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.