We are five partners, plus a dozen people at the workshop and in customer service. We design our ashtrays by hand in the Somme département, we install them ourselves at our clients' sites, and we organise their recycling with two industrial partners we trust. Our job fits in one sentence: take off companies' hands a topic they shouldn't have to manage in 2026 anymore.
— Gautier, Paul, Guillaume, Corentin & Nicolas
Five different paths, one shared project: building a family of circular services for companies, starting from their most poorly managed waste. Two co-founders in 2019, three partners joining in 2023-2024 to scale up.
Gautier leads client relationships and sales strategy: on-site audits, plan selection, key account follow-up. He runs the meetings with CSR and facilities departments, and trains new commercial hires. His pet peeve: refusing hollow marketing speak and preferring to tell the truth — even when it stings.
Paul is an engineer by training. He set up the workshop in Picardie, designed the first Easy Premium and Easy Eco ashtrays, and built the relationships with our industrial partners (MéGO in Brittany, clikeco nationally). On the finance side, he handles regulatory compliance, client reporting for CSRD and Ecovadis audits, and the overall management of the group.
Guillaume joined the adventure in 2023 to structure operations at scale. He leads the coordination of collection rounds with our logistics partners, the planning of multi-site rollouts, and the smooth running of operating cycles. When your quote turns into an operational service on the ground, it's his team that orchestrates the switch.
Corentin joined Easy to Change in 2024 to support the group's commercial growth. He leads development on key accounts and multi-site clients, and structures the sales approach alongside Gautier. He comes from management consulting and brings pipeline and client-follow-up discipline that the teams appreciate day to day.
Nicolas joined the group in 2024 to carry the Easy to Change brand and the content strategy. He leads the website, the campaigns, the awareness materials distributed at our clients' sites, and the communications of both brands (Easy to Change and Easy to Compost). He is also Publication Director of easytochange.co. His angle: getting a clear, honest message across on a topic where greenwashing is easy.
Around the partners, about ten people: the workshop team (ashtray manufacturing, painting, quality control), the customer service and coordination team, and our installation and maintenance crews across continental Europe.
Our workshop has been rooted in the Somme département since the very beginning. Every Easy Premium and Easy Eco ashtray is welded, painted, assembled and checked by hand before being shipped to our clients. No factory on the other side of the world, no anonymous assembly line, no parts travelling six months in a container before reaching an office car park.
We made this choice for three concrete reasons:
It's slower and more expensive than a low-cost chain. It's also what lets us guarantee our ashtrays for life without fearing the bill.
It all started with a hunch: in companies, it is not "noble" waste (paper, cardboard, clean plastic) that causes trouble — solid streams already exist for those. What sticks is diffuse, poorly managed, poorly funded, poorly understood waste: canteen biowaste, cigarette butts from smoking areas, and many other streams admin jargon lumps under "and the rest".
Hence the project name at the time: Caeterra. A play on the Latin "et cætera" — literally "and all the other things" — that captured the ambition: tackle everything that remains once the big streams are handled. Not the fancy recycling centre, but the real day-to-day mess.
We started with biowaste, because it was the most urgent topic: French AGEC law was coming, corporate restaurants had no solution, and most existing providers sold kit composters without dealing with what happens next. Easy To Compost was born with one simple stance: an integrated service, from bin to final agricultural compost, with a single point of contact.
The name also marked a posture shift: we stopped leading with the parent company (Caeterra, hard to pronounce, meaningless to anyone) to speak directly to the client about what we do for them. "Easy To… [action verb]". One brand per stream, easy to grasp.
Caeterra received the Hodéfi Winner 2023 prize, along with the TotalEnergies special jury mention. Not just a medal on the shelf: it was the first time an outside player — and not just anyone, a major energy group seeing hundreds of CSR projects pass through — recognised that our approach holds up. It also gave us access to support programmes and a first network of serious prospects.
2024 marked the move to scale: TotalEnergies, among others, became a client. We gradually rolled out across their sites, learned to handle multi-site management, hardened our quarterly reporting process. That was also when we realised another stream was being asked for non-stop by existing clients: cigarette butts.
Growth forced an organisational change. To scale cleanly, we brought in three partners taking structural roles:
We grew from two to five partners. That was the step that would let us launch Easy To Change as a full-blown service the following year.
The picture was clear: cigarette butt pollution in smoking areas is poorly addressed, poorly funded, and the few providers on the market either sell ashtrays without service, or defend a single recycling technology. We launched Easy To Change — the group's second brand, same posture as Easy To Compost: integrated service, technology neutrality, workshop rooted in Picardie.
On the front we are now "the Easy To group" with two visible brands (Easy To Compost, Easy To Change) — and a third service in preparation. Caeterra remains the legal name (the one on invoices, contracts, legal notices), but "Easy To" is what we say, carry and defend in meetings. The parent company has done its job: it has given birth to clear brands. It can now stay backstage.
Each brand handles a specific corporate waste stream, with the same promise each time: a turnkey integrated service, solid industrial partners, and a client genuinely freed from the topic.
Cigarette butt collection and recycling
Integrated B2B service for companies that want to address cigarette butts seriously: Made in Picardie ashtrays, regular collection via clikeco, material recycling with MéGO, quarterly waste transfer note for your audits.
See the serviceCorporate biowaste composting
The group's original brand, launched in 2020. Turnkey composting service for corporate restaurants, office sites and public bodies subject to French AGEC obligations: suitable bins, regular collection, recovery into agricultural compost.
Dedicated site coming soonA third B2B circular service
The group is preparing the launch of a third service specialised in another poorly managed corporate waste stream. Same posture, same standards, same format. Announcement expected in the coming months.
In preparationThe Easy To group is legally operated by Caeterra SAS (registered office: Arras, 62000, France — SIRET 921 547 956 000 26). This is the name appearing on contracts, invoices and official documents. Easy To Compost and Easy To Change are its two active commercial brands.
We do not sell an "inspiring CSR commitment". We do not do pure awareness work that vanishes three months after the workshop. We do not subcontract to an opaque operator that hides traceability to inflate margins. And we do not pretend to be "the solution" — we are a solution, a serious one, among a few other serious ones.
What we actually do: we equip you with ashtrays made in our workshop, we install them ourselves, we organise collection rounds via clikeco (present across continental Europe), we entrust the cigarette butts to MéGO for material recycling (or to a regional energy recovery stream if more relevant for your site), and we give you every quarter a signed waste transfer note for your CSRD, Ecovadis or ISO 14001 audits.
Why this approach: because the CSR, facilities and real estate managers we have been meeting for five years do not need one more partner to manage. They need one less topic to carry. The whole Easy To Change service is built around this idea — we take everything on, you keep control of the decision and the data.
Gautier, Corentin, Paul or a member of the team comes back to you personally. Not a sales rep on a generic script, not a chatbot, not an automatic email. Free audit, quote within 24 business hours, honest exchange on what we can or cannot do for your site.
You can find our full contact details (phone, email, addresses) at the bottom of the page.
