt needs to be stable over decades. Cardano's governance procedures, peer-reviewed development process, formally verified smart contracts, and proof-of-stake (PoS) protocol gave Plastiks a foundation it could credibly present to national institutions as enterprise-grade and built to last.

How verified kilos reach the blockchain

The methodology that underpins Plastiks's platform was developed over six years and is now ISO 9001-certified, a recognition that covers the entire process from initial client communication through to the issuance of digital recovery certificates on-chain. Before any entity can begin issuing certificates, it must complete a rigorous accreditation process that assesses sustainability, quality, environmental practice, financial health, and operational readiness.

Once accredited, entities upload what Plastiks calls triple documentation, comprising an invoice, proof of payment, and a waybill, which is verified through a combination of AI tools and manual review before smart contracts enable the minting of CIP-68 NFTs that capture key data points such as polymer type, quantity, and destination.

The organizations most actively served by this system include:

• waste operators and recyclers, who gain a verified, transferable record of their recovery activity that can be monetized as plastic credits;
• brands and producers, such as Danone, who use the platform to move beyond annual audits toward continuous, ongoing verification of their supply chain data;
• governments and regulators, who can embed blockchain-based traceability directly into national extended producer responsibility compliance frameworks.

A greenfield of more than 100 countries

As Vanyi-Robin explained, of the 198 countries in the world, 63 already have extended producer responsibility legislation in place, most of them in Europe, where those frameworks were built without blockchain. The remaining countries represent what Vanyi-Robin describes as a greenfield opportunity, and Plastiks is already piloting national-level measuring, reporting, and validation systems in Armenia and El Salvador through a Project Catalyst Fund 15 proposal developed in partnership with UNDP country teams.

Both countries are at the point of implementing Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) legislation for the first time, which makes them well-suited to embedding blockchain traceability from the outset rather than retrofitting it later.

Building for every stakeholder without losing any of them

Designing a platform that serves regulators, auditors, recyclers, and government bodies within a single system required Plastiks to think carefully about how each user type experiences the product. The approach Aguilar Meca describes is one source of trust with differentiated interfaces, where each stakeholder role accesses the same underlying data through a user flow tailored to their specific needs. The platform surfaces as a conventional web application. Blockchain runs underneath, handling verification and immutability without requiring users to engage with it directly.

Plastiks has built something uncommon: a system where environmental claims are settled by data any party can verify, rather than taken on faith. Connecting recyclers, brands, auditors, and regulators within a single source of truth turns plastic credit accountability from a reporting exercise into a structural property of how the ecosystem operates. For the organizations engaging with it, compliance becomes harder to game and easier to demonstrate.

Listen to the full episode on Spotify or watch on YouTube and discover how Plastiks is building the verified data layer that national plastic recovery systems have always needed.