Nicholas Nassim Taleb of The Black Swan fame, has recently written a new book called Antifragile. This book essentially takes the observation of black swans (highly unlikely, high impact events) and seeks to understand how the existence of black swans can be exploited.
Rather than systems being susceptible to black swans (ie fragile), or even resistant to black swans (resilient or robust), the goal is to design systems that thrive in the presence of black swans. Taleb coins the word "antifragile" to describe such systems.
What does that have to do with waste?
Well, I'd argue that it has a great deal to do with waste. Whenever the waste industry turns its mind to zero waste, it seems to do so in a perfectly fragile way.
Consider the 7 rules of antifragility:
Stick to simple systems
The industry fixates on waste processing plants that are incredibly complex. Sure, the underlying principles are straightforward, but their execution is far from simple. There are many, many ways that they can fail. The plant can break all by itself, the waste can break it. A perfectly good plant can be crippled as people don't like it any more.
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Photo of a waste processing plant under construction. Source: Western Metropolitan Regional Council |
The same goes for regulation. An increasingly byzantine web of regulation is growing up around waste, responding to the complexity that is waste with really detailed rules. Such a system cannot thrive in the face of significant and rapid change.
Decentralise
The industry looks to increasingly centralise decision making. We have strategies, plans, coordinated targets that are intended to move the whole industry in a particular direction. These systems act to hinder responsiveness, indeed, I've had one seasoned practitioner tell me that this is a key benefit. "Adam", he said, "these strategies stop people from going off and coming up with distracting new things". Cripey!
But the broader point is that the industry has its core mantra the saying "the economy of scale". A myth that drive centralised monoliths that break.
Develop layered systems
In the shift from landfill to waste processing plants, the industry seeks to replicate the landfill but in a big, expensive plant. That is, it looks to make plants that can take everything thrown at it. Landfill does that very well (hiding its inevitable pollution both underground where it can't be seen, and in the future where it can't be known). There is little space for nuance. It is all or nothing.
Red Hill landfill, Perth, Western Australia. Source: Wikipedia |
Waste processing plants do that poorly. They cannot be optimised to treat all materials as distinct materials, and so usually have a default low-value output (waste as compost, or as energy) but with some ancillary recycling around the edges. There is no layering. The plant has to take everything and produce the single product. If the market for that product collapses, the plant struggles.
Build in redundancy and overcompensation
Because waste processing plants that can take everything are expensive, there is never excess capacity built. The whole system is designed to be finely tuned. For the waste processing system to work properly, everything must work. And landfills must be retained in the system to provide a backup solution when the plants are offline (for whatever reason).
This is where you get this notion that you can plan out what the waste system for a city needs to look like. In fact, you can even build that system, ensuring that there is just enough capacity. Strike a power outage that affects part of the system, however, and the entire system collapses. It is fragile.
Resist the urge to suppress randomness
Waste processors put an immense amount of energy into stripping randomness out of the system. An incinerator will not be built unless a large proportion of its required waste is contracted to be supplied, and if the electricity or heat produced has an equally guaranteed market. The waste processing industry seems only able to operate in an island of certainty within a world of randomness.
Ensure everyone has skin in the game
Waste processing plants are typically initiated with the public sector carrying all of the risk. Sure, it may look like the private sector (designers, builders, operaters or financiers) is carrying a lot of risk. That is not necessarily the case, and it may well be that the long term underwriter of all risk is the public sector.
It is the public sector that has long term waste contracts, the public sector that has the political capital invested, and the public sector that permits these plants to get "too big to fail". Others are able to trade off this to improve the terms of the deal.
Give higher status to practitioners than theoreticians
Waste plants are usually driven heavily by consultants, theorists. These projects can spin off millions and millions in fees to people who are certainly sharp on what has happened elsewhere, but don't typically deal with the ins and outs of operations. Indeed, "very operational" is not a compliment in this industry.
These theoreticians are necessary because the whole edifice rests on this presumption that everything can be known and thus designed for. If everything can be known, then you want an expert to be doing the designing.
With all of the above, I'd suggest that the waste industry (particularly as it relates to "resource recovery") is in the business of making itself perfectly fragile. Where that fragility is acknowledged, the solution put forward is to rely more heavily on landfill. Or to try to make the system "robust", rather than antifragile.
I think that's the wrong approach. We can create an antifragile waste industry, an industry that gets stronger with shocks.
This matters because the industry gets shocks, continually, from things like commodity prices, general economic conditions, plants breaking, regulations changing, community expectations developing. In fact, working in the industry seems to be a long and drawn out crisis management.
Those crises are probably not immediately apparent from the outside, largely because of the massive reliance on landfills. Landfills are capable of absorbing a great many crises, accumulating them for future generations to deal with in the form of pollution. It's also a stupid solution that should embarrass us.
It needn't be that way. Rather than reeling from crisis to crisis, the industry could reform itself to be strengthened by crises, by catastrophic change.
Now I don't pretend to have the answers for what an antifragile waste industry will look like (that's kind of the point to antifragility, you can't know the endpoint), however my next post explores how the waste industry might create the conditions for antifragility.
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