How to drive innovation in waste

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

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

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

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

How might it be done?

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

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

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

Where do the ideas come from?

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

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

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

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

How do you bring that into business?

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

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

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

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

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

What do good ideas look like?

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

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

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

Why are you telling us this?

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

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

Moving from working a job to building a business

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

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

Transition

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

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

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

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

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

The Rubicon

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

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

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

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

It will be ok

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

All of that.

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

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

Recycling of mattress fabric

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are you hoping to achieve with that waste policy?

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

If your objective is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is that what you were hoping to achieve?

Vale Barry Commoner!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything is Connected to Everything Else

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

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

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

Everything Must Go Somewhere

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

Everything must go somewhere, adopted by Shell

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

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

Nature Knows Best

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

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

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

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

There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

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

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

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

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


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

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

The Blue Economy, by Gunther Pauli

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

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

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