When this photo was taken earlier this year, the photographer wanted me in front of something that was valuable in the waste. And of course, everything was valuable. Nothing deserved to be there. It was all either valuable in its own right, or able to be dismantled or recycled or composted.
We were standing in the most conspicious show of waste, and it was all going to landfill. Me, the CEO of the organisation running the site, and unable to do anything about it. The photographer there to show me dwarfed by my failure. It was kind of symptomatic of a deeper problem, and reinforced my decision to go into business to create a world without waste.
The problem
We confront this conspicuous waste every day in our management of cities. Everywhere we turn, we feel we are failing in the fight against waste. Every time we chart key waste statistics, the total waste to landfill seems impossible to shift down. Worse still, the total waste generated continues to climb. We are being swamped by rubbish, and no matter what we try to do, we can't seem to rein it in.
If you are anything like me, you take this as a personal affront. How can we possibly claim to make our cities more liveable, more sustainable, more in keeping with their underlying ecosystems if we can’t even balance that most man-made of elements: production and waste? How the hell can we talk about geo-engineering to control climate change when we can’t even engineer solutions to problems created entirely by ourselves? And then, with all of these misgivings, how can we even think about a world without waste?
For starters, we are not failing for a lack of trying. There is more regulation of waste now than there ever was. We have laws governing what can be thrown out, how it can be thrown out, what is done with it once it’s thrown out. There is a massive and growing wall of legislation attempting to stem the tide.
Below the level of regulation, we have an even denser thicket of policies, strategies and plans. We set targets, fight for funding programmes, announce new waste processing infrastructure, and still make little headway. There is waste without end.
This matters. Waste is a subset of the broader challenge of making cities work. The whole idea of our civilisation embedded within spaceship earth, that there is no “away”. And at core, we don’t really know whether we are destroying ourselves by consuming our natural capital, or whether our cleverness will save the day. Some argue that the only way out of the current situation is for civilisation to collapse. Part of “the situation” is the problem of waste.
And so again, how can we claim to be so damn clever in what we do, and yet not be able to close the loop? How can we aspire to colonise space, the seas, the world of ideas, when we can’t even work out how to use vital industrial ingredients like rare earths more than once? When we can take the solution of a closed nutrient cycle, and make two problems of it: nutrient deficient agricultural land on the one hand, and eutrophication of waterways from sewage outflows on the other.
And sure, this is by no means the only challenge confronting our ability to make cities sustainable, but you’d have to think it’s a pretty good litmus test. If we can’t sort this out, then it’s fair to assume that our vastly increasing powers of production will send us down the tubes pretty soon.
It’s pretty much the perfect problem. Not only do we have a lot of waste that grows fast, but our current tools to address it aren’t working as well as they should. Government intervention can only do so much. The market doesn’t seem to be dealing with it. It’s a problem that seems much too big for individual citizens, too fine grained for big players and far too complex for a tech solution.
In fact, as we look closer and closer, we seem to find more and more complexity. The problem becomes increasingly like a fractal, with more and more wrinkles observable the deeper you look. It’s because of this that I don’t think we can solve problems by analysis any more. There’s just too much going on to understand the problem, much less solve it. And even if you could understand the problem, that knowledge would be rapidly redundant.
For all this, there remains the fallacy of hoping for centralised coordination. It is not simply difficult, it’s not a problem that can be solved with better information. It’s a problem that can’t be understood in any meaningful way. In fact, in framing the problem we create it. When we ask the question of how much waste is going to landfill, we create the problem of waste at landfill rather than the opportunity of byproducts recovered. We create waste by defining it so.
All of these struggles are indirectly pre-empted by John Seely-Brown, John Hagel and Lang Davison of the
Deloitte Centre for the Edge in their book the
Power of Pull. That book essentially explains how scalable efficiency, the so-called “economies of scale”, is redundant. Scalable efficiency requires an ability to predict the future in order to develop the scale to deliver on those future opportunities. It also requires an ability to control the future by controlling information. In a world where the future changes fast and information flows freely, there is no longer any economy to scale. Instead, scale inhibits our freedom to move in a rapidly changing world.
But everywhere you look, scale is precisely the approach that we take with waste management. We look for ways to consolidate waste streams, to perhaps legislate for sufficient waste for a large scale solution, establishing infrastructure that requires large waste volumes to be viable, and maintaining an assymetry of information that embeds such structures.
In fact, scale is so dominant that we can only see solutions that work at scale. Any other type of solution is discounted as trivial. And that is at the core of many of the problems we have with waste. The framework of scalable efficiency, and the rapid obsolence of scale as a concept today.
The solution
So having set out how I see the problem, let me try to describe a solution. Because I think there is one, and in fact, the solution is really exciting.
My thinking boils down to dissolving this concept of a large volume of mixed up waste, and replacing it with a whole lot of smaller volumes of separated byproducts. In this world, a fleet of huge trucks will be swept aside by small, nimble vehicles. Coarse, aggregated data will be useless in the face of detailed, specific information. Big waste processing plants, landfills will scramble for waste because byproducts don't need to be incinerated or dumped. And processing opportunities will rapidly evolve.
The end point will be a continued race to dissolve waste to its constituent byproducts. The most nimble, most focused, most able to absorb innovation will lead. Indeed, this player will be a dominant player because of the depth of connection across the physical economy. Given the current immense investment in dealing with waste as waste, this will be a massive disruption.
And so the models of industrial production and all of the regulatory approach that accompanies industrial age thinking, are no longer appropriate. Instead, we need to think about scaling learning rather than efficiency, about antifragility, about taking an approach that has more in common with social media than it does with industrial production.
Scalable learning builds on the fact that competitive advantage now is NOT based on stocks of knowledge, but is based on having access to flows of knowledge. It’s about having access to the tacit knowledge that is up to the minute, that can't be documented, procedurised, captured into knowledge management systems. This is the knowledge that bounces around the cloud of networks that surround a company and its people.
Scalable learning is leveraging platforms that scale transactions and relationships, moving beyond them to embed the values of learning deep into the institutional design. It is, as Seely-Brown and Co call it, the formation of “creation spaces”. Creating teams that drive deep interactions, but also driving the diffusion of ideas across teams.
That is, a creation space is a zone where the answers are not known, but sought. Where knowledge is actively shared in the pursuit of new insights. Where imperfectly optimised systems that can be rapidly modified are preferred to perfect, but rapidly obsolete, solutions. Where economies of scale are the last thing you want to do.
You would be creating a space for free-form innovation, for refusing to accept constraints that were applied in a previous age. In this world, why wouldn't you create byproduct collection runs that service one or two of a manufacturer's many bins, and are done in a ute. Indeed, the waste might be processed at the place of waste generation, creating a product for the customer to resell.
Wouldn't that be an insane world? Rather than trying to sell bin collections to fill out a truck's run, you make a cut on value add markets for products extracted and resold from the waste.
It gets crazier.
Rather than working to funnel all waste down your own gob, you work to create dense networks of partners, sharing a stake in their success, and creating structures where all are rewarded for elevating value. A world where value is extracted from a better grasp of the details. A world of abundant opportunities for many, many entrepreneurs who weave together a network of dense inter-connectivity.
This approach of scalable learning means that we can begin to unlock the unlimited potential of ourselves and our organisations.
Now to the antifragile. The antifragile is an idea put out there by Nicholas Nassim-Taleb in his book of the same name. It is about making systems not just robust in the face of change, but instead, making them strengthened through change. It turns out that the antifragile is a really good model for creating a world without waste.
Nassim-Taleb writes about 12 elements, but you can really boil it all down to a central point, which is that you need to be prepared to take a lot of small bets. You need to provide the space for serendipity to work in your favour. That is done by focussing on options, being curious, looking at the edge where you no longer look like a waste activity. It is an iterative not analytical solution, and it’s a solution that doesn’t rest.
It is also an approach the relies heavily upon collaboration and trading across networks. It lives by the motto that information wants to be free, rather than accumulating information to hoard power. Learning does not operate in the stagnant waters of stored knowledge, but instead spins in the free-flowing stream of sharing. Just for the sake of it, because you never know what connection might be made.
It is, as I like to call it, a world where the information surface area is as great as possible. Just as cooling and cleaning is enhanced by a large physical surface area, so too is new learning encouraged by having a large information surface area. That’s not just collecting the fine grained information about which materials are where and when, but making that information freely available. It is looking to create a swarm of solution providers rather than a monolithic operator. It is a solution that has a fractal kind of elegance to it rather than a brutal kind of design beauty.
Finally, to consider the world of social media and its relevance to a world without waste, it strikes me that the sort of community of possibility being established in social media is quite incredible. This sense of freely sharing knowledge on the understanding that, somehow, you will be the beneficiary of something much larger than you have shared, is astounding. It’s unbelievable, actually, until you truly participate with trust.
You see, to work, social media requires a sense of quite indirect reciprocity. If somebody helps you, you help others. It is a gift economy in the sense that the greatest rewards flow to those who give the most freely. It is counter-intuitive in a world where we expect everything to be immediately monetised, but it works. It works because there is an immense sense of abundance, that the goal is to unlock new opportunities than protect current ones.
And that is the sense that we need to create for a world without waste. We need to create a world where connection matters far more than mass, where sharing and reciprocity and serendipity take the place of experts grinding out solutions. We need a world where amateurs scaffold themselves through continued learning and sharing of knowledge into a much more powerful position than the experts.
We need to let go of the pretence of control, and embrace experimentation.
Case study
So what does all of this look like in practice?
Well, I try to live it in the activities of Garbologie.
If you go to the Garbologie site, you’ll find a link to a Scoop.it magazine called
The Future of Waste. Here I share waste related news. It’s free, and anybody can bounce off it.
If you go to
my Google+ profile, you’ll see more information shared about stuff that is even more indirectly related to waste,. Similarly, the
Garbologie Facebook page tries to share knowledge learned through our waste processing activities.
As for waste processing, we are starting out with mattress recycling because that is a perfect demonstration of the point. We take on a small opportunity and make it awesome. We’ll then do the same with a transfer station/tip shop. Then we’ll deal with other materials.
In doing this, the additional opportunities that have come my way have been quite amazing.
Action step
But that’s me. What can you do?
I suggest that the first thing you do is get your head out of the mode of a big problem with only a few, expensive and difficult solutions. Instead, think of waste as many, many opportunities that lie open to you for exploration. To you.
Explore the ideas, but more importantly, share yours. No matter how dumb. See which ideas work or don’t by the only way that is valid. By testing them.
Form a group of people around you. They don’t have to have anything to do with waste, but I’d suggest they should have big dreams and be prepared to make them happen.
All of this will work. It seems like it won’t, that it can’t, but it will. If you believe that you can change the world, you will. You will finally see the opportunities that were there all along, you will attract the serendipity that makes them possible..
Don’t abdicate responsibility for the problem to the government, or to the majors, or even to your boss. Get out and make it happen.
Your final answer will probably look a whole lot different to mine. That’s ok. That’s the point. There are many ways to cut this problem, and the more people who come up with their own solutions, the more likely we are to have an answer.
Waste is the uncharted territory for sustainability. It’s also solely our creation. I think we can solve it, probably using the approaches I’ve outlined. And then, once we’ve done this, we show the way for other, truly wicked problems like climate change, loss of biodiversity, and how to make our cities reach their full potential without leaving people behind.
We can do it. You can do it.
By way of a footnote, all of the images are from the HBO series "The Game of Thrones". Except for the photo of me. My scenes in the Game of Thrones were all cut.
