Spend time in the recyclable paper and plastics industry and you quickly meet the people who make it work: the brokers, traders, and intermediaries who have spent years - sometimes decades - building the relationships, the market knowledge, and the counterparty networks that move material across cities, countries, and continents.
These are not people gaming a broken system. They are people who built a functioning system inside the constraints of a market that has never had the digital infrastructure it needed. They deserve credit for that.
But the system they built has a structural ceiling - and that ceiling is limiting the circular economy.
WHAT THE INTERMEDIARY LAYER ACTUALLY DOES
When a generator needs to move 500 tonnes of OCC and a paper mill in another country needs that exact grade of recovered fibre, the intermediary is the mechanism that connects them. They know who needs what. They understand grade specifications on both sides of the trade. They have established payment trust with both parties. They manage the logistics, the documentation, and the relationship.
That is genuine value. In a market without a digital counterparty network, without price transparency, and without a platform connecting supply with demand - the intermediary is the infrastructure.
The cost of that infrastructure is the intermediary's margin. And in a market where both sides of every trade go through this layer, that cost accumulates - not as a design flaw, but as the unavoidable price of operating without better tools.
THE LAYER THAT IS MISSING
Consider how other commodity markets evolved. Oil, copper, and agricultural commodities all went through a period where trade was dominated by relationship-based intermediaries. What changed them was not the elimination of traders and brokers - it was the arrival of market infrastructure that gave everyone better information.
When commodity exchanges, price feeds, and digital trading platforms arrived, the best brokers and traders thrived. They used the new infrastructure to do more, faster, with greater confidence. The market grew. Volume increased. More participants entered. Prices became fairer not because anyone forced them to, but because better information made it harder to sustain large spreads on information asymmetry alone.
The recyclable paper and plastics market is at that inflection point - without yet having had the infrastructure moment.
A generator listing material on Inacsys still benefits from the knowledge, relationships, and logistics expertise of an experienced broker. A buyer using Inacsys to find supply still benefits from a trader who understands grade specifications and can manage the cross-border complexity of the deal.
What changes is the starting point of every conversation. Instead of beginning a negotiation with no reference point - no visibility into what comparable material is trading at, no sense of how many sellers are in the market today — both sides begin with more information. The negotiation is more efficient. The deal closes faster. Both parties feel more confident in the outcome.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY
The goal of Inacsys is not to thin out the intermediary layer. It is to make the entire market more efficient - for generators, buyers, recyclers, and the brokers and traders who serve them all.
A more transparent market with better price visibility means more trades happen. Material that currently does not find a buyer because the broker network does not reach that seller - or that buyer - now has a path to market. The circular economy gets more efficient not by cutting out participants, but by connecting more of them.
Starting September 5, Inacsys launches with curated listings and real-time bidding - visible to all registered users globally. Every participant in the recyclable materials market - generators, recyclers, buyers, brokers, and traders - has access to the same market visibility for the first time.
The infrastructure layer the market has been missing is finally being built.
Founding access opens until midnight, September 4. Platform goes live September 5, 2026 globally.
? www.inacsys.com
Data Sources:
The Recycling Partnership - 2026 State of Recycling Report - recyclingpartnership.org
Resource Recycling / NERC - Commodity Pricing Data 2025 - resource-recycling.com