Jim Pasquet is one of the winners of the “Positive Young Leaders” 2023 award, created by Positive Planet, which highlights 35 young leaders under 35 years old who propose solutions to build a more sustainable society for future generations.
He ranked 3rd thanks to his project Le Pavé, which is recycled panels made from bottle caps and waste from the cosmetics industry. In 2017, while still a student at Toulouse Business School, Jim Pasquet decided to come to the support of a fellow student from the Versailles School of Architecture, Marius Hamelot, who was asked to work on a project to establish a school in Kenya, in the middle of the desert.
The student architect spotted a waste dump near the site and thought of using the waste for the construction of the school. Jim Pasquet remembers the first tests of using the waste in the kitchen with the microwave oven and blender and the first results, samples of a material with a mineral and aesthetic appearance.
In 2018, the two friends founded the company SasMinimum with the objective of changing the way we look at waste and proposing an eco-design tool for the school project. Thus, Le Pavé was born, a recycled and recyclable building material that comes in the form of panels, made in particular from bottle caps and waste from the cosmetics industry. Four years later, the company has its own factory in the Paris suburbs and employs 28 people. Jim Pasquet evokes the different uses that the Pavé can have, which interest more than a thousand customers and gives the example of a cabinetmaker who needs to be accompanied to design a piece of furniture, the Metropole du Grand Paris or the city of Paris.
The company has won a contract with these two public authorities in the framework of the Olympic Games of Paris 2024. It will notably supply eleven thousand seats for the bleachers of the Saint-Denis Olympic swimming pool and the Arena 2 at the Porte de la Chapelle in the 18th arrondissement of Paris. Since the creation of the company, Jim Pasquet admits that he has no time to do anything else on the side, he had started to work in the associative world during his nine-month civic service with the association Crions D’couleurs in Vitré in the department of Ille-et-Vilaine which organizes stays for children from modest families.
His commitment requires many sacrifices but it is a choice he has made and the only way to succeed in the long term according to him. He hopes to reach one million tons of recycled waste by 2040 and to reach this goal the company has managed to raise four million euros of funds in November 2022. Jim Pasquet plans to open a new factory every year and wants to continue to innovate with new materials, as at the Maison & Objet show in Paris in January 2023 where the two entrepreneurs presented a new material based on polystyrene. Jim Pasquet concludes by saying that the company is like a playground for him: it’s a project with few limits and he loves it.
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