Waste - the shadow economy

First, an apology

First things first. My apologies for missing a post. I try to write every weekday evening, but didn't last night. I am suffering a particularly severe case of manflu, and feel I came close to death (yeah, ok, I had a bit of a stuffy nose).

But as I glimpsed the shadow of death, I had a vision for a post. Waste as the shadow economy.

The "real" economy and the shadow economy

It goes a bit like this. In the "real" economy, we take raw materials and progressively transport, compound, add value and ultimately distribute them as products to people.

The shadow economy is the reverse. It takes products from people after they have had a catastrophic liquidation of value, taking a product they paid money to receive and converting it to material they pay money to get rid of. These products are then progressively consolidated into larger and larger flows.

A shadow economy done well would see the waste also purified as they are consolidated. It would seek to reinstate the raw materials making up the product. This is, I think, the transition we are in.

Our current transition

I think waste is a relatively new discovery. I think in the not too distant past we had stuff that needed a bit of love, passed on to others, repurposed. I think it is a recent "innovation" to have items so quickly and catastrophically lose all value such that we can only get rid of it.

With this innovation, we initially sought to just be gone with it. Coarse solutions such as incinerators and landfills to deal with a coarse problem. Once the catastrophic liquidation of value begins, we just go on rolling with it.

I think this is changing. There is a growing subtlety of purpose where the coarse solution is unpicked. Materials are purified rather than combined, industries are developing around the refining, processing, value adding to waste. Until, at some point, it is not longer waste.

And on we roll to society as a whole

The shadow economy notion goes further. Taking the pernicious conflation of "society" to "economy" as a lead, everything that is important in the "real" economy is also important in the shadow waste economy.

And so a multi-disciplinary course at university could truly draw out every single faculty. Not just the obvious Engineering, but also Arts, Law, Geography, Physics, Chemistry, Medicine. All of them. Even Economics. None of them would be bit players either; all could reasonably conceive their role to be pivotal to the whole endeavour.

And in closing

This was my thought. Like many of them, I would like to extend it in a future post, but will leave it lie there for now.

I would love your feedback, additional pointers for the shadow economy, revelations, inspirations, delirious ravings. I would also love the simple gesture of you saying "Hi, I'd like to hear more from you!" and your following this conversation a bit further.

Waste - racing to the bottom or the top?

Developing our waste processing plant, I am reminded of Seth Godin's blog post: The race to the bottom. In short, we can chose a race to the bottom or a race to the top.

The race to the bottom

This race is pretty clear cut. It involves bigger landfills, older trucks, cutting corners wherever possible to wring every last cent out of the business. Eventually, the last cent wrung out of the business is yourself. 

It assumes that the customer doesn't care what happens to their waste, and is purely driven by price. Of course, once you've created this race then it is self-fulfilling. You have convinced the customer that the only thing that matters is price.

Every market has its own race to the bottom, and every race to the bottom ends up at the bottom. You can only hope that race doesn't consume the whole market. 

In the field of waste management, but also in most other fields, you rely on regulators to protect you against the worst of the race to the bottom. Regulators can even call the race off (if they wish).

The race to the top

This race is also clear. It involves fewer landfills and more waste processing. It is probably more labour intensive as it seeks to extract every last resource from the waste received. Unlike the race to the bottom, it builds new businesses upon its success. 

Reprocessed material adds value and jobs to the economy - a recent report "The Australian Recycling Sector" estimates that

• 0.15 to 0.3% of all Australian jobs are in the recycling
• The sector has annual turnover of between $6-10 billion dollars, of which more than half is from the sale of recover materials
• A tonne of waste recycled creates more jobs than a tonne of waste landfilled

This race assumes that customers ultimately want good service, and are prepared to pay a little above the bottom of the market to receive it. Sell a vision and you will be surprised what you bring with you. Of course, it may be that the customers need some prodding.

For example, if you are building a waste processing plant, your key customers are waste collectors. Their customers are other businesses who sell, ultimately, to consumers. And consumers can be very influential in persuading businesses to lift their game. Selling the vision should not be confined to your immediate customers, but rather across all of society. It is the grand narrative that you want people to buy, not a selfish little "what's in it for me".

The race to the top is all but untouched by the regulator, but rather driven on by your customers and your ability to keep innovating.

Where would you rather be?

Long term, there is only one race you want to be in. The race to the bottom is easy. It is also a race to your own destruction. Sure, not now, but in a few years time (depending on the speed of change in the market).

The race to the top is hard. It requires a great ability to tell the story. It needs supporters, fans, followers. It needs a virtuous cycle of creating people who care, who in turn create more people who care. 

For all of this, the race to the top is the only sustainable race. When the bottom racers have collapsed, spent after slugging it out in the ditch, you remain strong and profitable.

And what do I do?

It is pretty straightforward - you can just keep spreading the word. Keep up your belief that the wrong thing is wrong, no matter how much people seek to persuade you otherwise. 

This and skim across my blog from time to time. In between digressing through some personal ramblings, I hope that the blog can keep inspiring ideas on what is right, what is possible, and how the bad can be replaced with the good.

May the bridges I burn light the way

I know there is a general warning out against cryptic blog post titles, but I cannot resist.

I saw the title to this post on twitter and it tickled my fancy. Put up by agency Unashamedly Creative, it encapsulates where I am right now.

On the one hand it is fearlessly irreverent. We all know that we shouldn't burn our bridges, you never know who might prove to be useful/important etc. But I seem unable to help myself.

I am forever burning bridges in the name of  idiocy, or rather, protection from idiocy. It feels like there is this horde of slavering zombies after me, dribbling their idiotic ramblings all over the place. Stupid, illogical, gutless and cynical pronouncements on what I really care about. Rubbish (quite literally, I care about rubbish). In this context, if I can get across the bridge and burn it down, I won't be infected by them.

Not everybody sees it this way. Most would just say I'm headstrong and destined for a fall. But this is the one hand.

The other hand is that the slogan resonates with that concept of a bold step, the "burning ships", the crossing of the Rubicon. Without any path of retreat, the only way is to move forward. It is the point of no return.

In this sense, the slogan is not fiercely irreverent at all, it is just fierce. It is a statement that I am on the move, I do not intend to take a backward step, I will prevail. Ultimately, it is a step that every entrepreneur must take to be successful. You have to leave that cushy corner office to live your life (rather than some other dude's). You have to be true to your dreams.

And so, in a world where the status quo is dead wrong (on waste), and the only way out is to stride forward into what I truly believe in (on waste), the slogan rings true as a bell.

May the bridges I burn light the way.

Burning bridge, from Atlas Media Group website

The world of waste without us

Reading (again) the book "The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman, I'm reminded that we leave some very long-lived legacies.

One is obvious. High strength radioactive waste will be around for a long, long time. It is pretty unlikely to be able to be contained in a world without us, and so it will cause radioactive hotspots that last a long, long time. That is bad enough, but kind of obvious.

The thing that struck me was that plastics are also very long lived. There are (currently) no bacteria that are able to decompose most plastics, and so they will be around a long time. Weisman dedicates a chapter to this discussion (Polymers are forever), including a discussion of the Great Pacfic Garbage Patch. A startling fact reported is that, of the 1 billion tonnes of plastic produced in the 50 years, every bit remains in the environment (except for a small amount that's been incinerated).

It's not like, paper, which largely decomposes. Except when it is deep in landfill, when it can also be very long lived. Work done by William Rathje (who, I have just learned in researching this post, die just four months ago) found readable newspapers from the 1930s in current landfills. Incidentally, Rathje termed his work "garbology".

So we are here blithely using some of the most long-lived material in the world for such transient applications as single use packaging. This is why we are seeing such an explosion of community groups trying to reduce plastic use, seeing things like Two Hands Project, Plastic Free July and many others. These messages get real resonance, indicating that people care. They are important, as they try to reduce plastic creation.

Another avenue, perhaps a secondary mechanism, is to remove plastic once it's created and collected. One avenue that tickles my fancy is a small scale plastic-oil convertor. Pointed out by my good cyber-friend Ken, the "Blest Machine" converts plastic (except for PET) back into its constituent oil. For every kilogram of plastics, about a litre of oil is produced which can be further refined to diesel etc. The units are pretty expensive, but a great first step.

Blest Machine - plastic to oil conversion

The Blest website has more information, but it strikes me as a pretty cool idea for creating fuel where plastic is abundant. Thanks Ken!

I remember first reading The World Without Us and seeing plastic in a whole new light. What just another product, a bit challenging in terms of waste operations, became one of the most extraordinarily insane materials in use.

The world of waste without us...some pretty nasty radioactive hotspots and a general smear of plastic throughout the environment, including within animals as the plastics get smaller and smaller.

Plastics on water, source Green Team RSMAS

Zeronauts unite!

The term "zero waste" has been so misused in government parlance that it has become a term of gentle (and not so gentle) mockery. So Western Australia had the slogan "Zero Waste by 2020", which then became "Towards Zero Waste", which is atrociously at odds with the reality of this state that had to change again, this time to "Western Australia: Too good to waste".

"Zero waste" is clearly misused when there is nothing to back it up - a "zero waste" policy becomes zero waste policy. Nothing. Nada. Nix.

However, just because a term has been misused doesn't make it invalid. The German Democratic Republic (East Germany) did not invalidate the term democracy because it holds a fundamental core. Similarly, there is a fundamental and revolutionary truth to zero waste.

To achieve zero requires us to refashion how we do things. That might seem terrifying, but this sort of revolutionary change has happened over and over again. There was a time when oil and kerosene lamps were ubiquitous. They then rapidly blinked out to be replaced by electricity (and associated immense generation and transmission infrastructure).

Of course, it is easy to get hung up on "zero", to find reasons why some tiny amount will always exist, and then act as if this is a fatal flaw that prevents even contemplating the concept. That would be akin to arguing that people will always die in car crashes, so there is no point in trying to prevent fatal crashes. And so on.

In fact, the case for "zero" and zeronauts in particular is well argued by John Elkington in his book The Zeronauts, Breaking the Sustainability Barrier and associated Zeronauts website, and summed up by Maxine Perella in a post "the zeronaut: where others fear to tread" on her blog //greendipped:

Essentially, it is about rebuilding the status quo and transforming it into a ‘future quo’. Elkington argues that status quo capitalism lacks imagination and ambition. That there is a design fault within it and also those factors linked to it such as mindset, behaviour, culture, economics and technology. 

His approach is a game changing, experimental one. Where zeronauts will succeed in achieving large-scale sustainability improvements, he argues, is where there is a market price signalling scarcity. So if consumers face higher prices for water and electricity, this should stimulate entrepreneurial activity centred on economising those resources.

It is a notion that is very close to my heart. It basically asks the question "Why do we tolerate waste?", and seeks an answer to that question in stronger entrepreneurial activity. I think it's spot on.

So, thanks to //greendipped, I've learned another thing that I am not (yet) but wish to be (joining the ranks of maven from my "social media epiphany" blog). As for the term "maven", part of the comfort is realising that what I am striving for is not impossible. Hard, yes, but not impossible.

Values and value. Or how do our values affect our waste?

I was speaking today at a forum about the importance of values in our organisation, noting that our values are all internalised. We don't do signs (you know, "Please wash up your dishes", "Please turn off the lights", and in fact, that's kind of one of the values. We trust each other to get it.

This thinking can be transferred to waste. Waste really is a collective set of values that, I believe, permits us to turn away from our destruction. Engineering better landfills or incinerators kind of misses the point. The act of destruction is perpetrated when we, collectively, decide it isn't worth sustaining that material any more.

I believe that we suffer a little death whenever we make this decision, a little death that is easiest dealt with by closing our eyes to it, and by telling ourselves little stories to make it better. "The landfill is best practice" we say. "There will be no environmental impacts" we tell ourselves.

The story is only accepted because it is both implausible and deeply comforting. We want to believe it, we need to believe it, and so we do. This is how we construct our values to permit our lifestyle to continue.

I don't write this to send you, the reader, down a guilt trip. It isn't intended to tell you that you can no longer use your bin lest you go to hell. Rather, it is to encourage a rethink of your part in our collective values, which may in turn lead to a movement which can ultimately lead to change.

Slavery was abolished in this way. Slavery was deeply entrenched in society, necessary for it to maintain itself, and built off the lie that slaves are sub-human, or that the slaves are better looked after enslaved than free. That lie was challenged, and the values system built off it collapsed.

I believe rethinking the values enables us to challenge those who sustain the status quo. They will say there is no other way. Perhaps not as they have framed the problem. And so the problem needs to be reframed. Its boundaries expanded, new questions asked.

I realise this is no prescription for action, but like my organisation, it isn't a matter of signs. You just have to get it, and then live it, and then things start to fall into place around you.

Why I can't write this post

You might notice that I've been trying to keep a regular, weekday blogging cycle. I'll sit down and nut out a blog post on something like the Ten Faces of Waste Innovation, or Don Delillo, Underworld and Waste, or even something more personal like Moving from Working a Job to Building a Business.

Tonight I am not going to achieve this, because I am truly exhausted.

I have spent the last three days in Canberra seeking Federal Government support for a waste processing facility. The flight over is four hours, so with a connecting flight I spent the best part of 9 hours inside an airplane since Sunday afternoon.

I then spent the best part of Monday, Tuesday and this morning roaming the corridors of Parliament House, going from briefing to briefing. That was exhausting, especially given there were long breaks when we couldn't sensibly leave (getting through security is a drawn out process).

What did I learn?

Well, contrary to the public opinion, I learned that most politicians are very intelligent, very engaged and sharp as a tack. They are also hamstrung in making snap decisions by a whole heap of processes. When we are being fair, we call this democracy. When we are unfair, we just roll our eyes and cynically declare "of course they can't help"

I learned that senior bureaucrats, particularly in Canberra, are consummate professionals. They are entirely across a sprawling department, and want to help. They are also hamstrung in making decisions by a whole heap of processes. Yep, that would be democracy again.

I also learned that behind the bluster of Question Time, Parliamentarians generally try to work together to help out constituents. They are (generally) hard working, and want to see a lasting improvement.

I realised that Parliamentarians have to do what I just did every week that Parliament sits. Where I can whinge about being exhausted, they do it without complaint. They also fold in a whole lot of other stuff around the country. I can only admire them. Doesn't mean I won't criticise them, as that too is part of this beast called democracy.

I don't know whether the meetings will lead to any government support - that's the way it goes in a democray with competing demands on money. I do know that our project is now better known in Canberra. If nothing else, that is worth the trip.

So my apologies for not being able to write this post. I need a rest.

Maybe some other time I'll write expand on how to recycle a mattress, or apply some of the great thinkers like Umair Haque to solving tomorrow's waste problems.

Just not now.

Is good customer service in waste facilities a crazy idea?

I blogged a few days ago around customer service in waste management, and to be honest, was a bit fixated on customer service as it applies in a B2B context. There is, however, another whole conversation to be had on customer service in the consumer space at waste facilities.

The horror

We've probably all been there. You go for the once in a blue moon trip to the tip. You're towing a trailer for the first time in a year or two, half lost, and you stumble upon the entrance. 

You are then struck by a barrage of signs. Do this. Don't do that. Waivers of liability. Fees, fine print and a scowling attendant who looks at you like you're the worst form of idiot. And you haven't even opened your mouth yet.

A barrage of signs, courtesy of HuffPost

Depending on your personality, you rustle up your best "I know what I'm doing" swagger, hoping like hell you'll bluff your way through. Or you go all subservient and meekly ask what happens next. Doesn't really matter, because you then get interrogated about what is in the load, with no clues about what matters. And so you explain that you've got your husband's old vinyl suit (lively little number that was), a couple of tree branches and a couch.

You may then get an inspection, at which point the attendant uncovers a tin of paint and a couple of tyres that you've tried to smuggle in. Which, if you'd known they wanted to know about, you would have disclosed. And you then get charged some ridiculous amount for an arbitrary interpretation of the fees that you can't read anyway. And you're sent on your way to tip.

It doesn't get better at the tip site. You drive nervously down a dodgy goat track hoping you're not trespassing, before you end up with a whole heap of other non-trespassers. Another attendant wanders over and shows you the needle's eye you are to reverse your trailer through, then wanders off (perhaps to film it for "world's greatest reversing idiots"). At which point you break out into a cold sweat, and finally get in there after causing a minor riot among the people waiting.

So you unload. By yourself. Doesn't matter how heavy anything is, and by this point you just want it gone. Doesn't matter that the old couch is ok. Don't care about separating out branches from general waste. Just get it off this trailer so I can flee far from here. Which you do, and only return once you've forgotten the whole experience.

The vision

As I'm wont to say, it doesn't have to be thus.

Imagine if the tip was a warehouse in an industrial part of town, but instead of looking like a tip, it looked more like a drive through bottle shop. One big, simple sign showing prices and not much more. There are only a few prices. 

You drive in, an attendant walks over to you and doesn't bother with the interrogation. They just say hello and ask if you'd like a hand unloading. Which of course you do, and they bring a crate over to the car. And you both unload, together. No reversing, no crazy questions, just good old fashioned service.

Even better, the attendant helps to separate out the stuff that is still ok. So the couch is put to one side. The cardboard is separated with you. The paint and tyres are put to one side. The crate for rubbish remains pretty empty. All the while the attendant chats to you, you know how the place works and you know what the fee is going to be. When it's all done, you're charged the appropriate fee, paying via a mobile device and you're free to go.

But you don't want to go. Because there is an awesome little shop and cafe, where all the stuff that was separated out from everybody else is available for sale. And everything is so, so cheap.  So you drive your car (and trailer) to a parking bay, get yourself a coffee and browse. Either walking around or using one of many iPads at the tables. Congratulating yourself on a job well done, and looking for an excuse to return. Maybe all of the kids' stuff being stored in the back room? 

How could you not love this service? 

It is nothing more (nor less) than rethinking the waste facility so that it serves the needs of the customer. Not the needs of efficient bulk handling. Which, to be fair to the attendants, discourage them from helping.

Is customer service in waste facilities a crazy notion?

The value in bulky waste

Sometimes it seems that the Universe conspires to help you. For me, this happened today.

The backstory is that I've been working up a business plan for the past few months around a facility to receive, resell and recycle bulky goods.

The plan is built off my 15 years of experience in running waste facilities, and so I think I have a pretty good feel for the industry. Based on this feel, I think there is enormous potential for a waste receival site that aims to send little or nothing to landfill.

My experience was as good as confirmed by a study recently published by WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme, from the UK) into bulky waste. This study suggests that there is a strong business case for a waste facility that separates and reuses bulky waste.

According to the data collected, 39 kg/hh/yr of bulky waste was delivered each year to waste facilities. Of this, 42% is furniture, 19% textiles and 19% e-waste.

Here is where it gets interesting. Of the total waste received at the site, 32% is reusable as is. With no repair. The reuse percentage increases to 51% being reusable with slight repairs.

Note that this is only what can be reused. There is another substantial category of waste that cannot be reused, but can be readily dismantled and the components recycled.

So work through the numbers. For a population of 100,000 households, there are 3,900 tonnes of bulky waste per year. Of that, about 2,000 tonnes can be resold with some minor repairs. Much of the remaining 1,900 tonnes can be dismantled and recycled too, but we'll leave that to one side for the purposes of this discussion.

Considering just the resalable, even if you sold it at a bargain basement price of $1.00/kg (ie a 20 kg bookcase going for just $20), then there are $2m worth of reusable goods being destroyed each year simply because there isn't the infrastructure to appropriately collect, repair and resell. Even worse, at $100/tonne, the landfill fees on the resalable goods represent a further $200,000 in costs.

Second hand bookcase, from Second Hand Furniture

In short, a community of 100,000 households represents a largely untapped $2.2m business in its bulky goods alone! This is quite extraordinary, and confirms that there is a business here.

Social media's role in waste management

I've been gnawing this question of how social media works in with something as physical as waste. The obvious reason for my disquiet is that a lot of the discussion, buzz and excitement around social media seems to be associated with its ability to transform human relations.

This doesn't really cut it for me - rubbish cannot be effortlessly passed around the world in the same way as bits of information. Garbage is weighed down by its sheer physicality, the fact that somebody or something has to handle each atom of matter as it moves through the economy.

This handling would imply a great combine of systems to efficiently pipe waste to where it belongs. Not that bits of information are without their own massive infrastructure, but once that infrastructure exists, there is no need to shovel particles up or down the line. And that effortlessness of information moving is what makes everything around the internet work.

In short, waste doesn't seem to a good possibility for virality, for the sort of distributed empowerment and foment of ready innovation that characterises the world around which social media whirls.

And yet, and yet.

And yet, I can't let go of the fact that social media is a powerful force that goes beyond allegory.

I wrote about this a bit in my post "social media, entrepreneurship and waste",writing that the combination of social media, entrepreneurship and waste might be:

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.

I'm not sure that really gets there, as it is pretty vague, but it is a taste.

My more personal post "a social media epiphany" took a slightly different tack, and amongst the personal observations noted the information aspect of social media:

There are a whole heap of people who blog, tweet AND run business in waste all around the world. And they are invariably doing something that is really interesting and deserves adaption for local markets. There is a lot to learn, digest, turn around.

That idea of social media as data distributor, or rather the philosophy of distributed systems in general that are best recognised in social media, was explored more fully in "waste and peer to peer". This aspect is important, but not quite what I am gnawing my way towards.

Finally, at a speech I gave recently (if the link doesn't work, visit the Western Earth Carers facebook page to find the speeches), I started with:

Let me start with an exciting and terrifying proposition.  The future of waste management does not rest with governments building infrastructure which they then command.  Like it or not, people no longer believe that institutions serve them.   

Now why does this matter?  It matters because organisations [...] must adapt.  

Now by adapt, I do not mean some sort of formal process for channeling something called the community.  I am talking about deep engagement, the sort of conversation that is now seen in social media like facebook and twitter.

On first blush, this seems silly and faddish.  That would be both arrogant and wrong.  

Wrong because social media is no fad.  People are rapidly demanding more and better engagement.  It is not just the way of the future, it is the way of now.  I think we’ll look back on what we’ve always done with the same disdain that we look back on the crude simplicity of wartime propaganda.

Arrogant because there is a truly staggering depth of knowledge you can tap through social media.  To discount social media is to claim that you know better than the many out there.

So, again, getting at that element of communication and information.

And yet that doesn't quite seem to be the destination I had in mind.

I think I had seen the possibility most clearly in my first post above, but am still no closer to seeing how that business might evolve. It must involve information and communication, that much is clear, but somehow take these to the next level.

Maybe it is a series of micro-businesses that can pop up to deal with particular wastes. Maybe it is the clever collection, aggregation and analysis of data, without falling back to becoming a sales portal. Maybe it is the creation of an enabler that can hitch waste services off everyday activities - a bit like a MeeMeep but less deliberate, almost seeming to happen by accident.

To be honest, I don't know, and suspect I won't know for a little while. However, I also suspect that the only way I am to ever come to know is if I write it, gnaw it, turn it over. And over. And over again.

Come join me.

Infrastructure or disruption

There is an argument that waste management is about providing infrastructure that services economies.

Under this model, it is the responsibility of government to provide a core service that gets rid of waste as quickly and efficiently as possible. Cheaply too. There is an emphasis on planning, on making sure that you never get into a situation where you can't get rid of the rubbish.

The outcome of this sort of top down approach is that waste tends to get treated in aggregate, and the least bad outcome pursued. The approach tends to reinforce the position of established players, and reduce the chances for innovation. It is safe mediocrity.

An alternative is to see waste management as having ample scope for disruption. That waste is no different to any other industry in a free market, and that is, established players are on a permanent slide to being consumed by nimbler businesses around them.

If you see the potential for disruption, then planning is the last thing you will want to do. Not only are plans impossible, but creating the plan removes the ingredients for disruption. Disruption requires bottom up action, people and businesses recognising and acting on opportunities close to the ground rather than from the stratosphere of spreadsheets built on dodgy assumptions. Planning tends to create solutions that prohibit bottom up solutions.

It would be fair to say that I have a strong bias toward bottom up solutions. This seems more entrepreneurial, more innovative, efficient, alive. It seems to me to create the necessary preconditions for excellence. Nevertheless, there remains a role for base level infrastructure.

There needs to be somebody providing a safety net solution that prevents disease, but a net that can be built upon. I think that is what landfills are all about. They are imperfect but sufficient. They do not suffer greatly from waste being taken out and recycled, and indeed their existence is so repugnant that you feel obliged to do something. They do not demand large volumes to be viable. In fact, the existence of landfills might even be a necessary precondition for disruption in the waste industry.

Landfill, complete with compactor and seagulls. From Zerowaste SA.

And so, like so many things, you have to conclude that it is not a matter of either-or, but both-and.

That is not to defend landfills (though I've run many). It is simply to acknowledge them as an imperfect part of an imperfect world. A part we should not rest within but rather build upon.

Customer service matters in waste

Three experiences over the past few weeks came to a head today, and reminded me of the absolutely critical importance of customer service. Two bad, and one great. The great one showed just how bad the bad was. All are in the waste industry.

First of all the bad. No names.

The first bad experience

The first was the supplier of some plant to our transfer station. I thought that I had engaged him to give me a turnkey solution that involved a piece of mechanical equipment and some site works. He thought (correctly, as it turns out) that he was only contracted to supply and install the equipment. So I had my first shock. However, he said he could sort out the site works. In fact, he'd prefer to do this himself and would get back to us with a quote.

The next shock came a few days after the install when I was hit with a bill for extra works to install the plant. This was not an insignificant bill. All of it justifiable, but not justified in my view.

The final shock came when I next met with the contractor, expecting a quote and a quick turnaround. Turns out he had thought about it a bit more, and wasn't interested in the site works after all. We learned this after almost two weeks of waiting.

So we are left with some kit on site that we can't use, we've lost a few weeks in the process, and all along the contractor has been in the right, but totally in the wrong. You see, the contractor seems to think I'm after their piece of plant. I'm not. I want the solution the plant offers. I didn't get it.

The second bad experience

My next experience was to do with a conference where I'm presenting. Presenting at a conference requires work. You have to think about what to say, you have to write the paper, you have to prepare your presentation, you have to present. It's several weeks of work.

All of this is a significant investment. All of which is fine in the context of an investment in your industry, an investment in yourself.

The shock was to then learn that I get to pay the full conference registration fee. Presenters, without whom there is no conference, pay the same as the punter sitting up the back passively soaking it up. The punter who pays the fees, turns up in the morning, goes home in the evening and makes no further investment in the conference.

It's not a big deal financially - the fee is not huge. But I'm left feeling that I'm being exploited. I now have no ownership in the deal, I don't care if the conference succeeds or fails. And there is no chance that I'll be investing any more effort in promoting this conference. The conference organisers have made enough money off my work.

The good experience

The nice experience was actually a few weeks ago. It involved The Creative Arts House, a brand creation agency. I turned up to discuss how we might develop a brand around our work, which has been running along for decades in a pretty lacklustre fashion.

The surprise was that Clare and Heather had done their homework. We sat around a table, and they had our corporate documents (all easily found on our website) before them. They then proceeded to tell me what they liked about us, and we could cut straight past the preamble and get into the business.

That is such a small thing, but such an awesome thing. And I am delighted to promote their services as a result.

What is the lesson?

The lesson from this is pretty straightforward. Customer service matters. Even for companies in waste management. It matters for customers of waste management outfits. And customer service is not about selling your service, but about meeting your customer's needs.

It doesn't matter if you have the best product on the market, without meeting your customer's needs, the customer just feels shafted. Especially if you have the best product. Conversely, putting yourself in the customer's shoes increases the chances that you will delight the customer and build immense loyalty.

That must matter.

Another business model for second hand books

If you are looking to take waste and reuse it, then one of the materials that you are going to end up dealing with is second hand books.

Typically these books are listed and sold on an item basis, with each book having a different price depending on what the store thinks it's worth. Here's a different model: sell books by the kilogram. The greengrocer for books. You could play with this.

It's not my idea. I first saw it written up at Springwise (a website listing entrepreneurial ideas), with the article referring to the Spanish bookseller La Casqueria which apparently sells books by the kilogram. Unfortunately I don't read Spanish, but I believe them.

There is another store in the US that does similar: Market Fresh Books. Books there are $5/lb, or a bit over $10/kg. In fact, they have some really clever business models like book rental where you pay a deposit of the book's cover price, and get refunded the deposit less $0.75 per day. If you like the book, you keep it and everybody's happy. Cool approach!

You could have a bit of fun with this. Maybe romance novels are "in season", and so you can reduce the price. Greengrocer scales, people in smocks, books put in paper bags etc. Go the whole hog.

It certainly changes thinking about books, and that can't be a bad thing. You're certainly in front. At $10/kg, you are getting $10,000/tonne. That beats paying $100/tonne at landfill, or maybe getting $300/tonne as recycled paper.

Why do books go to landfill again?

The changing economics of waste

Waste has classically been an industry where labour is minimised at the cost of more landfill. This made sense when landfill was cheap. This dynamic is changing.

The graph below shows the cost at a Perth landfill, and the minimum wage per hour.

Landfill and labour costs - Perth, Western Australia

The graph shows a jump in landfill costs for 2010 coinciding with a jump in the landfill fee per how of labour. In 2000, each tonne of waste was equivalent to three hours of minimum wage labour. In 2012 it has jumped to over 6.5 hours on a landfill fee of about $110/tonne.

In Sydney, the Eastern Creek landfill charges twice this gate fee, making a tonne of waste equivalent to over 13 hours of labour. And trends around Australia (except, perhaps, Queensland) are for landfill costs to increase much faster than the cost of labour.

What does this mean?

In short, it means that the innovators in waste management can afford to invest labour to reduce waste to landfill. This will be difficult for established operators to acknowledge, as they are hamstrung by their existing operations.

As discussed in my post marginal thinking and waste, existing operators are all but forced to frame the problem in terms of how to marginally improve on what they have. Which is bulk handling systems that minimise labour at the expense of waste to landfill.

The field is wide open for new players to enter this market.

A social media epiphany

A couple of days ago, enjoying a beautiful winters day on the edge of a quiet oval, I had a bit of an epiphany.

I had been receiving tweets on my new twitter account for something like a month, and blogging for a little longer. This great tide of information had been washing over me, but had kind of felt like somebody else's conversation.

Until Wednesday, with the sun warming my back. It was then that I finally realised the true value of social media. And this is that there is an almost bottomless wisdom and intelligence in social media - be it twitter, facebook, blogging, whatever.

Of course, there is also limitless inanity, but that's the easy bit. Just ignore that. The fear is not tapping in to some vapid stream of consciousness, but rather missing pearls of wisdom.

My realisation was that social media gives you access to a million minds, each turning over similar questions in wholly unexpected ways. Many writing blogs of immense value, the sort of blog that you would truly cherish in a book, challenging your thinking. indeed forcing you to think.

Then there's the more instrumental observation. There are a whole heap of people who blog, tweet AND run businesses in waste all around the world. And they are invariably doing something that is really interesting and deserves adaption for local markets. There is a lot to learn, digest, turn around.

Social media, in short, makes you realise that the world is quite a bit larger than Perth, Western Australia. That the ideas are not limited to that which circulates around this goldfish bowl. That you can learn without cease. I had not felt this for many years.

I also realised that social media goes further than being a kind of uber-library. It holds the possibility of fundamentally changing the way we are.

Critics will write of how these changes are for the worse. A lack of attention, inability to express complex thoughts, confinement to an echo chamber of peers and so on. Of course this is possible.

But equally possible is a remarkable deepening of humanity. I see this with the personal branding described by Trevor Young in his book "The Micro Maven Manifesto". I see it in the annual report prepared by Jonathan Fields. I see it in the flowering of individual expression, each working toward the more perfect fulfillment of their self. A person can finally be all the different people he/she really is. People no longer need to give simple answers to "What are you?"

I realise that is naff, but I find it immense. To be able to be authentic and find people prepared to listen is humbling. To be able to work hard, knowing that the work you are creating is forming a part of the world EXACTLY as you want it, not mediated through the lens of an employer, is empowering. And for this opportunity to be available to so many is truly incredible, creating a rich ecosystem in which many can find their own niche.

This was my epiphany. A realisation that there is a vast library of work just waiting to be found, and a whole host of people helping me to find it. A realisation that I am in the perfect place at the perfect time. A realisation that all of the hopes and dreams which have been (poorly) bottled up inside my brain can be free.

There is no need to pretend any more. Garbologie is just the beginning.

Dickens' Great Expectations of waste - it needn't be thus

The last two days I've been working through a retelling of the waste industry through the prism of Dickens' Great Expectations. The first piece set out who (what) the novel characters represent in the industry. The second piece then told the tale of Great Expectations with these characters. With Pip as the waste industry, it is not a happy story.

The story need not play out this way. 

Dickens' Great Expectations of waste, Part 2

Having set out the characters in yesterday's blog, it is time to try to try for the telling of the story of the waste industry through the prism of Great Expectations. To be specific, it can be read to tell the story of the waste industry’s aspirations for waste processing.

The industry starts, as might be expected, basically. It is close to the people, and does not aspire to greatness nothwithstanding the sophistication off in the distance. This is seen as unattainable.

Dickens' Great Expectations of waste, Part 1

I recently dreamed up the idea of reading Great Expectations as an allegory of the waste management industry. It is a reading that is challenging me, but fun all the same.

To start, I've tried to give each of the key characters in the novel a theme in waste management. Here's what I ended up with:

Marginal decision making in electronic waste

Yesterday's blog marginal thinking and waste referred to the lost opportunity in e-waste, with billions of dollars worth of precious metals going to landfill each year. That seems a bit flippant on reflection, and I'd like to explore a bit more on the cascading decisions that bring this to pass.

The first decision maker is the consumer who has a dead piece of electronics. There is simply not enough precious metal in the unit for it to be financially worthwhile to recycle themselves, through e-scrap is certainly valuable. They can decide to throw it in their bin, take it to the nearby waste facility, or take it to an e-waste recycler.

Marginal thinking and waste

You would think that finance and economics were a little distant from waste management. Or at least, any theory beyond "get rid of this rubbish at the lowest cost".

You'd be wrong. Reading a summary of Clayton M. Christensen's book How Will You Measure Your Life, you might get some sparks of new perspectives.

Christensen looks at how marginal cost theory is misapplied - a series of incremental decisions based on marginal costs leads to a bad overall outcome. It inevitably leads to the status quo being maintained, even in the face of fatal changes in circumstances. The example used is nimble Netflix devouring the Blockbuster behemoth.

In private lives, according to Christensen, a similar "marginal cost" slippage in values can be catastrophic.

If the principle can be transferred out of economics and into private life, it can also be transferred to waste management. Indeed, on reflection, it transfers very well.

After all, what is waste other than a long series of marginal cost decision that lead to an outcome that is illogical and undesirable, even for the decision maker? 

Only in a marginal cost world can it make sense to recover only 15% of the estimated $21 billion of gold and silver incorporated in electronic goods, leaving the remaining 85% to go to landfill in concentrations 40 to 50 times the concentration of the ore originally mined for the metals.

It is a world where each decision is a little disaster, where the benefits are small and barely realisable by the decision maker, but the path embarked upon is stupid for society. 

It is a world that suggests the standard economic theory unravels, where even if people did make individual decisions in perfect knowledge (which they don't), the aggregated decision would still be dumb because each self-optimised marginal cost decision slips further and further from a sensible outcome.

Christensen suggests that the way to overcome the outcomes that arise from marginal cost theory is to look at things from a sort of "Ground Zero". Consider the world as if you were a disruptor. Ignore your "assets" on the ground. What would the decision be then? If it would be different to what you are doing, change what you are doing.

This has powerful resonances with waste management, and reinforces why entrepreneurs (and perhaps intrapreneurs if they can find the necessary internal support) are so important to overthrow the status quo.

Eco-Stock: Upcycling waste food

In my post when recycling goes wrong, I suggested that recycling is not always best, but it is very difficult to assess when it is not. To try to navigate through this, I suggested we need to be especially careful around food and systems that are hugely complex and perhaps unknowable in the full scale of potential interactions.

As it happened, I was in touch with somebody in New Zealand at about the same time as I wrote this, and she pointed out a food waste recycler in New Zealand called Eco-Stock (thanks Leny). I don't know if Leny was in touch with me because of my post or whether it was just synchronicity at play, but Eco-Stock is a very interesting company.

In essence, the business takes surplus food products and reprocesses it into stock feed for cows, calves, poultry and pigs. The food products that Eco-Stock deals with are:

• Production food waste
• Packaged goods
• Liquid/syrup wastes
• Chilled/frozen goods

These products would ordinarily go to landfill, but instead go through a stock food plant in South Auckland.

This is no different to what was (and is) always done on small farms. Animals get scraps so that they don't go to waste. Eco-Stock takes the concept to an industrial scale, but doesn't change the concept. So, in a sense, it doesn't mess with my poorly definable "natural order of things" test.

I think Eco-Stock is brilliant, and love the fact that they fuse waste management service delivery (they provide skip and hooklift bins to collect the waste) with a manufacturing mindset.

I also love the vision:

Be the catalyst that partners with industry and its communities to bring science and technology to waste goods, resulting in sustainably upcycling these into tradable commodities, to feed the growth of New Zealand

A waste wiki

I wonder if there has ever been somebody who has classified all of the different products manufactured, or at least the main classes, and identified:

1. What the materials making up the products are
2. What the materials might be converted to once they have reached their end of life
3. Who might buy the converted materials, and and quality is required
4. What processing is required to achieve this conversion

Of course, I've done a quick google search and there appears to be nothing. At least, nothing that systematically goes through products.

Imagine what such a resource might provide for people wanting to set up a business to pick off a small part of the waste stream. 

For instance, I know that mattresses are made of spring steel, polyurethane foam and either a cotton or synthetic textile cover. The spring steel can be recycled with scrap steel, and the foam can go into carpet underlay and foam for furniture. To get to this point, the mattress is dismantled by hand.

Knowing this, I can pretty quickly develop a business model around potential waste sources, likely prices to be attained for converted materials, and the processing costs.

Sounds pretty cool to me. If anybody knows of this sort of a thing, let me know. If anybody wants to start one, also let me know. If not, I might need to start one myself to help me in my own business development. 

Freely shared, this knowledge could enable guerilla recycling organisations that pop up almost fully formed to cater for a small niche in the waste market. Bringing the power of the information revolution to waste.

Ethics, morality and waste

In my post Social media, entrepreneurship and waste, I raised and then parked morality contrasted against ethics, particularly in discussion of waste. I'd like to return to this briefly, considering how Gay Hawkins contrasts the two in her 2005 book The Ethics of Waste.

The Ethics of Waste, Gay Hawkins. Image from Amazon

In this book, morality is a grand discourse centred on righteousness and guilt. This is the "Do the right thing" sort of messaging, and it is the most common mode of communication adopted by centralised communication around waste. If you don't do the right thing, then you are a bad person.

Morality is then contrasted against ethics, which are a series of actions which define the self. One's self is defined by one's actions. And so how one deals with waste becomes a matter of self definition and self expression, centred perhaps on generosity, on giving, on acknowledging one's transience. For waste is, ultimately, a demonstration of our own passing.

It is not a straightforward distinction. Maybe it can be boiled down to moralising is intended to have you comply with an external norm, whereas ethics is a norm formed of your actions. But I think the point is that it resists boiling down.

Gay quotes David Halpern's "incisive description" of the difference between ethics and morality in relation to waste:

The difference between ethics and morality lies in their differing attitudes to value and to waste. According to a moralistic perspective, life is not wasted if it is lived in the service of value. Value gives transcendental meaning to life and redeems the loss of it. An ethical perspective, by contrast, is one that measures, assesses and adjudicates among the diverse concrete practices of living one's life, the various calculations used to determine how exactly to throw it away

To be honest, I'm not sure that helps a lot read cold. Coming at the end of the book, it made sense when I first read the book.

One of Gay's points is that the guilt associated with moralising could be avoided by taking a gentler, more generous tone in our communication. This would ultimately be more effective. Rather than referring to what we should do, perhaps we could refer to what we could do, and that discourse would be firmly rooted in the physicality of waste. A simple (but a little unsatisfactory) example: "you should not waste food" can be contrasted with "your garden wants your waste food".

I will return to this again, as Gay's book is quite lovely and a nice application of cultural theory, perhaps quite clearly located in a postmodernist school of thought. At less than 150 pages, I thoroughly recommend it if you are prepared to open your mind to new ways of thinking about something you probably thought you already knew.