When recycling goes wrong

Having blogged so consistently of the opportunities for great improvements in the recycling of waste, it is worth recalling that recycling can go wrong.

A great (terrible) example among many is the outbreak of Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in the UK in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This was caused by the recycling of animal remains (specifically that of contaminated cattle) into meat and bone meal which was then added to cattle feed to improve its quality. The idea was that the animal remains were sterilised, and so no diseases could be spread in this form. On the face of it, this seems a wise use of an otherwise waste resource.

Of course, with hindsight we know this was not the case. The disease led to the slaughter of 4 million cattle in the UK, and the deaths of over 200 people to October 2009 (its long incubation means that there may still continue to be cases). And with hindsight we ask ourselves how it could ever have been considered a good idea to have cattle, naturally plant eaters, in effect cannibalising other cattle.

Cow with BSE, digging frantically but going nowhere. Source: Wikipedia

We can respond to the BSE experience in several ways. One extreme is to demand full testing of all risks before we try anything new. This approach essentially requires that anything new be proven to be ok - formally an impossibility (as Nassim Nicholas Taleb pithily wrote: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence), and crazy insane as a blanket rule. In effect it decides that the status quo remains, and the status quo may be far worse than the unprovable alternative.

The other extreme is to pursue and implement any new idea, stopping only when it proves to be bad. This is easy to do, but built into the approach is an acceptance that bad things will happen, and that they are ok. On big risks this is also insane crazy.

So the middle ground ends up, as always, the best ground. You try to avoid big negative outcomes. This is not quite the same as quantifying the risk, because some risks are unknowable with the current knowledge base. It is attempting to identify what bad things might happen even though we don't know how they might happen, and then trying to guard against the worst.

I don't quite know what the rules of thumb might be for this evaluation. Perhaps it has something to do with not messing with any ordinary order of things (begging the questions "what is ordinary?", "ordinary to who?") and so on. It might look at the natural cycles of materials (though there is not a lot natural about steel manufacture). It might even decide to make things no worse than they are now. But I think something could be derived.

At core, we need to be careful, but not paralysed by fear. We need to be especially careful around food and systems  that are hugely complex and perhaps unknowable in the full scale of potential interactions (such as animals, the environment). But at the same time, we need to keep the course clear for innovation. And from there, be sure to keep a ready eye out for things going wrong.

Perhaps this warning is pointless, obvious and useless. Perhaps, but I think it is worth the reminder that recycling is not always best. Some paths need to be very carefully thought through before they are begun. But this does not mean no path should be begun.

Waste and peer-to-peer

It is one of the pleasures of Twitter to have a constellation of different ideas emerge, combine with your existing framework of knowledge and form new concepts. And so it is with Michel Bauwens' writing on peer-to-peer (tweeting at @mbauwens)

In the waste management context, Michel's description of the failings of information and production hoarded is spot on. Waste is the most obvious symptom of a failed mode of production.

Waste is not intrinsically waste. It is only waste because the holder has no value for it. In a different context the waste is a resource.

The difference between the two? An inability to connect the waste context to the resource context. This inability to connect is driven by a lack of information. That might be a lack of information where a local user of the waste is not aware that the waste exists. Or a potential business cannot be unveiled because nobody has the aggregated information to piece it all together. Or maybe as stupid as the timing of a byproduct doesn't match when it is needed, for no better reason than the parties didn't know. And so it goes to waste.

Think about it. Waste is generally managed by waste companies. They do not usually share their daae for fear that competitors might step in. This is not to say that they don't try to direct waste to where it can be used as a resource. But the problem is structural. It is endemic in the way business is done. They cannot anticipate all of the solutions to the problem.

Government tries to fix this by attempting a wholesale aggregation of all of the data around. So there are innumerable studies presenting the quantity of this or that waste, but it is never enough. In fact, it probably sets the industry back.

Why? Well, for one, the data is never provided in sufficient detail to enable any sort of real understanding of what is happening. It is presented in a manner that presupposes a certain type of infrastructure-bound solution. Having data creates an impression that government should then try for a waste infrastructure plan. And the whole exercise reinforces the structure where data is a resource to be monopolised.

Imagine an alternative where it is in the interests of the data holder to share it. I don't know why just yet, but set "why?" to one side. Once you have the situation, then the infrastructure is more than available. There is immense social media, immense data networks that can quickly and intelligently process data into information.

Furthermore, with the data freely available, entrepreneurs can see new patterns, new opportunities. They can slice and dice in ways that nobody could anticipate. They can open the field for collaborative solution making, a mode that is far more nimble and intelligent than silos of information hoarding experts. This has been demonstrated in "immaterial production" (ie the web), and there is no reason why it cannot also be true in material production.

You could see a world in which there is some clever way of quickly and effortlessly sharing information on waste generated and resource needs, which then leads to pop-up businesses who connect the dots. Perhaps anticipating needs, perhaps transforming wastes to meet unthought of needs.

Framed like this, I think that waste starts to look a bit silly. A problem that has arisen because we are too dumb to raise our voice and just...Share. Our. Knowledge.

Landfill mining

A comment in my post on the 20th of July "What will the IT revolution look like when it hits waste?" referred to a future of landfill mining, with Hackerspaces such as the Perth Artifactory being a prelude to this future.

The comment intrigued me, and reminded me of a reference in Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson to landfill mining. At the time it made quite an impression on me. The idea of mining landfills, of these vast dumps of that must hold incredible value which is currently unattainable. It is an amazing idea, and you wonder if you could recover it.

Then you spend years in the industry and learn the many, many reasons for why you can't recover the value. Perhaps the reasons are sound, though a Fast Company article in 2006 suggests that the economics are beginning to change.

So lets go back to Green Mars and see what was written.

Before its acquisition, he [Art Randolph] had been the co-founder and technical director of a small company called Dumpmines, which was in the business of digging up and processing old landfills, recovering the valuable materials that had been thrown away in a more wasteful age.

and then

So when starting Dumpmines he had taken the technical directorship, and had done some good work on their Super-Rathjes, the giant robot vehicles that did the extraction and sorting at the landfills...

Robots digging out and sorting waste from landfills. Obviously not now, and maybe needs development in waste sorting technology to recover the most valuable components that then cover the cost of processing. The gold and so on that is in the waste.

But perhaps we are getting close. Perhaps if we look at landfills that occupy valuable land, we might manage to make it pay off. The gold might not be within the waste, but beneath it.

So thanks for the comment Ken, it reminded me of some inspirational memories.

The language of waste

It is not common to hear people talk of "language" and "waste", but when it happens, the discussion is usually around how we should rename to remove "waste" connotations.

"Tips" become "landfills", "incinerators" become "waste to energy" (or "energy from waste"), "rubbish bins" become "MGBs" (Mobile Garbage Bins). And, in the best of all, "waste" becomes a "resource", "waste processing plants" become "resource recovery facilities".

The logic here is Orwellian. Just as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the Ministry responsible for war is the Ministry of Peace, we pretend that a new label on rubbish changes its being. There is some sort of alchemy going on here, a collapsing of labels to things. A belief that, if you call rubbish a resource then it actually becomes a resource. And people treat it as such.

They don't. Because it isn't a resource. At least not to them. If it was, they wouldn't be throwing it out. To state the obvious, a resource is something with value to the holder. Rubbish is something with no value. To the holder.

Perhaps we should forgive a bit of Orwell in our lives. Perhaps we can give a bit of a nod and chuckle, but tell ourselves that from the absurdity comes some sense. Calling waste a resource will lead to enough people treating it as a resource.

Perhaps some do. In fact, some certainly do. But for most, what doublespeak does is create a barrier of understanding between the communicator and the audience. It creates a new language, where people have to first work out what is intended by "MGB" (or indeed, MRB - Mobile Recycling Bin), and only then can they process the message.

Most don't get that far. MGB? Don't have one of them, not for me. Resource recovery? Not for me, I don't work in the mines. And the rejection isn't even that explicit.

Creating a new jargon around waste is just what waste does not need. Recycling has enough messages on enough levels. It does not need a new filter of misunderstanding.

How about listening to your customers, and using their language? They persist in calling your landfill a tip? Cool, call it "the tip", and then explain how a modern tip is vastly different to an old tip. They want to know what happens with their recyclables? Don't say they go through a Materials Recovery Facility - use their language. That might be "waste factory". Or "waste processing plant". Or something else. Use whatever your customers use when they describe it to their mates.

At the end of the day, language should not be used to create barriers to communication. It should enable communication. Keep the jargon for technical journals, if you must, but talk true when you talk to those using your services. They are your customers and they deserve better.

Charities and waste

I think most people understand that charities are an important destination for pre-loved clothes. Indeed, I think everybody has been touched by the great work charities do in recycling clothing, either through buying clothes at an op shop, or by placing second hand clothes in a clothing bin. Probably both at different life stages.

The quantities involved are staggering. According to the National Association of Charitable Recycling Organisations, charities in Victoria received an estimated 55,800 tonnes of goods. Of this about 65% was diverted away from landfill through reuse/resale, recycling into a range of materials (such as wiper rags) or exported to developing countries. The remainder went to landfill. The full report (pdf) can be found on the NACRO website.

Considering Victoria has about a quarter of Victoria's population, there's over 220,000 tonnes of goods handled by Australian charities each year. That is a monumental contribution.

Behind this story is a disturbing reality. Of the goods received by charities, about 35% goes to landfill. About 77,000 tonnes per year. You'd think this was avoidable, and it probably is, but it is a massive cost for charities. At a landfill cost of $100/tonne, this is an $8m problem. Each year. Not to mention time and resources sorting rubbish from good stuff, taking it to landfill and so on.

So a problem for charities, but an opportunity for some astute operators in the waste industry. Or perhaps operators outside the waste industry who don't accept the status-quo.

Imagine a partnership, charities doing their bit taking quality goods back to the community, and processors dealing with the waste (and establishing better channels to keep the waste from the charities in the first place). Working together to get some of that $8m back for charities to do their thing. Creating value from the reprocessed materials.

This has to be part of any vision for a new waste world. Crazy, entrepreneurial businesses who refuse to believe that charities have to shoulder the burden of rubbish, and that rubbish is even necessary.

Composters - the men and women behind the vision

Most of the garbage we produce in our home has high levels of food, paper and other biodegradable waste, "organics" in the trade. In a landfill, these organics lead to methane, a strong greenhouse gas. Organics also lead to the stench and water pollution associated with landfill.

As a result, whenever you look at dealing with garbage, organics is a prominent target. Most obvious is to stop the waste in the first place. Reduce wastage of food and you are a long way in front. According to the Australia Institute, $5.2m of food is wasted in Australia each year, more than is spent annually on digital equipment.

You can do better at landfill, capturing the methane, but this is ultimately a losing bet. Most of the gas is gone before you can capture it. You can incinerate it, but to get energy out of the organics you have to consume energy drying it out.

Best is to convert the organics to compost, and take the organics back to the land where it can grow more crops. It seems obvious but is far from settled. There is the question of contamination of the finished compost - heavy metals, plastics and glass being high on the list of concerns. There is the question of technology - the piece of plant to convert the waste into compost, how effective it is, how expensive. And, finally, there is the question of economics. Compost is classically low value, but its low density makes costs high.

Enter the composters. These are the people who underpin the entire edifice of sustainable waste management. They take a product from a waste processing plant, generally of low value, and add value such that it can be sold on to end users. The value is added through blending to create a product targeted for particular soil deficiencies, distribution, agricultural trials and even packaging. Some of the cleverest work is in pelletising compost so that it can be direct drilled into broadacre crops with seeding machines.

Without the composters, the end product after composting garbage would still be garbage. It would be a product looking for somebody naive enough to accept it. With composters, the end product is high value and in demand. Crops demonstrate this.

Perth is blessed with three excellent composters: Nutrarich, Richgro and Custom Composts. Each is driven by strong personalities who believe in what they do, and do what they believe. They don't see themselves as participating in the waste industry. They are in agriculture or horticulture. They are the most valuable piece of the puzzle. 

Compost worked into horticultural soils, image from Biogro

I suspect these traits are shared by composters around the world. They are driven, passionate and highly articulate people linking two ends of the continuum, ends that always were connected until relatively recently. Here's to the composters - the men and women behind the vision.

Social media, entrepreneurship and waste

Sometimes it's fun to grab three apparently dissonant ideas and rub them together. So here we go: social media, entrepreneurship and waste.

If we take social media and entrepreneurship as orbiting waste, then the two almost contradict what we currently do.

A common thing in rubbish is to have an education campaign. This goes something like this: an educator prepares a waste minimisation or recycling message, delivers it, and then perhaps measures the effectiveness of that delivery a while later. It is a megaphone. It is not a social media.

Instead, social media would require the educator to be educated as much as he/she educates. Social media in waste management would involve creating the space where a community can speak with itself, and the educator becomes facilitator. This space is, so far, unmapped. It has remained so for fear of "blow back", where the failings of the host organisation are reverberated and amplified through the community until the host reputation is shattered. The Western Earth Carers is feeling its way through the space through a series of facebook pages: Western Earth Carers and Plastic Free July. Together with twitter feeds, this is not for the faint hearted. However, it has been quite amazing thus far.

Throw entrepreneurship into the mix, and it gets even more interesting. For me, this is where social media starts to move outside the realm of communication, education and facilitating community action, and begins to move into the realm of building up new businesses. Nimble business, with social media at their core, in the field of waste management.

I'm not sure what this looks like exactly, but suspect it is the space between people taking personal action for the environment, and business doing things environmental things for people. I think it is people enabling businesses who enable people. It might manifest in viral campaigns to drive a particular business model around the environment, perhaps "gamification" of some environmental activity, maybe a deeply personalised waste service.

To get to this point, I suspect there is a fair amount of design work to enable network effects to be unleashed for a business. A lot of thinking is needed to understand what might actually resonate, and how. It must be driven by ethics rather than morality (a future blog surely rests on ethics and morality in waste management).

There needs an immense amount of authenticity - the bullshit detector runs red-hot when people can see everything you do. But it is only by seeing what you do that people trust to engage their own passions around "your" cause. And only then can this precious space at the intersection of three dissonant concepts form and thrive.

You don't know quite how this space will turn out, or even if it will form at all. It is a bit like the "scenius" described by The Technium in "Scenius, or communal genius". A bit different too, but the idea is that it erupts when the conditions are right, and also easily dissipates where it is forced into formality.

So they are my thoughts. I'd like to develop them further over the coming months, and would love any comments or suggestions for further reading, case studies, ideas.

What will the IT revolution look like when it hits waste?

I often wonder about different perspectives on something I'm looking at.

One perspective that has been bugging me lately is the IT revolution and how it might affect waste. Specifically, the sort of hyper-innovation that has ripped computing from the basement and lab coats into smartphones and cloud computing in the space of 50 years.

This is not a question of how computing per se is affecting waste. Of course, there are some interesting things going on with data management and so on, but it is fundamentally a business built on people circling big and expensive plant: lab coats circling big, expensive machines. Computing has not changed this, and isn't really what is bugging at me.

What bugs me is how and when waste will make the shift from mega-machines to become personalised. When will it become something that we can all find out self-expression through? It is the shift in attitude that interests me.

It sounds absurd to even propose that something like waste could ever become personalised, ever be a medium for self-expression. Just as a basement full of wires and punch cards and blinking lights could never be the genesis of an awesome flowering of personality. But it is, and so too waste might not only be disrupted forever, but might even disrupt everything forever.

How? Imagine first a series of business models that permit the citizen to easily take control of his or her waste for financial reward. The resource value within the waste drives this new perspective, and you start to see the sort of massive reverse logistics that so characterises scrap steel. You start to see a self-reinforcing loop, not needing capitalism to be overthrown for it to make sense.

Imagine this then driven by high-tech. You can imagine little bins that don't just store your rubbish, but deconstruct it for sale of the components, pocket sized units that deconstruct your rubbish when you're on the go. Tiny micro-factories at every street corner replacing the vending machine, taking materials in from people walking by and using them to make your next purchase as you wait, bleeping out little calls to people who have the stuff they need. Credits automatically credited for this, the end of bulk logistics, the ushering in of personalised consumption.

But it doesn't need high-tech, and it certainly doesn't need this high-tech, for the disruption. All it needs is a disruptive business model to start us down the path. That little disruption, that upstart, will set us on the path to changing everything. Just like the clunky mini-computer led us to the PC to the smartphone and cloud computing.

I wonder about this stuff. I'm not so egotistical to think I need to make it happen, but I can't help feeling it is about to happen and now is the perfect time to be involved. I am sufficiently egotistical to think I can be part of the happening.

Government in waste - help or hindrance?

Whenever there is talk of waste and recycling, there is talk of how the Government can assist. Should it?

On the plus side, Government obviously has loads of cash, and can make all sorts of laws to reinforce the business model of a recycling business. It can mandate recycling of particular materials, put in place landfill bans, impose landfill taxes and subsidise recycling business.

But should it? Perhaps, under certain circumstances, however this is going to naturally lead to a certain type of industry. It will favour the large and established over the small and nimble. It will favour those who control the market over those who would disrupt it. It will favour the bureaucratic over the free-wheeling. It will favour monumental infrastructure over human scale business model innovations.

Government will take a risk averse approach and channel money to organisations that, whilst they might lead to significant improvement, will not lead to great improvements. Organisations that are exciting and disruptive, that might make massive changes, won't attract support because they could equally fail hugely. Government will look to minimise downside, not maximise upside.

Be this as it may, I would argue that the question is posed the wrong way. Instead, the better question is "should waste and recycling businesses seek Government support?" And I suggest that the answer is resoundingly "No!"

Chasing Government support takes a lot of effort. More importantly, the things you have to do to your business model to meet Government funding requirements will also cripple your business. You will start as a nimble organisation, reliant on none, and end up gummed up with a bureaucracy that you never believed possible. And certainly never needed.

In this field that is ripe for disruption, ready for upstarts, primed for somebody to change everything, you don't need to be wasting your time convincing the Government. Use that time to surround yourself with investors who get what you are trying to do and will help you get there.

Incineration and the future of waste

Today I was at a seminar on "waste to energy", otherwise known as incineration.

It was quite surreal. Listening to great speakers from the US and UK (and they were excellent - thank you) on video-conference, in a packed room (had to be well over one hundred there), I couldn't help the feeling that I was watching the justification of mainframe computing in a personal computer era.

You see, the presentations were all about how incineration is fine environmentally etc. I get that environmental and health factors concern people. It's easy to get frightened of the "pollution factory" down the road, especially when you can't see the pollution. But I don't think this is the problem with incineration.

For mine, the problem with incineration centres on its philosophy of bulking everything into a furnace and then cleaning up the back end. In doing this, you pretty much have to cater for the worst case.This is expensive. And the best fuel (plastic, timber, cardboard) is so easily recycled through much cheaper avenues. You are desperately vulnerable.

So the problem becomes how do you finance these things? Especially now in the post GFC world where banks are risk averse (!?). Incinerators are immense capital investments (several hundred million dollars just to build) that require waste feed secured over decades. And that, to me, is why incineration will fail.

It is no accident that incinerators are only built when underpinned by government. This might be finance, subsidies or waste feed,or more likely all of the above. Absent one, the business case gets very dicey. Large mixed waste incinerators are not built commercially.

Commercial incinerators do exist, but they are smaller and focused on a specific waste stream. Why? Because it requires less pollution control, feedstock is more secure and the business case is stronger.

But it comes back to this. Why would you invest hundreds of millions of dollars on technology that is forever at risk of new pollution control standards, when you can invest a few million and make a highly focused plant hum. A portfolio of these little plants dealing with discrete parts of the waste stream - now there's a business I'd want to build!

How to start a timber recycling timber business

Yesterday's blog described the extent of the markets available for timber recycling. Perhaps that has whetted you appetite and you want to start something. It is not difficult.

First the plant. You can start on two paths. One is a big capital investment. The second is low capital cost, but higher operating costs. The second is lower risk path until the demand is proven, at which point you can make the big capital investment.

The capital investment path first. You'll need a large hardstand area on which to store waste timber, and potentially also chip and sawdust. It is important to keep the timber as free as possible from grit, particularly if you want to sell it for particle board manufacture. This hardstand would ideally be made of concrete to avoid being dug up. A load out ramp will also be required.

The plant you need then is a loader (large bucket to bulk out chip and sawdust), a small excavator with a grab to crush timber, and a single pass timber grinder from somebody like HAAS. All told, that will cost $1.5-2m.

The low cost path also needs a loader and an excavator, but the rest is more mundane. A low speed grinder with a magnet on the outfeed conveyor will do the initial size reduction, removing the main steel.

Hammel grinder for processing waste timber, photo from Town of Port Hedland

The "clean" product is then able to be ground using a high speed shredder, also with a magnet, and the finished product is cleaned up using a trommel. Again, with a magnet.

All of the plant used in the low cost path can be dry-hired, and so whilst more expensive to run, this is a good path to develop a market without the enormous upfront investment. More importantly, you can be strategic on what you purchase and what you hire so that you only purchase what can be transferred to an operation involving the single pass grinder.

Irrespective of which path you take, challenges are removing plastics, and perhaps unusually, stainless steel.

Stainless steel is not removed well using magnets, however it is increasingly used for pallet used in shipping. I don't have ready answers for the removal of stainless, but would love to hear suggestions. The best fix is to make sure your market can handle some stainless steel nails.

And so that's it. Simple. Kind of.

A business model for timber recycling

Let's imagine that you have a market where there is a lot of timber waste, be it pallets, furniture, general construction and demolition waste. You want to do something better than landfill, because

1. Timber in landfill consumes a lot of airspace. A length of seasoned pine has a specific density of 0.5. To put it another way, a tonne of seasoned pine perfectly stacked takes up 2 cubic metres. It's even worse when it is in the form of crushed pallets or furniture
2. It's the right thing to do

You don't want to start this unless there is a market, a business model.

Ideally, you'd have a particle board manufacturing plant close, but that is relatively unlikely. Particle board is made where the timber is grown, and most pine plantations are not near the cities where timber waste is generated.

This leaves you with the need to think laterally. In fact, this leaves the need to think up a business model that makes money in a number of ways.

One approach is to charge to accept the timber waste, chip it, produce a clean mulch (a bit more on the how of this in a future blog), and then sell the mulch. 

Timber mulch on its own is not an especially high value product. Timber mulch is competing with raw mulch, which can be as low as free at sites that specialise in linking tree lopping contractors with gardeners. 

Where it gets clever is when you add value to the mulch. A perfect way to add value is to colour the mulch using mineral oxide dyes. A company selling coloured timber mulch is Mossrock in Melbourne, converting timber waste into a high value product. It looks for all the world like expensive red gum (red colour) or peat (black) mulch, and retains its colour for years.

Red coloured hardwood timber waste. Image from Mossrock

To colour chip cost effectively, you need to remove the sawdust that comes about through the chipping process. If sawdust is in the mulch, it soaks up the dye and makes it all very expensive. Sawdust is easily removed through a screen (such as a trommel).

Having removed the sawdust by screening, you have a new product - sawdust. Sawdust is much easier to find a market for, especially in urban or peri-urban areas. It makes perfect animal bedding. Certainly for poultry, perhaps not for horses. A nail through a horse's hoof could lead to the horse being permanently lamed, and nobody would want this on their conscience.

But poultry bedding. There are invariably a lot of poultry farms near any large urban area, and they need bedding to be replaced with each batch of chickens. It is an expensive exercise, but one which ultimately produces a bedding rich in nitrogen (manure) and carbon (sawdust). Perfect for composting. 

Broiler shed, typically bedding is sawdust. Image from Australian Chicken Meat Federation Inc

So you contract with the poultry grower to maintain the bedding (supply, spread, remove) for a fixed fee. Turning the sawdust byproduct into a valuable fertiliser, and getting paid to do so.

And on the cycle goes. With clever thought, you add value throughout the chain for a business model that bootstraps itself.

A Garbological week recapped

With the working week over, the narrative for the week's blogs can be summed up as forming a framework for how big recycling can get (as in the case of steel scrap), then looking at the underlying forces which drive this and thinking how those forces might be harnessed.

The exploration of driving forces led us to thinking about steel's obvious helpful physical properties (it is magnetic and so easily extracted), but also its role as a central part in forming the dynamic American economy, and thus driving immense innovation. The physical properties are relatively unique to steel. The social element of the story is not., and some of the driving forces behind the success in steel recycling  can be transferred to other materials. 

We continued to broaden our thinking on root causes by considering Murray Bookchin, philosopher and penetrating thinker. We thought a bit about how Bookchin's writing in relation to domination, ecological thinking and human scaled technology might be applied to waste management. It can, and is a very good fit for a philosophy that this blog will continue to develop, which has human scaled waste management at the core of a revolution in how we think about our waste.

A real example of human scaled waste processing waste was then explored, looking at how mattresses are recycling by cutting them apart manually to recover the various components rather than using big industrial shredders. Dismantling extracts more value and is a clever application of low tech.

Low tech is not the only way a human scaled system for waste management will be achieved. The analogy of Silicon Valley was borrowed, and the question asked how we might achieve such a phenomenon of extreme innovation in waste and recycling. It boils down to clever people developing clever business models, bootstrapping them until they run themselves and then attracting the investment. It is not a matter of competing with Silicon Valley in size, but instead to look to emulate the synergistic ecosystem that has created around innovation.

That is the week that was. I look forward to blogging again on Monday.

What would a Silicon Valley for waste look like?

We are all familiar with the awesome reputation of Silicon Valley as a hotbed of entrepreneurship. It is a classic example of the synergistic effects of an ecology of excellence growing up around an industry. Ideas attract brilliant minds attract venture capitalists.

More important, however, is the prevailing ethos that you have a crack. Trying and failing is better than never trying for fear of failing. Or trying to cover yourself against all risks before you begin. Business is risky. Good business people accept that, minimise their risks and then begin.

This sort of culture is sorely missed in waste management. It is a field that has managed to convince itself that it needs government support, that it is only able to succeed if it is big. An enormous risk averse edifice that grinds out incremental improvement only when led by the nose by government. An industry that leans heavily on public underwriting of private profits, and even then manages to get it wrong (no names here, of course).

Imagine if the norm in waste management was for entrepreneurs to get out there and start creating little eruptions of businesses. Or, more accurately, little disruptions. What might that look like?

You might see some very nimble companies focusing on serious product differentiation in otherwise bog standard markets. This would be great for customers. You would certainly see exciting solutions to avoid the capital intensive and largely monopolised landfill. Indeed, clever ideas would sidestep high capital requirements and barriers to entry across the board. I reckon you'd also end up with an ecosystem that drove landfill close to its deathbed.

A Silicon Valley of waste would emulate the start-up process for technology companies, starting as bare bones business that delight their customers, and growing into business that are so prevalent that you can't imagine the world without them. It would also provide the space for ideas to be tested and abandoned without disgrace.

To get to this point will be a tricky chicken and egg problem. Some sort of venture capital is required to get this off the ground, but that won't happen until there is a track record. And a track record is hard to achieve without funding. And, finally, brilliant minds are especially tricky to attract in the absence of a track record or funding.

I think it is a nut that can be cracked, and will be cracked by innovation in business models. I will blog on this in a later blog. I will also blog on what a constellation of small waste businesses might look like.

Thanks for following this tale, and I welcome any comments or suggestions you might have.

How do you recycle a mattress?

How do you recycle a mattress?

Well, there is the dumb way. This assumes that the springs are the valuable bit, and tosses the mattress into a shredder and pulls the shredded up steel off using magnets. Looks like this.

Mattress in a low speed shredder, image courtesy of American Recycler

You'd think that was a pretty clever way of going about it. You'd be wrong.

Sure, there's value in the steel, but there's also value in the foam (depending on markets) and the timber (to a lesser extent). Shredding the mattress destroys these elements.

It also jams up shredders. I have been to any number of "demonstrations" of new shredders that will apparently shred up a mattress. They're usually good for a couple before the spring steel clags the machine up. You want to laugh, because you knew it was going to happen, but you just feel sorry for the poor contractor who, at best, has just lost a whole heap of potential sales. At worst he's damaged his machine.

And then there's the clever way. This looks at the value of everything, including the space taken up in landfill, and pulls the mattress apart to maximise these values. It is men and women with sharp knives standing around a mattress on a wool classing tables, cutting it apart to separate out the springs from the foam from the fibre from the fabric. It looks like this:

Mattress recycling with a knife, image courtesy of MPR News

The steel obviously has a market (but preferably cut into metre square pieces so it doesn't jam the steel shredder), and the foam can go to things like carpet underlay. In Australia, the big player was and presumably still is Dunlop Flooring, part of Pacific Brands. Baled and shipped to Melbourne, it is reincorporated into new products.

Up until late last year, you could comfortably say that most Australian cities had a mattress recycler, however mattress cleaner and recycler Dreamsafe went into voluntary liquidation in November 2011. They had a lot of plants on the east coast. There are probably others.

In the west, the Eastern Metropolitan Regional Council runs one, but you can drop your mattress off at most waste facilities and they will take it to the EMRC. You'll pay $10-20 or so for the service, but seriously, for the sake of a pint or two of beer at a Perth pub, how could you not?

Murray Bookchin, waste and recycling

It is the classic story. Several years ago I was browsing through a second hand bookshop, one of the great pleasures in life, and stumbled across Toward an Ecological Society. It was a collection of essays by an author I'd never heard of, Murray Bookchin. It proved to become one of my favourite books of all time, and especially the title essay.

In brief, Bookchin argues that society needs to move from a central approach of domination - dominating women, people, animals, nature in general, and recognise itself as a part of a whole. He contrasts ecological thinking with environmentalist thinking. Ecological thinking is revolutionary, seeking to reform society in a technologically advanced harmony with nature. Environmentalist thinking is geared around maximum exploitation (or domination) of nature.

I get this. As an environmental engineer, my career is all about doing what is required to minimise environmental impact. It presumes it can know the impacts of actions in extraordinarily complex and non-linear systems. It never asks how the question can be reframed such that the question of environmental impact becomes inconceivable. An analogy - we don't walk down the street looking to minimise broken limbs. It is inconceivable that we should harm ourselves.

Bookchin also writes of human scaled technology. This is where things come close to home for waste management, and indeed, he makes explicit reference to the failures of centralised, monumentalist waste management. To take it further, he is critical of the "economies of scale" and "leave it to us" approach of waste management which ultimately leads to monster landfill, incinerators and other base level waste systems. This is everything a human scale waste system is not.

A human scale system involves humans. It works with humans to reduce their waste in the first place, then engage in sorting their waste, and ultimately using high technology to process waste. It is an approach of great subtlety.

It doesn't need these elaborate efforts at "community engagement" to convince people that they really do need this big plant which will solve their problems. Instead, it responds to the desires of people to actually engage. It is increasingly plausible as people move from trusting "experts" to trusting the crowd, increasingly likely as technology leaps forward. Our waste plants are getting smaller, and people are doing more themselves.

Toward an Ecological Society, Murray Bookchin. Image courtesy of Amazon

Ultimately, the tale of Bookchin is a tale of hope over despair. We can control our destiny. It is reasonable to know your world. We can live in a world that is not free of waste, but rather enables each of us to put out waste back into the productive economy. We can change the world one decision, one action at a time.

And most importantly, we can build business models around this. We can build business models that engage with people, deliver on their core values, prevent waste to landfill and are profitable. All at the same time. This is only impossible if we lock ourselves into the domination mindset, the "grow or perish", "big is best", "economy of scale" inanity.

It is an opportunity that is set to become real as intelligent people gather around heretical ideas. It is the future I want to live.

As for Bookchin, he passed away in 2006, 85 years of age and having lived a life filled with crystal clear polemic.

The lessons from scrap steel recycling

In yesterday's blog Scrap steel - the greatest recycling story ever?, I pointed out how significant scrap steel is as a recycling sector. The sheer size of scrap steel recycling through the Electric Arc Furnace obviously diverts large quantities of material from landfill, but it also saves immense quantities of energy and thus greenhouse gases.

Electric Arc Furnace, image courtesy of Made in China

 This is all good, but more interesting is what lessons can be learned. My view on why scrap steel is so heavily recycled is:

Steel is integral to industrial societies

Steel is used in so many applications, from consumer uses like cars, through to heavy duty industrial application such as reinforcing for concrete. Indeed, it is so pervasive that it could be said to define the current era. All of this means that there are a great many buyers each looking to use it in any number of applications. The market drives this.

Translating to other materials, it is vital to let markets drive recycling, a point I return to over and over. Recycling without a market is just another form of waste disposal. Markets thrive where there is competition, and so developing a myriad of uses for the materials within waste will encourage its recycling.

Steel from scrap is high quality and uses less energy to make than from iron ore

It always helps if product generated from recycled material is of high quality. It especially helps if there are energy savings (though these tend to net out through pricing of scrap steel when compared with other raw materials such as iron ore). 

Sometimes these attributes are inherent in the product. Steel, aluminium and glass all recycle into high quality products using less energy. Sometimes it is a decision made by the recycler. In deciding how to sort for materials, the quality of the end product is determined. Failing to remove steel (ie nails) from timber recycling plants means that the chip cannot be used for particle board manufacture.

Steel is a cornerstone of the American economy

The point here is similar but different to my first. Being linked into the dynamic, innovative American economy means that there will always be a seething mass of engineers and entrepreneurs looking to do better. This is one of the great features of the American culture, and why America recycles more than 80% of its steel, far better than any other economy.

Other materials have a great prospect if they too can hitch their wagon to a culture of innovation. You can imagine, for instance, palladium's use in electronics driving all sorts of recovery innovation. This will be the subject of a future blog.

Steel is easily extracted

Being magnetic, it is easy to remove steel. Similar processes can and are being invented for other products, but here is where materials processing engineers with some lateral thinking could be game changers. We need to support this, encourage it, drive it.

Steel is dense and easily transported

There is a lot of cost in moving space around. If you can get a lot of weight into that space, then you are increasing the transport efficiency. Less dense materials can be made more dense through compactors, and this must be (and is) a first step for any recycling operations.

Waste paper baler, photo courtesy of Alibaba

Steel is high value

Leaving perhaps the most important to last - steel has a value that is high and preserved as it moves through the economy. This enables a vast web of collectors consolidating to larger and larger entities, all profitable in their own right. The ecosystem thus created is vital. Container deposit schemes seek to create the same system of cascading value through legislation. Not as good as a natural market, but sometimes these sorts of steps are needed. Any long term recycling and upcycling venture must be financially worthwhile for all participants.

So my thoughts. I'd be keen for comments on how the success of scrap steel can be, and is being, translated to other materials.

Scrap steel - the greatest recycling story ever?

When we think of recycling, we tend to think of plastic, glass and paper. The sort of stuff we see around the home and put out into the recycling bin. This is important, but the real story in recycling is scrap steel.

Global trade in scrap steel, 1998-2010

The chart above shows immense tonnages of scrap steel used annually - over 500 million tonnes per year. The whole report "World Markets for Recovered and Recycled Commodities: The End of the “Waste Era”..." is fascinating, and well worth a read.

This is obviously not the same as the 1,000 million tonnes plus of iron ore traded each year, but not grossly less. A bit sobering for Australians accustomed to feeling that they are building the world out of the Pilbara.

So why is this? Why is scrap metal so successful when we can't do the same for plastics, rubber or all the other commodities. I don't quite know, and would love to hear ideas, but my take is:

• Steel is integral to industrial societies, and useful in so many applications. As a result, there are likely to be many buyers
• Scrap steel makes high quality steel with lower energy requirements through the Electric Arc Furnace
• Steel is a cornerstone of the American economy, and formed the basis of its industrial revolution. This in turn led to a massive eruption of energy and innovation which characterises the American economy
• Steel is easily extracted, being magnetic.
• Steel is dense, and so easily transported
• It's high value, and this value can be passed down the line to a network of collectors

The trick, and a problem worth considering, is how can this be translated into other commodities? 

What is the shift that is needed to make other commodities roar like steel? 

How can Garbologie disrupt the status quo to make new industries form and grow? 

Critical mass for upcycling

If you want to divert waste from landfill, recycling or upcycling, you need to think about critical mass for your business. This is the point at which the business can not just sustain itself, but grow to fill its market.

The conventional approach for waste management is to take waste at the very end of the line, apply some significant processing through big licks of capital, and end up with a product that's not particularly good. This sort of business needs to be big to achieve its critical mass. "Economies of scale" apply here.

To me, the clever approach is to intervene far earlier in the waste process. Rather than taking a mixed up mess of trash, garbage, rubbish, waste (call it what you will), you approach it earlier in the waste generation cycle. 

You can get out large amounts of material for upcycling with little capital, instead investing in human capital (customers and your own staff sorting it out). Of course, it won't get 100% of the good stuff out, but it will do a lot for a little.

This is the elegant approach to upcycling. Approach critical mass by reducing the scale of the problem. Rather than try to recover timber from a mixed waste stream, offer a discount for segregated timber. Rather than attempt to sort through a mixed up bulky waste stream at landfill, have staff work with your customers to sort it out beforehand. 

The capital requirements are reduced, space, uncertainty, everything shrinks to a manageable problem. Furthermore, by treating your customers as humans, you probably also have happier customers with greater loyalty.

It really is that old adage about how you eat an elephant - one bite at a time. 

Or to flip it on its head, the reason why we do so poorly in upcycling is because we can only frame the problem as an elephant towering above us. Break it down, shift your perspective, and suddenly the problem becomes a whole series of solutions that grow upon themselves.

Garbologie is liberated!

Garbologie has been hiding under Upcycle for several months now, struggling to break free from the inherent tensions of a full time job and a family life not to be abandoned. Both are important, and so Garbologie/Upcycle gives.

The exciting news is that I am now working 4 days a week in my normal job, leaving a day a week to pursue Garbologie. I celebrate this with a new name for the blog, a new post and a taste of what Garbologie is to become.

Garbologie will turn waste management on its head. It will do this on the three pillars of Thinking, Guiding and Doing. Thinking through writing, expressing opinions, being a thought leader. Guiding through consulting, advising organisations on how they can do better in waste management. Doing through establishing our very own network of waste facilities to demonstrate what we say.

Expect to see a lot of activity in thinking, growing into activity in guiding and, in a year, the first waste facility launched. Follow us to track our progress.