Reality stranger than fiction

Today sees a guest post from Alex Serpo, editor of Inside Waste, Australia's leading waste journal.

It is presented unedited (other than to sort out hyperlinks), but before we present the article, some background.

The key piece of information required for the story is that New South Wales has landfill levy in the order of $95/tonne. Neighbouring state Queensland has a landfill levy, but it was set at $0/tonne when Campbell Newman was voted into the Queensland government earlier this year. Finally, at 800 km away, Sydney is not close to Queensland.

So here goes Alex. After Alex, some of my opinions.

The Ten Faces of Waste Innovation

I have just finished reading The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley (of IDEO fame) and Jonathan Littman, and found it sparked an immense flow of ideas on how to develop innovation in waste management.

The book describes ten personas for innovation, grouped into three broad types

• Learning personas
• The Anthropologist
• The Experimenter
• The Cross-Pollinator
• Organising personas
• The Hurdler
• The Collaborator
• The Director
• Building personas
• The Experience Architect
• The Set Designer
• The Caregiver
• The Storyteller

What does, then, the future of waste look like?

In my post a couple of weeks ago, I set the scene for an understanding of the future of waste, describing a methodology and mapping out key components to the waste system.

I've been intending to take this "map of the future of waste" through to scenarios for waste, thinking about how to develop "anti-fragile" businesses. To be honest, the methodology has been doing my head in. It is so deliberate, almost ponderous. It feels to be grinding out an answer. As a result, I've only managed a half-arsed job.

Trends

Looking at the system map for waste, you could imagine a million trends. Waste is the whole of the world in a mirror, reversed perhaps. A shadow economy as I've described it previously.

It is here, the selection of which trends are significant and which are not, that this particular approach to futurism reveals itself as highly subjective. Some might say that is just the art of futurism. I think it's a bit more. It is where the futurist (admittedly rank amateur in my case) reveals his/her own assumptions and constrains the discussion.

I've plumped for some trends that aren't particularly interesting or controversial. They are generally macro-economic trends. Interesting ones would be the unexpected, like the growth in readership of science fiction, for instance. Interesting and unexpected trends reinforce that all is connected, and they might be more revealing in a wholly intriguing manner.

But to the macro-economic trends.

Online shopping is growing rapidly according to many studies. A quote from a PWC and Frost & Sullivan study states:

Online shopping is causing major structural changes in Australia's retail industry with a record 53 per cent of Australian consumers aged over 15 now buying online according to new research released today by PwC and Frost & Sullivan. 

The Australian and New Zealand Online Shopping report found that in 2012 online shopping in Australia will increase 17.9 per cent to $16 billion, and is predicted to grow to $26.9 billion by 2016 at a compound annual growth rate of 14.1 per cent. 

Offshore online shopping has increased by 20 per cent in the last year to $7.2 billion, and represents 45 per cent of Australia's total online shopping spend.

China and India are also growing rapidly. Considering Gross National Income in PPP dollars from Google Public Data Explorer, and plotting US, Australia, China and India is revealing.

Gross National Income in PPP dollars, Source: Google Public Data Explorer

Fuel prices might go up, or they might come down, but they're unlikely to come down as low as they were in the 1990's.

Projected world oil prices to 2035, Source: US Energy Information Administration

Mass customisation is on its way, notwithstanding some false starts along the way. Forrester Research will charge you $500 for the full report, but the summary points out:

As they have done across consumer markets, digital technologies are the disruptors. Current and emerging digital technologies are turbo-charging mass customization, breathing new life into the product strategy

The population is urbanising, and recently passed, for the first time ever, the benchmark of more people living in cities than not.

Urban and rural population of the world. Source: UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs

Prices for commodities are also steadily rising, nothwithstanding several large recent drops in prices, with the growth in food prices outstripping the growth in prices for industrial commodities (such as metals).

The Economist commodity-price index. Source: The Economist

Finally, China has recently moved to ban restrict the import of "dirty" plastics for recycling. This article fromearly September 2012 is one of many, and reports:

The new rules ban irresponsible handling of scrap materials, and impose restrictions on recycling techniques, rules on unwashed plastic materials and the handling of hazardous waste in the country

This especially impacts the UK, as it has limited incineration capacity and sends much of its plastics to China.

Scenarios

Now to a couple of scenarios

Sticking with the pretty stock-standard trends selected, I won't get too radical in terms of scenarios. The two I'll consider are both potentially shocks to the current system, and if I'd been more thorough I would have done a couple that reinforce the status quo.

In the vein of all great futurists, I've come up with (pretty unimaginative) names for my scenarios:

• The Great Oil Crisis
• The Dragon is Slain

The Great Oil Crisis

Life's a bit of a struggle out here with fuel being the price it is. When you need a week's salary to fill your tank, you think pretty long and hard about what you're going to go get. And that suburban lifestyle? Forget it. We moved to the city long ago like a lot of our neighbours. Everything's a lot easier here, although if you'd have told me I'd be living in an apartment back in the good old days, I'd laugh. But it's nice, actually. We can get all the stuff we need, ordered on line, made exactly to your liking, and home delivered. Most of the short trip cars are electric, with only long haul ones being fueled by oil. 

Some people weren't as flexible as us, couldn't go without their acre block, were happy to buy up cheap land. They pretty much had to change over to electric, so the big freeways in and out are filled with either electric vehicles or fueled delivery vehicles. China's still booming, though. They've got cheap energy, see, so they can make anything there and ship it over here on huge ships. Another reason why we had to move into the city - just more opportunities here than there ever were where we used to live.

The Dragon is Slain 

Funny how we used to wish that China would go away, stop taking our jobs. Well, China did go away. Economy collapsed, we can theoretically have our jobs back. But we can't, because nobody wants to work for the money on offer, and nobody can afford what's being made. Especially if you work one of the 'jobs that came back'. So we just have to do without. Mend and make do, they say. But it's not quite that straightforward. All of the stuff that we got used to having - to recycle it needed a market. And the market, China, has collapsed, so recycling has too. Yep, there are a few local entrepreneurs looking to build up local industries, but they are battling. Fuel is just so damn cheap, and it's just as easy to dump it in a landfill.

We'll be ok, I'm sure. It's nothing we haven't got ourselves out of before, but having to pay real money for stuff bothers me. I think we kind of got used to stupid low prices for stuff coming out of China that, when it stopped, we all felt ripped off and so stopped buying altogether.

What's it all mean?

For waste? Well, I think there are growing trends for local value add to waste. Yes, that seems counter-intuitive in a world of massive globalisation, of specialisation of functions into particular economies. But I feel that the anti-fragile move is to establish local businesses.

I also feel that there will be growing moves to improve the at-home service offering. This might something like a reverse delivery service, especially if commodity values increase to the point where it can pay for itself. It might be centred on a building rather than person. But I think people will expect to be doing less and less with their waste, and so waste handlers will need to do more for them.

There may also be a trend to establish mass burn incinerators. More waste in an energy starved world leads to a pretty obvious solution. Take energy out of the equation, however, and mass burn rapidly falls away, with the physical resources becoming much more valuable.

Finally, there will be increasing exotic materials in waste, and those materials will be valuable. There will be a lot of effort put in to recovering them. Things like rare earths in magnets used for electric cars, plus all of the tech applications I have no idea of now.

Rounding out

As I wrote at the start, this exercise did my head in. It is quite ponderous, and more significantly, is heavily tethered back to the reality you start with. I don't know if I like it as a system. The scenarios it produces risk confusing precision (they are 'supported' by a lot of data) for accuracy. In reality, the scenarios are as much a creation as me sitting down and dreaming a vision - the data obscures this truth.

Even worse, the approach seems to constrain me to what is likely, and the one thing I know is that what is likely, isn't. That is, the probability of the most likely scenario I can come up with is still very low.

I think I prefer a bit of a reverse engineered approach. I'll go into a bit more or sometime soon (after my brain recovers), but it involves coming up with the scenario you want, and then working out what you need to happen to get there. Including what you can do. So you can dream up how you want to be anti-fragile, and then make it happen.

So my apologies to the futurists who make a living out of this. I hope I haven't offended. No doubt I've ballsed it all up in my haste and amateurism. Your profession is still intact, and I would love to work with you some time. I still find the idea of making stories fascinating, and look forward to doing so using trends that seem utterly irrelevant to the task at hand.

Composite plastics from waste

I regularly find incredible surprises through social media. People doing great work, sharing, helping out.

One such surprise was Cibele Oliveira, from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. She got in touch in response to my scoop.it magazine, alerting me to work she has done on the manufacture of composite plastics using a mix of plastic and organic materials. Composite plastics are not particularly new.

The work that Cibele drew my attention to was the production of these composite plastics using a mix of plastics sorted from Municipal Solid Waste and bagasse. A paper presenting her work is contained in a book containing prize winning research into sustainable cities (pdf - go to page 166).

Since the work is published in Portugese, I did a rough and ready translation using Google Translate so that I could get a sense of what the work was about. Of course, any poor writing is entirely my fault, and I invite readers to offer corrections where necessary.

The thrust of the work is that composite materials were able to be manufactured from a blend of waste plastic and bagasse, without affecting too many of the mechanical strength properties. However, the rigidity and thermal stability are considerably affected, a thermal anti-oxidant would need to be used if the recycling composites were to be used in applications where thermal stability is important.

Bagasse reinforced composite plastics, in the proportion of 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% and 25% bagasse 

It is important work, and has many echos of the work being done by Waste for Life, a group that describes itself as:

Waste for Life is a loosely joined network of scientists, engineers, educators, architects, artists, designers, and cooperatives working together to develop poverty-reducing solutions to specific environmental problems. We use scientific knowledge and low-threshold/high-impact technologies to add value to resources that are commonly considered harmful or without worth, but are often the source of livelihood for society’s poorest members. Our twin goals are to reduce the damaging environmental impact of non-recycled plastic waste products and to promote self-sufficiency and economic security for at-risk populations who depend upon waste to survive.

We, ourselves, are not interested in profit, but are keen to disseminate a technology that upgrades waste plastic and natural fibers into composite materials for use in domestic products and building materials.

This is all really interesting work. To be able to take plastics of no value in MSW and make it into useful products, whilst at the same time assisting to resolve poverty, is an impressive undertaking. It is pure entrepreneurship, with very limited safety net in the event that it fails.

So thanks Cibele, and thanks to the contacts at Waste for Life who I've dealt with in the past.

Attempting a map of the future of waste

A previous post described my first taste of futurism through the use of scenarios. That has coincided with some interesting discussions with Eric Garland and Hildy Gottlieb, interesting readings, including Eric's books and a paper "Strengthening Environmental Foresight: Potential Contributions of Futures Research", and interesting further connections to explore.

What this has given me is food for thought on how to think about the future. One approach is to project forward from today, including thinking about the possibility of disruptive events. The other is to look at the future you want to create and reverse engineer your way back to what needs to happen to get to that future. These approaches are probably unfairly opposed. I associate them with Eric and Hildy respectively. Not because Eric or Hildy is a strong exemplar of either (though they may be), but simply because I know of the approaches through them.

Today I want to think about the approach represented by Eric. Actually, I want to set the groundwork for some further thinking to be done in a subsequent post.

Eric's book Future, Inc sets out a methodology for thinking about the future. It is systematic, first starting with:

Data

The first step is to understand the system, its key components. Knowing the system, you can then look at trends (qualitative) that might affect system components, and attempt to put numbers around them to form forecasts (quantitative). This is important stuff, and seeks to narrow questions (forecasts) down to a sufficiently narrow base such that they can be answered.

Implications

Having the data, it then needs to be explored for implications. Two approaches are suggested:

• A "futures wheel", where a single change can be fanned out into primary, secondary and tertiary implications. The example from Eric's book is below:

Futures wheel, page 93 of Future, Inc by Eric Garland.

• A "cross-impact analysis". This is a pretty straightfoward analysis that enables separate trends to be systematically analysed to see how they might interact upon combination.

Scenarios

So all of the above gathers information that is likely to be interesting but boring. And thus useless. Sure, it will capture some compelling factors to consider, but it will be abstract. This is overcome by developing scenarios.

Scenarios are stories we tell about a point of time in the future, preferably at least 5-10 years in the future to escape the orbit of here and now. The stories are not to be likely (as Herman Kahn put it, "the most likely future isn't"), but instead are to be plausible enough to think through what they mean. The stories are also close to home, even prosaic. So it might be "how does a typical family have breakfast in 2020", or "what is the headline of your local paper's 'Year in Review' edition for 2020". By using a story and making it local, you cut through the fog of abstraction and come down to something that people can relate to.

Eric suggests more than one, and preferably four scenarios, for presentation and discussion. Having only two leads to people polarising to one or the other, three permits people to select for a "middle ground" between two apparent extremes, and more than four starts to become too confusing. Four is just right.

The interesting bit comes from the scenarios. They are used (and here I shift in focus from Eric Garland to Nicholas Nassim Taleb) to understand where you are vulnerable to black swans, or low probability, high impact events. You work out how to position yourself, your business, such that these events do not kill you, and ideally you are strengthened through them. That is NOT the same is predicting the events. That would be impossible.

Applying this to the future of waste

For today I won't track right through this process. Waste is complex. Or at least, it seems complex to me having spent a fair bit of time within the industry. So to start, I've done a dump of components of the waste system  into Freemind. It's copied below as a picture, and you can get the Freemind version here. I welcome you to look and play.

Systems map for waste. Find the Freemind version here

From here, I want to explore this system through to understanding trends, forecasts and implications such that I can prepare four (4) scenarios. And then explore how to become antifragile. Of course, my analysis won't be right. It will need significant improvement. But the point is to do the exercise and see what comes of it. To learn through trying.

Building a business - the story continues

In the time since my "Moving from working a job to building a business" post a few weeks back, I've been through a few ups and downs. My day job (CEO of a metropolitan council grouping looking after waste management, called somewhat misleadingly a "regional council") continues to cross over into Garbologie. Moods go up, they come down, they go bleak, exultant, then bored. I think I know what I'm doing, then I realise I never will, and finally acccept I know enough.

It's no tougher than what anybody else goes through.

The sideswipe

A few days after the post, I was summonsed along with all other metro Council CEOs and Mayors/Presidents to a presentation by the Premier of Western Australia of the findings of a Metropolitan Local Government Review. To cut a long story short, we learned that the 30-odd Councils in Perth are recommended to become 12. All of the Councils in my regional council become one, making my job redundant. And, in case you missed it with that recommendation, the review explicitly recommends that all metropolitan regional councils be dissolved. But because this is in fact a long story, there is consultation through until 5 April 2013. Almost 6 months!

Now this shouldn't really bother me. I'd already decided that I wouldn't be renewing my contract at the end of May 2013. I'd crossed the Rubicon, telling Council of my decision. But in thinking this through for the regional council, I'd satisfied myself that a new CEO would be good for the organisation, taking it to new levels. The news shattered that hope for the future, wiping out the work over the past 2.5 years to build the organisation.

Side-swiped! From the AFL. Source: The Age

It also brought out a sense of greed. To recruit a CEO for the role, the council will need to offer a pretty attractive early termination bonus in the event that the organisation is wound up. Six months is not uncommon. "Why?", I thought, "should some schmuck come in to the place I've worked so hard to develop and walk away with the loot? Why can't I have that? It sure would come in handy when I'm trying to get Garbologie off the ground.

I'll be honest. Having the prospect of $50,000 (perhaps) of free money is very tempting, with the only catch being that I have to put my plans on hold a little. The devil couldn't do better.

The yawning abyss

On the weekend after learning that my organisation will be dissolved, I looked at a potential property for Tip/Shop. It was pretty grim, and the area the sort of place I'd rather not be. Seriously. It had a bad vibe, and I tend to listen to those vibes. So I didn't take it any further with that particular place. The challenge is, for the business to work it needs to be in the general area that I looked at. Fortunately there are places that are nice, but they are very hard to come across.

So I faced the abyss. My core selling proposition, a location that is the most convenient offering for a large population, might not be possible to find. Certainly not easy to find leasehold, and I don't have the capital to buy it myself. About $2m for a suitable site. My piggy-bank comes nowhere near this.

The yawning abyss. From Star Wars. Source: Kahri Sampson blog

The bridge

It was not all bad. A meeting with our mortgage broker (we are looking to borrow against our house to finance part of the business) drew really strong affirmations of the business idea from him, and a strong belief that he can find investors prepared to invest in the business.

So we're back to happiness. That parcel of land may not be inaccessible after all. Structure a business such that there is a separate entity owning the land, with most of the funds coming from investors and the entity paid a standard lease. Garbologie is then financed as a straight business, preferably with me holding 70%.

The bridge. Sydney Harbour Bridge from Sydney Showcase

So the bridge and the belief worked wonders.

The fog

The joy of believing that you have a business after all doesn't last a long time. If you're lucky it survives a day. In this case, I got myself all befuddled with thinking about a swirl of futures. Part of that was prompted by my reading a whole heap of really interesting books. Most was brought on by a "future scenarios" session I did in at Spacecubed. I was the faux client for an international consulting firm, and the exercise was intended to train management consultants in how to use the tool. The upshot for me was despair about the challenges ahead, and amazement at the use of future thinking.

The fog. London 1952. Source: Another Nickel in the Machine

The despair has now dissipated, but the amazement has grown. The fog remains. I think I attempt too much, am getting ahead of myself, will find my way back home if I follow the hazy outlines of features I know well. The business. The core offering. The trajectory it is to follow. The rest can come later.

The light

Finally, after the crazy ups and downs, a light.

In my day job, we learn of a project (not generally known) being done by a consultant for the Department of Environment and Conservation to learn what happens to mattresses in Perth, and the barriers to recycling them through the sole recycling plant at Hazelmere. DEC only starts this sort of a study if it is thinking about intervening. The word is that it will contribute to the cost of recycling so that more mattresses are recycled.

Now I'll withhold my opinion on the merits of the subsidy, and merely state that mattress recycling is a core part of what I intend to do. The timing is about right - I should be up and running in time to be in the way of some of the river of money pouring out the DEC.

And so a light. The core offering is fine. Not that I want to be reliant on the Government for my business to be viable, but it will help get the business off the ground.

The light. Source: cFranklinPhotos, Flickr

The light is further strengthened by Eric Garland quoting Clayton Christensen:

First, innovators peel off your least profitable business, increasing your operating profit and making you feel like you got rid of your worst business and that it is not a big deal. Now the smaller competitor is financed, hungry, and ready to go after even more business, perhaps changing the market dynamic for good. The incumbent is left being gnawed at by a ravenous mob of innovators, like some poor wildebeest beset by a pack of hyenas on the Discovery Channel.

And that is me. Or at least, where I want to be. I am taking on the least profitable business of the current waste operators because I know I can do it better and I also know that they won't chase me. They may even help me take it off their hands. After then, well, that's when it gets bloody. I had decided this before reading Eric or Clayton, and so having it affirmed is tremendously empowering. A light beaming through the fog.

Reducing the cost of failure in waste innovation

In my last post "How to drive innovation in waste", I wrote about a foment of ideas being critical to innovation proceeding. From this foment, good ideas emerge and can then be developed.

Having written it, this model of innovation troubles me a little. Not because it doesn't work, but because it glides straight over something really important - and that is how to select ideas. But first, let me go back a step or two.

Publish then filter

I've been reading Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky lately, and the key point that sticks in my mind is the notion of "publish, then filter". Rather than filtering before publishing, the social model for innovation is to publish first, then let something like natural selection filter.

Now this model works where the cost of publishing is very low. It simply happens because it is cheaper (time, money, whatever) to publish than it is to evaluate. In fact, it is so cheap to publish that you can use the audience to filter for you.

Now how might you run a similar model in a waste processing business? Keep in mind that my aspiration for Garbologie is to make waste redundant. Everything becomes reincorporated into the productive economy rather than being siphoned off into large and growing waste streams at landfill, incineration or whatever.

Top-down and bottom-up

Attempting this through centralised data leads to a particular type of top-down approach. That approach is governed by thinking at a scale it can conceive of (large infrastructure), and is motivated by a drive to achieve targets whilst minimising environmental impacts. If you are in the business for long enough, this seems the only way to proceed.

Top down view, Empire State Building. Source: notmyholiday.com

Frankly, having been in the business for a while, this approach is paralysing and stupefying. It's paralysing because it requires massive capital investment, and this investment means that you have to be right. And stupefying because the only way to be right in waste is to go for the broadest, least value adding base.

My thinking is to attempt a bottom-up solution. It would seek to carve out particular materials from the waste stream and reprocess them. It would, necessarily, be formed of a network of loosely connected operations. Businesses even.

Bottom up view, Empire State Building. Source: Aquirkyblog.com

The challenge in bottom-up

The trouble is, how do you identify the materials to be carved out? And what is there to do with them? In building and sharing a scoop.it resource regarding innovation in waste management ("The Future of Waste"), I've come to realise that there is little shortage of ideas for processing a whole slew of materials.

There is no simple source of data that shows how much of a particular material is in the waste stream, and certainly nothing sufficiently fine-grained to enable decision making. There is no way to get help that isn't mediated by the same professionals who are locked into a "bigger is better" mindset. And the costs of failure are large - to test something you have to build it and hope they come.

So to me, the challenge is threefold:

1. Collect data. Lots of it, cutting across the problem on a range of different angle, and making that data as publicly available as possible
2. Be guided by the wisdom of non experts seeing the data with fresh eyes
3. Make the cost of failure low so that ideas can be attempted easily

My proposed solution

To me, many of the challenges are well on their way to being resolved by starting a business that is both broad and shallow. I have decided to do this through Tip/Shop, a site that is both: 

1. A customer oriented waste facility, clean, friendly and utterly focused on recycling as much as possible. As far as the customer is concerned, this is a place that is nice to visit, nothing like a waste facility; and
2. A test bed and incubator, gathering data on the materials coming in, seeking opinions from staff and customers on which materials could be next processes, and testing out micro-scale ventures to process them/

By having a steady stream of materials coming through, and by having sufficient space to undertake small scale trials, you can tinker until something works. That then develops into its own business, perhaps moves away to develop on its own trajectory. 

If you could do this as a myriad of employee centred ventures, each given support to come up with something that might eventually work and they can own a piece of, then you've created a business that is porous, interconnected and retains that "surface area" of a lot of people testing a lot of ideas on the ground. 

So this is how I propose to reduce the cost of failure in innovation. Provide a space where there is plenty of opportunity, and where experiments can be run regularly and easily. Make those experiments deeply personal to the people running them, and you might, just might, reduce the cost of failure.

How to drive innovation in waste

I keep coming back to this idea that waste management must innovate itself into sustainability

My problem is that, even as I write this, I realise that the statement is hollow. It's full of hollow words, like "innovate" and "sustainability" - empty vessels that can be filled with whatever meaning you want to fill them with.

The hollow words are a bit of a warning sign. They usually come out when good intentions go home. I suspect we've all experienced this - anybody ever been inflicted with "high performing teams"? We get a bit cynical when the words appear. They are usually foils to continue with precisely the opposite. Or nothing.

Let me clear here. What I have in mind is that we MUST find new ways of doing "waste" to stop this ceaseless (but rational) flow of materials through our society. That "MUST" has the passion behind it of a full-blooded scream from a cliff top.

How might it be done?

I suspect the innovation we need will not be achieved by decree. It won't happen through 5 year plans, or centralised command and control systems, or some sort of industry focus group. It also probably already exists. Just not where you'd go looking for it.

For me, I think the innovation we need will emerge out of a foment of ideas. An unexpected connection made between two seemingly disparate ideas. I don't know what the connection might be, which ideas might be banged together, but I DO know that you're more likely to find it if you keep knocking the ideas around.

Foment 1 by Arvid Wangen. From http://painting410.blogspot.com.au/

Where do the ideas come from?

Ideas will come from all over the place. As I've suggested above, the next incredible thing probably already exists, but not where you expect it. Let it come to you by exploring all different fields. Follow your nose. Let your interests take you to someplace new.

For me, I love the ideas swirling around emergent design. There are some great thinkers on Google+, Facebook and Twitter. So for me, ideas come from listening to what they have to say, contributing to the conversation, sharing where you can.

For others it will be different. I've had people suggest ideas from science-fiction, from movies, even chats with their mates over a BBQ. The point is not whether the ideas are intellectual or not, but whether they make interesting connections.

Again, the more ideas that bounce around, the more likely it is you'll find connections.

How do you bring that into business?

"This is all very well Adam", you might think, "but I have a business to run, and we can't just sit around and dream up new ideas.

True. But that's not really what I'm referring to. What I have in mind is creating a workplace culture where new ways of doing things are continually sought after, tested and then evaluated.

It is creating a workplace where ideas are tested BEFORE they are evaluated. It is creating a culture that assumes most ideas won't be quite right and a very few are awesome, but doesn't presume to know which is which.

It is creating a certain diversity of function, or background, of personal views and giving each equal autonomy to create. And reinforcing that the only judge is the customer. An idea might seem a dud to all within the business, but be a raging success with the customer. That idea is just as good as one that all staff vote on as being the best idea. And even better if the best idea (as voted by staff) isn't also a raging success.

To get to this point, ideas must be small enough to be "fail-able". There's no point in testing an idea which, if it fails, will bring down the business. I suspect this is where the cleverness comes in. Just as the smart part of science comes in designing experiments to test an hypothesis, the clever part of innovation is designing trials that test an idea.

What do good ideas look like?

I think around to ideas that I've tried or seen tried in waste. One was mattress recycling. Offered $10 per recycled mattress, staff didn't bother with high-tech solutions, but instead got a stock of knives and developed a system to dismantle mattresses by hand.

Similarly timber recycling. I had presumed that the best idea was to recycle timber to woodchip for supply to particle board manufacturers. Indeed, that was (and is) a good idea, but it relied upon chicken growers to buy the dust screened out of the woodchip. And this byproduct market was actually more reliable than the primary market.

It goes on. The best ideas, best markets, best technologies are never (or rarely) what you expect. The best you can hope to do is create the space for them to be tested, and to move in response to your testing.

Why are you telling us this?

I'm writing this to explore the idea for myself. Clearly. But I also write to explore the idea for my Garbologie business. I want this business to make real the thoughts I'm expressing here. To be the space where ideas can be tested, to be a skunkworks through which innovation can explode to change the face of waste.

To this end, the thoughts are expressed to gather ideas. I would appreciate any suggestions, past successes, actualisation frameworks.

Moving from working a job to building a business

I've been blogging here for a few months now, generally writing on waste stuff. All interesting enough to a small subset of people who care.

In the meantime, I have been developing a business that will see me leave my job, and replace it with a business. More on the business in future posts.

Transition

Right now the story is about the transition I am currently making. See, I have reached quite a high point at a relatively young age. I was made a Director (reporting to the CEO) of a pretty large Council when I was 34, and then CEO of a small Council when I was 36. It is a role of significant responsibility, and the natural career progression from here is to be appointed CEO of progressively larger organisations. It's everything I should be grateful for.

Problem is, that doesn't really float my boat. I've come to realise that I don't really like having my personality mediated by the structure of an organisation that is not me. Sure, I've managed to infuse my values into the organisation, but there are some things I cannot do. Even though I am the CEO, I cannot turn around the cruise liner that is government culture.

I want to build something that is good. Not just good as in performing well, but good as in doing good. I want to make something that is honest, and true, and doing the things that really matter. I want to build a business in waste management that lives values I try to live myself:

• Clean. Our facilities feel like they are not part of the waste world.
• Friendly. Our customers have the sort of experience that they will return to again and again.
• Respect. Our staff, customers and the environment are respected, seeking to leave a legacy of empowered people and a cleaner planet.
• Integrity. Only do things that are right, and that you'd be happy seen done to you. There is nothing to hide.
• Intelligent. Continually learn, finding better ways to do what you do and to outsmart your competition.

I want to create a waste business that doesn't do landfill (or incineration), a business that seethes with passion and brilliant ideas from coworkers who are then supported to go out and do it. The epicentre of an earthquake that shakes the industry to its core.

The Rubicon

All of this came to a head when I spoke with my Chairman and Deputy Chairman on Monday, confirming that I won't be renewing my contract. They are relatively supportive. Perhaps a little less than I had thought they would be, but there is no problem on that front. Nothing will happen quickly, as my contract has another 7 months.

But for me, it feels I've crossed a threshold. To be portentous (and perhaps a little pretentious), I have the saying alea iacta est running through my mind. "The die is cast", a saying attributed to Caesar as he crossed the Rubicon to commence civil war. This is obviously no war, but there is no return from here.

I confess to feeling all of the feelings of anxiety about my decision. I have traded the relative security of a job, ok but not able to fulfill all of my aspirations, and decided to start something for myself. I've traded the predictable hassles of my current job for indeterminate hassles from customers and staff and, yes, Councils. I have passengers on this journey - a wife, a daughter. A dog.

I do not go into this naively. I know that I will never "be my own boss".

It will be ok

Yet it all still feels right. If I didn't feel fear, then I couldn't be courageous. If I never pushed myself to descend from the point I've reached in my career to date, I'd never manage to get down from the comfortable hillock and up the lofty mountain.

All of that.

In short, this is the first step in a journey. This journey will see me change from an employee of others, becoming my own path. It will be a journey that, I expect, will see a whole lot of bad days and hopefully enough good ones. It will see me dive deep into myself to make sense of what I'm trying to create. Because what I want to do is truly something I have not seen done. It may, but I've never heard of it.

I hope you stick with me to see how it turns out.

Recycling of mattress fabric

A former post, "How do you recycle a mattress?", described the mattress dismantling process and identifies that steel and foam is recycled. Mattress fabric is not, generally.

I've been doing some research on how to recycle this fabric. That research has indicated that the fabric is generally a polyester blend, often blended with cotton. Which led me to ask if polyester fibre is recycled.

It turns out it is, and that is reasonably high profile for companies like Patagonia (working with with the Teijin ECO CIRCLE system from Japan). There is also Repreve in the US. Both processes take post-consumer fabric and reprocess it back into polyester fibre for remanufacture.

Teijin's Eco Circle Polyester Recycling process. Source: Teijin.

These processes chemically decompose the polyester and convert it into new polyester raw material. They work for clean polyester. I think. I'd love to know if they (or other) can also work for polyester blends.

In asking the question of networks, I was contacted by Nextek and advised:

We have recently finished a project in Europe where we have successfully recycled dyed polyester fibre, stripped out dyes and volatile and also upgraded the IV of the polyester resin for closed loop recycling back into fibre applications.

It will be interesting see what comes of it, and the answer may be the subject of a future post.

In the interim, it is good to know how much work is being done to recycle polyester. This has classically been described as recycling PET bottles back into clothes, and to be honest, I could never really reconcile this. Think about how many PET bottles are discarded and contrast that with the amount of clothing made with PET - I can't imagine they are in the same game.

But taking polyester fabric and reforming polyester fabric seems much more sane. It matches life cycle, it looks to close a loop reasonably tightly. Repreve has a great summary of what their process saves in the manufacturing process. To a non-polyester expert, this all seems pretty impressive.

A summary of how the Repreve process conserves natural resources. Source: Repreve

Perhaps asking the question of what can be done with mattress polyester blends can nudge the industry into finding solutions (if they don't already exist). 

That, in turn, could could find a path for a whole heap of additional resources to be returned to the manufacturing process rather than landfilled. And, done locally, it enables every city of reasonable size to have its own polyester resource that can be used to build in all sorts of fabrics.

What are you hoping to achieve with that waste policy?

Waste is rife with government policies. All well-intentioned (we hope), but rarely clear how they work. So lets think about this a little.

If your objective is:

• Reduce total tonnes to landfill, then your policies need to focus on dense materials disposed of in bulk. That is generally construction and demolition waste. It is also not usually especially harmful to the environment. It's also food waste, which is harmful to the environment.
• Reduce greenhouse gas (methane) emissions, then your policies need to focus on food waste, paper and cardboard, garden waste and timber.
• Protect the marine environment, then your policies need to focus on plastics, and especially plastic bags.
• Preserve economic resilience in scarce materials, then your policies need to focus on rare earths in electronic waste.
• Reduce immediate environmental harm, then your policies need to to focus on household hazardous wastes, potentially even food waste (leachate pollution).

We'd like to do all of these things at once. That is not always possible.

The policy levers to drive reducing total tonnes to landfill will invariably run against paper and cardboard (they are light), plastics (they are light), scarce material recovery (they are insignificant in the total tonnes) and reducing immediate harm (the weight of toxic materials is very small).

Operations do respond to policy levers. They respond to solve problems and to create new problems. Recovering steel from e-waste to reduce tonnes can destroy the chance to recover rare earths Trying to fix a new problem with another set of levers makes for bad policy. It creates confusion and counter-productive efforts.

The ideal is for a policy maker to design an elegant solution that achieve as many of the objectives as possible. Key words are "design" and "elegant". Ideally that policy wouldn't need much policy.

And what are we currently doing? Right now, the dominant push is to reduce total tonnes to landfill. This is what is reported on, this is where the effort is.

Is that what you were hoping to achieve?

Vale Barry Commoner!

On 30 September 2012, Barry Commoner died, aged 95.

Commoner is not a household name, even for those of us who have grown up on the heady vapours of environmental thought. He is certainly not as well known as others who were prominent in the environmental flowering around Earth Day in 1970, people such as Paul Ehrlich and Rachel Carson, however his ideas are so well known that they are almost truism. Not adopted, mind, but considered core to environmental thinking.

Consider this quote from his introduction to his 1971 book "The Closing Circle":

Here is the first great fault in the life of man in the ecosphere. We have broken out of the circle of life, converting its endless cycles into man-made, linear events: oil is taken from the ground, distilled into fuel, burned in an engine, converted thereby into noxious fumes, which are emitted into the air. At the end of the line is smog. Other man-made breaks in the ecosphere's cycle spew out toxic chemicals, sewage, heaps of rubbish---the testimony to our power to tear the ecological fabric that has, for millions of years, sustained the planet's life.

Suddenly we have discovered what we should have known long before: that the ecosphere sustains people and everything that they do; that anything that fails to fit into the ecosphere is a threat to its finely balanced cycles; that wastes are not only unpleasant, not only toxic, but, more meaningfully, evidence that the ecosphere is being driven towards collapse.

This is almost received wisdom in environmental circles.  Indeed, it sometimes even breaks out into the "mainstream".

Commoner distilled his thinking about the "ecosphere" down to four laws of ecology:

1. Everything is Connected to Everything Else.
2. Everything Must Go Somewhere.
3. Nature Knows Best. 
4. There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. 

Again, these laws have stood the test of time, indeed they continue to be strengthened in ways that not even Commoner anticipated. 

Everything is Connected to Everything Else

In school we learn of the connection of everything to everything else in ecology, being taught how different species interact in a web of life. I suspect that lesson is a bit dry and seems not really relevant to us in real life.

There true significance of intense connection has been demonstrated by the globally connected economy and communications we have created. Who could possibly have expected that loosening home lending policies in the US so that more people could own homes would cause riots in the streets of Greece? That the connections formed by the internet would lead to memes spreading faster than anybody could believe, and creating consequences nobody could anticipate.

The sense that everything is connected has been radically strengthened through the internet, and our observations there may well lead to us revaluing the ecological connections around us. If the connected world we have created is so hard to predict, if it can cause such devastation from innocent beginnings, how can we dare presume that our meddling in ecological systems is "within acceptable limits"?

Everything Must Go Somewhere

This is translated into several forms. One of the better known ones is that you can't throw anything away, because there is no away. It is developed in Cradle to Cradle by Michael Braungart and William McDonough. It even got picked up by Shell.

Everything must go somewhere, adopted by Shell

The Germans coined the term "Kreislaufwirtschaft" (or circular economy) based on this notion, and built laws around the recovery of waste materials for input as raw materials back into the economy.

And in popular culture, The Simpsons episode "Trash of the Titans" demonstrated it in perfect satire. In fact, that episode is a perfect demonstration of all of Commoner's four principles.

Nature Knows Best

The idea that nature knows best is built on the idea that, over the millions and millions of years of evolution, nature has formed everything perfectly. It cannot be improved upon.

This concept is clearly highly controversial in a time of genetic engineering, a field of knowledge that has at its core the principle that improvements in life can be designed. I have sympathy for the work of genetic engineering, as it has produced some important things. It has also created uproar with genetically modified foods that have caused intense controversies.

So on one hand you have Amyris, a company that genetically engineers yeast to enable the fermentation of artemisinin (an anti-malarial) and is developing strains to ferment diesel and jet fuel. On the other you have Monsanto, global agribusiness, and villian du jour for much of the environmental movement.

Outside the field of genetic engineering, this principle became rather literal in biomimicry, where nature is used a guide for engineering design. The term was popularised by Janine Benyus in her book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, and you see the principle of using nature as a guide influencing waste management. The extensive use of composting to deal with organic waste. Attempting to use natural systems as guides for cradle to cradle designs. In time that will also extend to ending the use of synthetic chemicals in manufacturing, making waste management a simple matter of returning materials to where they are needed.

There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

The notion that nothing can be taken from nature without being replaced underpins pretty much everything. You will eventually have to pay the piper. That the piper is calling doesn't mean we are prepared.

Indeed (and to continue the metaphor), it seems that we prefer to be forever paying off our credit card debt by rolling that debt into our mortgage - and then spending freely again.

Landfills are the perfect example. We are quite good at preventing short term, immediate environmental impacts, but replace them with long term, drawn out impacts. The addition of synthetic liners delays the leakage of contaminated water into groundwater, certainly long after the operator has moved on, but does not stop it. We accept chronic problems as a replacement for acute ones, and hope they will sort themselves out before we have to deal with them again.

The free lunch is really the whole point with waste. Waste needn't exist. The fact that it does exist, the fact it has a multitude of challenges in its management, all of this is a hint that we are not enjoying a free lunch after all.


The hint that we are not enjoying a free lunch gives us clues as to how it can be resolved. If we work to enhance rich connections, give up the notion of away and learn from nature, we will be a long way advanced toward having design criteria we can work with. Design criteria that can guide not just waste management, but also the economy of material flows in general.

It is not idealistic to plan for this. Real people with real outcomes do it. People like Braungart and McDonough of Cradle to Cradle, like Gunther Pauli and his Blue Economy and all of those people who make it happen every day in everyday ways.

The Blue Economy, by Gunther Pauli

I think we can give a lot of credit to Barry Commoner for rethinking how we interact with the environment, and especially how we interact through technology. He saw that we needed to replace our model of a linear economy, get rid of the arrogance that we know what we are doing, and unwind the hubris that it doesn't matter what we make because if we don't want it we can always throw it away. This thinking is dangerous, and Commoner proposed the perhaps radical ideas that needed to replace it.

Sure, the ideas are now commonplace (sort of), but they needed somebody to formulate them .

Often a great thinker is often overshadowed by his or her ideas. That is surely the fate of Barry Commoner.

The opportunity for specialty metals

I've been giving quite a bit of thought to what the Future of Waste might look like.

Right now, I am fixated by the prospect of an intimately connected world. Not just connected, but also transparent, and all of that information broadly available so that reprocessors can connect waste generators with manufacturers.

This might seem a little esoteric, but it can be brought home in the context of specialty metals.

But before we get to specialty metals, consider metals in general. Their recycling is generally pretty poor. The figure below is from a great paper in Science magazine called Challenges in Metal Recycling (subscription required). If you don't want to pay for a subscription, much of the information in the article is in a UNEP report "Recycling rates of metals" (including a version of the figure below)

Recycling rates of metals, source Science

The article makes the point that, whilst metals are theoretically infinitely recyclable, actual recycling often falls far short.

Returning to specialty metals, part of the problem is straight out thermodynamics. You can't get around the laws of thermodynamics around extracting some metals from alloys.

But the real story is not really about thermodynamics. We are a long way away from butting against limits on recycling imposed by immutable laws. Instead, our limits are far more prosaic.

The report distills the challenge down to three opportunities:

1. Improved segregation and collection
2. Improved recycling technology
3. Improved design for readily separation and dismantling

An example is made of an aerospace superalloy that is both valuable and confined within a relatively small industry (making for straightforward logistics). In this context, 90% of the superalloys are collected.

Imagine if reprocessors put their efforts into the first two opportunities, and worked with designers and manufacturers to sort out the third.

Improved segregation and collection

Imagine a network that "knows" where materials are when they have reached the end of their life and scampers out to collect the materials before they are smashed up, mixed up, otherwise made uneconomic to recycle.

It's like a Geographic Information Sytem, but containing details of any number of components and their location. The Internet of Things, but drilled down to a very fine level. With the liberal use of sensors and some really clever programming in behind it, you could overcome the tricky logistics of diffuse materials.

Not down to each alloy of course, but aggregated up to a level where variation is insignificant. So maybe each definable component (say, down to a mobile phone, or a particular superalloyed component). That must be possible. In fact, it's probably already being done (or close to being done) for the aerospace industry to monitor components for their fatigue.

Knowing where components are, you can then look at their targeted dismantling to separate out particular metals, making their final processing simpler. The report cites studies which have found that targeted dismantling has the potential to "increase gold recovery from the current 26% to some 43%, tantalum up to 48%, and gallium up to 30%".

Improved recycling technology

The opportunity for technology innovation in this space is awesome. You can imagine that the mining industry could play an immense role here, modifying the technologies they've deployed to extract metals from trace concentrations in ore.

Rare earth magnets at Hitachi Plant Technologies Ltd.'s Matsudo research laboratory, Japan. Source: Bloomberg

To quote from the article:

It is not much of an exaggeration to say that we manufacture modern products with the best possible technologies we can devise, but generally recycle them with relatively basic approaches. This situation has evolved from a lack of incentives in many directions—little to no support for implementation of new recycling technologies, the unfavorable image of the scrap yard, the frequent specification of virgin material by manufacturers, and sheer lack of knowledge as to the elemental composition of modern products. It is true that recycling is often limited by unfavorable economics, but it is equally true that those economics reflect a lack of attention to design for recycling and a reluctance to invest in the improved separation and sorting equipment that has emerged within the past decade. It is time that corporations, universities, and governments work together to transform the state of today’s metal recycling by demonstrating the need for continuing research on improved technologies, the potential benefits of deployment of the improved technologies now available, and the promise suggested by regulatory and financial initiatives that speak to these challenges.

There is little more to add. The development of technology is surely something that the developed world gets. The transition of research from lab to pilot to full scale technology is not an unknown. The shortages of specialty metals are also no secret. 

This will happen when the right team is assembled, supported by the right venture capital, and underpinned by strong collection systems.

Improved design for readily separation and dismantling

The final point where improved recovery of specialty metals will occur is in the design of items using the metals. That might involve substituting one metal for another, making components easier to take apart, or even designing components so that they automatically come apart when exposed to a particular environment.

All of this can be done. The limiting factor is information and interest.

It has been argued that having mandatory Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) fixes this, as it makes the electronics manufacturer interested in the eventual e-waste problem. I'm not so convinced, as even under an EPR scheme, the management of waste is very quickly divorced from the design of new materials. Done right, it is useful as a motivator to improve collection. Done badly, tonnage targets can ruin the rare metals in favour of recovering the heavy components.

I think that, setting aside EPR, there is scope of a clever intermediary to exploit the information gap, to maintain a flow of information back and forth between the designer and the recycler. This, I think, the article suggests:

Ideally, an information feedback loop to materials scientists and designers would emphasize the consequences of complex designs on the recyclability of products, leading, for example, to a redesign of alloys to accommodate more scrap

So there is an opportunity in the recovery of specialty metals. I would suggest it is a very substantial opportunity. I'd also suggest that it matters little where the high-tech end of this is done, because the mass is relatively small and thus the transport component of the total cost not great.

You could imagine Perth (or Darwin) dedicating itself to becoming a rare earth recovery hotspot, having labour intensive disassembly in South-East Asia (in a properly controlled environment), and the extracted components shipped (flown!) here for final recovery.

You could imagine a firm developing and rolling out sensors, offering to pay for materials once they reach the end of their life as determined by the sensor. The added benefit is that you get scheduled maintenance and replacement of components.

You could also imagine all of this happening within the same firm, and that firm developing incredible expertise in the design of high tech equipment for recycling.

It is an immense opportunity, an opportunity for the 21st century. It is an opportunity that is already being developed in Japan. 

Does anybody else want to play?

Time for waste to take centre stage

Guest post by Alex Serpo, editor of Inside Waste Magazine and associated website, BEN Waste.

For god knows how long, the waste industry has sought to brand itself beyond a disposal or cleanup service. This process has seen limited success, but it is critical to industry growth and a viable planet.

The reality is, public perception of an industry matters. Industries in the front of the public's imagination (not mind!) attract smart graduates and investment. Those we forget about tend to suffer.

As I perceive it, the waste industry is suffering from a famine of public enthusiasm, but we'll never get there unless we firmly believe there is a road from famine to feast. 

While acknowledging the road may be long and arduous, as a communications professional I thought I'd throw in my two cents about how the industry could help promote the value of the services it provides to the public at large.

Given the huge wave of commentary around environmental issues today, I believe the waste industry is in a unique position to place itself at the centre of the sustainability movement.

Where are we today?

Broadly, the public associates waste management with kerbside collection, blissfully unaware of the waste impacts that come from the commercial, industrial, construction and, increasingly, mining sectors.

People are also deeply concerned about environmental degradation, but wary of action on international issues like climate change due to scale and complexity. They also don't like taxing resource-intensive consumption - they think it's the fun police.

No, the sustainability revolution - or better, evolution - must happen from the ground up. This disconnect between the global and the local presents an opportunity for the waste industry to recreate itself as a proactive force on sustainability that has roots at an everyday, domestic level.

The science is in - waste can take centre stage

The link between waste management and sustainability is easy to make, but if you think laterally, it's surprising just how broad the connection can be.

Waste can take centre stage, Source gyidi at Tumblr 

For example, let's look to renewable energy. The removal of fossil fuels from our electricity supply means more than just a reduction in greenhouse emissions, it also means reducing other undesirables like fly ash, water consumption and land displacement (but you already knew that).

Viewed in this context, the movement towards renewable energy is in fact a form of waste reduction, and therefore waste management. The same argument could be made for almost any other environmental enterprise.

Wastewater treatment? It reduces 'waste' nutrient outflows to the environment. New electric Holden Commodore? A great new way to reduce waste associated with petroleum consumption. Energy efficiency? A way of reducing all the wastes associated with energy production.

Under the banner of 'nature produces no waste', the industry has an opportunity to place itself right at the heart of the new dialogue on sustainability. When the public begins to see waste management as the core of sustainability, the industry will repeal rewards.

Materials matter - energy does not!

By and large, much of the public anxiety around sustainability appears to be focused on the fossil fuel industry. Some have termed this an 'energy crisis', but to my mind it is more appropriate to define it as a 'fuels crisis'.

The total amount of solar, wind, hydrological and geothermal energy available on earth is vastly beyond our needs. Consider that the Japanese earthquake last year released 3.9×10¹⁶ megajoules of energy in a matter of minutes, equivalent to 600 million times the energy of the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Energy is abundant,  Sun Inferno at deviantART by GuilleBot 

The challenge here is to find economical ways to collect and store this energy in materials, be they fuels or any other industrialised good. We then need to use these materials as efficiently as possible (read: design for waste reduction). Therefore, the energy challenge is more broadly a materials management challenge.

However, the materials challenge is more fundamental than just fossil fuels and solid wastes. The supply of many materials on earth is a zero sum game; we have a finite amount. This is true for bulk commodities like phosphorus or lithium, or even fresh water - but bites particularly hard when we get to materials like rare earth metals. Consider the global supply of Indium, used in electronics, is expected to only last 30 years.

Some have attempted to convey this message about material sustainability by talking about 'embodied' energy and the 'carbon footprint' of products, but to my mind these messages are too complicated.

'Economic dematerialisation' contains a lot of syllables but at its core is a simple message - 'don't waste as much' and then 'use materials sustainably'. The waste industry is in a unique position to place itself at the core of this new dialogue.

Walk the walk, talk the talk

This new framework starts with you. Waste managers need to communicate to the public, their clients and the friends they meet walking the dog that sustainability is effective waste management.

Communicate that there is no environmental problem that can't be tackled through better waste management.

By and large, renewables energy advocates, conservationists and politicians have dominated public commentary around sustainability. Hat's off to them - but they aren't doing the hard yards in terms of pollution reduction, management and mitigation that waste managers are.

The spotlight won't come to you. You need to go stand it in. If collectively we can make our voices heard, only then will the opportunity come to take the waste industry to the next level.