What if the biggest barrier to a circular economy isn’t technology or funding, but the way we lead and collaborate with each other?
In the first episode of the Resource Recycling Podcast, host Uriah Kiser talks with Cassie Gruber, a 20-plus-year circular economy strategist and Founder & CEO of Circular Bound and CALM Impact. Cassie started in a Buffalo e-waste shop inside an old Wonder Bread building, spent eight years leading Scope 3 and circular strategy at Jabil, and now builds tools to help leaders shift from linear habits to circular ones.
Cassie argues that the industry already has technical solutions for recovery and reuse. Progress stalls because organizations stay siloed, and because more than 90% of how we behave is driven by the subconscious. Her answer is human-centered systems change: Circular Bound as the movement, and Ciround as a free behavioral intelligence platform built around an eight-habit framework, human KPIs, and daily practice.
In this episode:
• Cassie’s start recovering components, leaching lead from CRT monitors, and extracting gold from inkjet cartridges
• Why collaboration keeps stalling even when the technology exists
• How Circular Bound and Ciround.ai are built to make resiliency and emotional intelligence accessible
• Where the industry still needs better collaboration: brands and ITADs, metals, plastics, chips, and data centers
• What’s coming at the 2026 E-Scrap Conference in New Orleans, October 26–28, including the Sunday state-of-the-industry session and parade
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Transcript of episode 1: The Resource Recycling Podcast
Host: Uriah Kiser | Guest: Cassie Gruber
Uriah: What if the biggest barrier to a circular economy isn’t technology or funding, but the way we lead and collaborate with each other?
In this very first episode of the Resource Recycling Podcast, we’re going to be talking with Cassie Gruber. She’s a 20-plus-year circular economy strategist. She started in a Buffalo e-waste shop (an old Wonder Bread building, if you can believe it) and spent eight years leading Scope 3 and circular strategy at JBLE. She left in November 2025 and founded CircularBound.
Her current focus is Ciround, a behavioral intelligence platform built around an eight-habit framework, human KPIs, and shifting from linear to circular leadership practices. She serves on the E-Scrap Conference steering committee and will speak at the 2026 event in New Orleans, which we’re all really excited about and will be talking about.
But more than that, Cassie, we are so excited that you’re our first guest here on the Resource Recycling Podcast. Welcome in.
Cassie: Oh, thanks, Uriah. I’m honored to be here.
Uriah: Well, we want to talk to you. Obviously we have our conference coming up in October and we’re very excited about that, but we want to know more about you: how you got your start, how you got into this, and what you’re doing to propel the industry.
I teased that old Wonder Bread building. You and I were talking before we came on, and when you gave me a little of that history it resonated with me, because my father drove a Wonder Bread truck years ago. Just hearing your roots there connected with me.
You talked about your early work recovering components. What got you into this industry?
Cassie: I actually studied art and philosophy for 10 years and wanted to be a professor. During that time I had two children very young, and I bartended and learned a lot about people. Eventually I needed a real job. I just said, “I don’t know that bartending is forever for me.”
So I looked in the newspaper, because that’s what you did back then. There wasn’t LinkedIn or Indeed. And I found this job refurbishing computers in a dirty shop on the east side of Buffalo. I said, “Let’s do this.” Every other weekend I was there getting my hands dirty, and next thing you know, I became a partner. We moved into the old Wonder Bread building, where every Twinkie made in America was produced and distributed out of Buffalo, New York, until they went bankrupt in 2002, 2003.
Uriah: You were doing recovery work early on. It sounds like you were one of the innovators, identifying components that could be reused and entered what became our circular economy.
Cassie: Oh, yes. My partner at the time was a chemist by trade, so he knew metallurgy like no one I’d ever met. We focused not just on the assets we knew had value (nobody really knew how much value was in laptops and desktops) but also on leaching lead from CRT monitors, extracting the gold strip from inkjet cartridges, and working with local refiners like Colt refiner to extract those precious metals and repurpose them into other products across supply chains.
Uriah: When you talk about pivoting from that into more technical solutions, finding a better path forward, you told me several technical solutions already exist for recovering these materials and useful components, but the progress is quite siloed. You don’t have a lot of organizations, a lot of companies, talking to each other. Why is that an issue?
Cassie: Oof. Uriah, for the last 15 years I feel like a lot of amazing people and great organizations have all been getting up on stage talking about the same collaboration, the same supply chain compression, the same innovation, resources, funding, you name it.
It boils down to people. Organizations wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for all of us who make them up. We’re the ones who make the decisions. And even though we’re good people wanting to progress the circular economy and tackle the global climate crisis, we’re often thinking in our own siloed ways that we don’t even realize, because we’re over 90% driven by our subconscious. That’s one of the biggest sticking points to progress around the world.
Uriah: I want to bring in CircularBound now, the platform you built to help leaders shift from linear to circular practices, with that eight-habit framework. You showed me your (for lack of one of my favorite words) whiz-bang website, and I think it’s fantastic. Talk to me about this program you’re working on with CircularBound, and now ciround.ai.
Cassie: Well, the meaning behind the name is circular. It stands for sustainability, the environment, circular economy, everything I’ve focused on my whole career, one of the two things I’m most passionate about. “Bound” evokes unity; it’s about uplifting and developing humans. Together they’re a commitment, a movement. That’s CircularBound: the foundation of all my work, the ecosystem that Ciround sits in.
Ciround is the most fundamental part: the human approach to systems transformation and systems thinking. And this isn’t just for companies. It’s for leaders, it’s for individuals.
Uriah: Talk about who you’re trying to reach with this effort.
Cassie: My audience is anyone, really. Some pretty big milestones: Ciroundwent to early beta at the end of November / early December last year, then public beta in February of this year. We made it into the Google for Startups Cloud program a few months ago, the Google Play app was released last week, and just today Apple finally released it, so any moment now it’ll be available for download on the App Store.
It’s free for individuals. They can go to ciround.ai, Google Play, or the App Store, download it for free, create an account, and answer some beta questions, because yes, we’re still in beta. Google was in beta for five years, so I don’t know how long we’ll be, but it’s free.
And here’s the thing about the vision and mission, and it will always remain this: I wanted to make mental wellness, resiliency, and emotional intelligence accessible to anyone in the world, regardless of gender, generation, geography, or economics.
Because the reality is technology and AI are accelerating at a mind-boggling pace. There are people in third-world countries who don’t have a fraction of what we have, but they have a smart device connected to the internet. They’re lacking a trusting network. They can’t afford hundreds of dollars an hour for a coach. This is a solution that helps them: resources, education on what this stuff means, a chance to learn about themselves, and a tool that offers a daily reinforcement mechanism to show up as the best version of themselves. That’s the vision and mission of Ciround. And there’s a whole enterprise piece to this that is just mind-boggling.
Uriah: That sounds really cool. I want to talk about the E-Scrap Conference, which is in New Orleans this year, October 26th through the 28th. More information at e-scrapconference.com. That’s e-scrapconference.com.
We’ll be talking about collaboration, and you’re no stranger to this stage. You’ll be speaking at various sessions in October. But going back to the people in the industry, you say collaboration is a people problem when it comes to working together. Let’s expand on that. Where do we need to look first to solve that collaboration problem?
Cassie: First, we need to look in the mirror. It all starts there. Pointing fingers at anyone isn’t going to solve anything. It’s just sugarcoating.
Being part of an organization, you have a value statement, a culture on the wall. But the reality is the culture lives and breathes in the rooms we show up in every day. And what makes up that culture is the hundreds or thousands of operating systems each of us brings. It’s really on each of us, our onus, to reflect on ourselves, to create the awareness to understand why we behave the way we behave, why we react a certain way or get defensive or take things personally. To learn to lower our walls and build trust when it matters most, when we’re under pressure.
Uriah: Can you give me some real-world examples of collaboration you’ve witnessed in the industry, a shining example of “that’s how it’s done”?
Cassie: You see a lot of this with the big brands collaborating with ITADs and recyclers, which is great, but I feel like it still happens in these silos. One of my biggest goals is to create industry standards: a space where everyone can thrive.
A couple of examples: early on, going back 20-plus years in the precious-metals industry with smelters and refiners, the recovery process (the monetization, the dollars, the value, where it was all going) was very hidden behind the Wizard of Oz curtain. We just didn’t really know: were we making money? Were we making enough? I’ve definitely seen some transformation in the metals recovery industry, more collaboration. And I’m definitely seeing it in plastics. The innovators are opening the doors to all the different players across the value chain and saying, “Hey, how can we work together? How can we not slice the penny eight times, but compress the supply chain and create an economical business plan that benefits everyone: a region, our country, the globe?” So we’re starting to see some of those dots connect a little more.
Uriah: What other areas in the industry should be looking more toward collaboration, areas that may have put a toe in the water but should be communicating and collaborating better than they are today?
Cassie: Well, I could branch into cloud and data centers, because that’s where most of the money is getting invested. We can’t stop using our ChatGPT to tell us what we need to know about ourselves.
Uriah: There you go. Right.
Cassie: So I think there are a lot of untapped opportunities, and a lot of unknowns. For example, at the rate chips are being used and replaced, there’s a huge opportunity to tap into what’s happening in the chips and components market, all the way down to how we design these chips and components for longevity or second use. Get the chip and component manufacturers on board. They have their concerns about reliability, but there’s a lot of opportunity to build an ecosystem with different stakeholders and make it scalable.
There’s so much innovation out there. Again, I don’t think the issue is really technology or a lack of resources or funding. Those are barriers, but I don’t believe that’s the core. If we had all the money in the world, would we really be exactly where we’d want to be as a society?
So, data centers: huge opportunities. I’m seeing companies really think outside the box: using the heat produced inside these data centers and repurposing it for energy, and reusing electric-vehicle batteries by placing them in farms to power data centers during off-peak hours.
On the book I co-authored, The World’s Thought Leaders, my chapter is Chapter 3, “Little But Fierce.” My mantra is: anything achievable is possible. I believe that with all of me, but it starts with ourselves. We truly need to collaborate. We need to come together. We need to be one. One as a globe.
Uriah: And we’ll make sure to put a link to that book in the description so people can find it and get a copy of their own.
I want to pivot to the upcoming E-Scrap Conference, where you sit on the steering committee. For anyone who’s never been to New Orleans, to hear what you and many others have to say, get us excited. What should we be looking forward to?
Cassie: Oh, this is such a big deal, and it’s very touching to me. The E-Scrap Conference was the conference before all the other summits and conferences came about in our industry. I’ve been attending for 15 years, maybe more. It’s where everyone came together.
What’s really neat about this year is that it’s very transformative. We decided to keep the name E-Scrap because of its nostalgia. We contemplated changing it, because we’re actually branching into a space where all the major stakeholders across the value chain will be there: some of the biggest brands in the world, the processors, the IT companies, the recyclers, the innovators, the smelters, the companies writing the policies, standards bodies, you name it. And we’re calling it the Longevity Conference. I couldn’t be more excited about a conference than for E-Scrap 2026 in New Orleans, of all places.
The Sunday before the conference kicks off, Resource Recycling has put together a parade. Right from the hotel, we’ll kick off a state-of-the-industry session with Stefan Larson from Lenovo, who’s going to share what’s going on: how customers are driving change, what the biggest challenges are, how climate connects to all of this in Scope 3 and carbon, and how we can really collaborate to innovate and move the needle. From there, the parade’s going to meet us, and we’ll parade all the way down to Bourbon Street and the French Quarter. We’re just going to have a blast collaborating as humans, just being human. So I’m really excited about that.
Uriah: That does sound exciting. And I can’t think of a better destination for a parade than the French Quarter on Bourbon Street. I think wherever your parade starts, it should always end right there on Bourbon Street.
The E-Scrap Conference: e-scrapconference.com. Again, we’ll put the link to the website so you can get tickets and learn more, because you do not want to miss this conference.
Cassie, I really do appreciate you being here, our very first guest on the Resource Recycling Podcast. How do you think we did? Should we keep doing this? Is it worth doing again? I’ve already got, like, 20 people lined up, I think. Maite was just like, “Run with it.”
Cassie: I love it. I love it, and I can’t wait. No, this is awesome. I’m really excited for what’s next, and I’m honored to be the first. You’ve got a great lineup of industry people from all different walks of life, so you’re going to become a pro by the end of it.
Uriah: Well, I’m looking forward to talking with more people in the industry and bringing you these exclusive insights here at the Resource Recycling Podcast. Cassie, thanks for coming on. I’m Uriah Kaiser. Please download our podcast, and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Resource Recycling Podcast.
