Brief
EQT Infrastructure acquired Covanta Corporation, a leading US sustainable waste management company, in late 2021 with a plan to separate the U.S. and European businesses.
We were appointed in August 2022 to create a new brand for the European business, which specialises in Energy from Waste (EfW), a solution designed to divert non-recyclable waste from landfill and turn it into energy. As the world strives to reduce its carbon footprint and recover useful materials from its waste, EfW’s role is a vital stepping stone in the decarbonisation process.
Solution
A new name. protected by trade marks with a matching dot.com domain were the urgent requirements, as the European business needed to establish its own cloud technology infrastructure around a new domain, prior to full separation. We answered this challenge within two weeks presenting five pre-screened, viable name candidates. ‘Encyclis’ was selected, the domain registered and the trade mark application submitted.
Next, we were asked to define the brand promise. We would normally address this in parallel with naming, but in this case it followed. This provided a good opportunity to engage with the leadership team and a wider group of colleagues to understand the business in detail and its points of difference. We articulated the brand promise in a narrative expressed as 100-word and 50-word statements, brand values and a tagline ‘More than energy from waste’, which references the energy from waste process – high temperatures destroy any toxins, steam drives a turbine to generate electricity, excess steam is used for industry or district heating – and valuable by-products, such as ash for roadbuilding and metals for recycling, are also recovered.
The brand narrative inspired the brand design, centred on the idea of ‘imperfect circularity’. Aiming for 100% recovery, Encyclis generates clean electricity from waste that would otherwise end up in landfill, plus several useful by-products, all in the most efficient way possible, whilst acknowledging that perfect circularity may not yet be practically achievable.
The symbol reflects this rationale with a slightly elliptical design contrasted with clean sans serif logotype suggesting no-nonsense efficiency.
The symbol is also brought to life in animations and icons, which share the distinctive colour palette.
Nucleus also designed the Encyclis website, buildng it on the Umbraco Cloud CMS.
Results
The new brand was launched on January 24th 2023, 6 months after the project began. Andy Bedford, Encyclis COO commented: “We are absolutely delighted with our new brand name and identity. Nucleus’ process was frictionless, moving from brand naming to brand promise, identity and website design without a hitch, creating a distinctive and meaningful brand we can lead the industry with.”
In July and September 2024 Encyclis announced the go-ahead for an Irish bottom ash processing plant to recycle bottom ash from the Dublin waste-to-energy facility and then approval to build a pioneering carbon capture plant alongside its Protos waste-to-energy plant in Cheshire, capturing CO2 from the facility for storage in depleted gas fields in Liverpool Bay. These latest innovations further reinforce the vision behind the name.