Optoro, winner of the circular economy enterprise category at The Circulars awards at Davos, started life as eSpot, a middleman selling people’s knick-knacks and antiques for them on eBay in the days before widespread online knowhow. “We had the idea for Optoro when more and more local retailers, instead of individuals, asked us to help them sell their returned and excess inventory,” says the firm’s director of communications, Carly Llewellyn. “We realised that dealing with returns and other goods in the reverse supply chain was a problem even top retailers face.” Optoro now works with 20 of the top 100 retailers in the US and expects to process 25m items in 2016, cutting its clients’ waste from returned and excess stock by 73%.