A woman kneels by an open dresser drawer at midnight, untangling chains and single earrings she hasn’t touched in years. Somewhere far away, in a river valley thick with humidity, a backhoe scrapes topsoil off a hillside that used to be forest. The metal in her hands and the metal the machine is chasing are, chemically, the same substance. One is already found. The other will cost a mountain.
She lifts a tarnished ring she stopped wearing a decade ago. Sentimental, mostly forgotten, technically worthless. Somewhere else, a solar panel factory is waiting on exactly this kind of silver.
What if the ring in the drawer and the panel on the roof were never two separate stories? What if nobody had simply bothered to connect them?
Meet Cleo Escarez
Cleo Escarez is the founder of Redyoos, a Seattle-based company that recycles pre-loved jewelry into raw material for clean energy technology, and into second chances for women rebuilding their careers. She is a mother of three, a 2025 Earthshot Prize nominee, and a former jewelry industry operations executive who spent years inside the system she now works to change. Escarez didn’t discover urban mining in a lab or a pitch deck. She discovered it in a drawer, and decided the rest of us probably have one too.
From Retail Floors to Refinery Logic
Escarez’s path to climate work didn’t start with climate work at all. She built her early career in retail and fashion merchandising, studying at the University of Washington before moving through trend analysis, product assortment planning, and sales strategy for national consumer brands. It was, in her words, training in how complicated global systems actually operate.
She describes herself as “entrepreneur curious” even in those early years, certain she’d eventually build something of her own. What she didn’t yet know was what that something would need to fix.
The turn came when she stepped fully into jewelry, eventually becoming Chief Operating Officer at Boma Silver Jewelry Company, a B-Corp pursuing profit and social good in equal measure. It was there, inside the industry, that a statistic lodged itself permanently in her mind.
“When I learned that mining the gold for just a single 14-karat wedding band releases roughly 288kg of CO2 equivalents, it completely shifted my perspective.”
For an operations executive who had spent her career optimizing other people’s supply chains, the number felt less like an abstraction and more like an assignment. As a mother, she started calculating something else entirely: what kind of planet her children would inherit from the choices her industry made every day.
That calculation became Redyoos.
The Double-Impact Blueprint
Redyoos runs on a simple premise. Customers order a free mail-in kit, fill it with jewelry they no longer wear, and send it back. Metal that can be melted gets recycled into materials for solar panels and other clean technology. Fashion pieces that can’t be melted are donated to Dress for Success, supporting women re-entering the workforce.
“Everyone and everything has a story that can lead to change, and real change happens when we design systems that care for both the planet and its people.”
That belief shapes what Escarez calls her three operating principles: double-impact, radical simplicity, and collaborative ecosystem building. Every decision at Redyoos has to serve people and planet at once, or it doesn’t happen.
“If a business choice doesn’t support both environmental progress and community empowerment, it doesn’t align with who we are.”
She is equally firm about accessibility. Sustainability, in her view, fails when it demands too much effort from ordinary people.
“Sustainability can easily feel overwhelming. A leader’s job is to demystify the complex, to make participation as heartwarming and simple as ordering a free, easy mail-in kit.”
The results back the philosophy. Redyoos has been nominated for the 2025 Earthshot Prize, one of the most prestigious environmental honors in the world, and Escarez recently delivered a TEDx talk that framed the stakes in blunt, memorable terms.
“Your jewelry box is a $61 billion graveyard. We are burying the future of clean tech.”
The comparison she returns to most often is a simple ratio: one ton of already-mined jewelry yields more usable precious metal than one ton of raw ore pulled fresh from the ground. Jewelry alone accounts for up to half the world’s silver demand, the same silver that solar panels require to function. Recovered metal, she argues, isn’t a workaround. It’s the more logical supply chain all along.
“We destroy the earth for ‘new’ gold and silver. Yet tons of it sit in junk drawers and jewelry boxes.”
The Escarez Playbook: 5 Lessons
Treat waste as an unmined resource. Before asking how to produce something new, ask what already exists that nobody is using.
Make the right choice the easy choice. Complicated sustainability initiatives fail. A free mail-in kit succeeds because it asks almost nothing of the customer.
Design for double impact, not single wins. Every initiative should serve both a planetary goal and a human one, or it isn’t finished yet.
Build partnerships instead of empires. Redyoos scaled by working with nonprofits and processors who shared the mission, not by trying to control every piece of the chain alone.
Let personal stakes sharpen professional purpose. Escarez’s clearest strategic thinking came from asking what she wanted to leave her children, not her shareholders.
What the Drawer Was Always Trying to Tell Us
That ring in the drawer, the one nobody was wearing anymore, was never clutter. It was inventory. It was a smaller, quieter version of the mountain the backhoe was digging into, except this version required no forest, no toxic runoff, no new hole in the earth. Escarez built a company on the idea that the fix for extraction wasn’t a better mine. It was a better memory of what we already own.
“Waste is just a failure of imagination.”
The mountain is still out there. But now, so is the drawer.
Cleo Escarez, Founder of Redyoos, is based in Seattle, Washington. She helps companies and consumers convert overlooked jewelry into recovered precious metals for clean technology and secondhand opportunity for women entering the workforce. To connect with Cleo or learn more about Redyoos, visit her LinkedIn profile.
