Pollen Tech rescues unsold products from the dump, Sustainability Impact Awards

Between 2021 and 2024, Pollen assisted more than a hundred sellers – including L’Oreal and Procter & Gamble – save up to 1.5 million kg of product waste by clearing inventory. It estimates that the impact of the waste averted in 2024 is equivalent to avoiding 4 million kg of carbon dioxide emissions.

Pollen’s contributions earned it an Impact Enterprise Excellence Award in the tiny and medium-sized enterprise category at the 2025 Sustainability Impact Awards, jointly organised by The Business Times and UOB.

Where it all launched

Excess inventory is stock that goes beyond what customers are likely to acquire. It can arise from deliberate overproduction to avoid stock-outs, customers returning goods, or operations that damage products.

Liyana Sulaiman, Pollen’s co-founder and chief product and technology officer, noted that a manufacturer or retailer that accumulates too much excess inventory will have no warehoutilize space for its next batch of goods, so it must pay to dispose of these products.

The disposed inventory often finishs up in landfills, where decomposition generates liquids that seep into the ground and irrigation channels, affecting soil quality and water supplies, she declared. “We’re talking about environmental damage for generations.”

Pollen’s chief of staff, Tan Yang En, added that excess inventory is sometimes incinerated before its ashes are sent to landfills, a process that generates carbon emissions.

Sulaiman first witnessed the disposal of excess inventory at a retail warehoutilize where her father worked – migrant workers were cutting up Nike shoes and dumping them into 20-foot containers. “That was really shocking to me as a 17-year-old,” she declared.

Fast-forward to 2017, and she found “a large amount of slippers” in a warehoutilize while assisting Havaianas clear its stock in Singapore, as the footwear brand scaled back its operations here.

She wondered why perfectly good products were being wasted, and believed data and technology could assist companies achieve better cost recovery from excess inventory, while protecting the environment.

With this in mind, she co-founded Pollen in 2018 with David Ng, who is now the startup’s chief executive officer.

From marketplace to metrics

Sulaiman declared that, in its first four years, Pollen brought sellers and acquireers of excess inventory toreceiveher on an online marketplace, to assess whether such deals can actually happen.

She soon realised the marketplace had too many different products and acquireers, each with their own purchasing practices, logistics costs and profit margins. “Some kind of system” was necessary to match sellers and acquireers efficiently, she declared.

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