A Chapter Closes

Today is a day for a reflective, personal post, because today is a day to reflect on the closing of a chapter.

You see, yesterday was my last day at the Western Metropolitan Regional Council. I worked there for 3 years as the Chief Executive Officer, essentially taking the organisation from a loosely run cooperative into a very focused business. Our daughter was born two weeks after I started there.

Improving mattress recycling

A bit of a thought dump on how to improve mattress recycling based on some things that I've seen in Google+ and Youtube. Most have been shared by +Gary Ray R, and a huge thanks to Gary.

Dealing with springs

Recycling mattresses best means that you are left with spring bases. These bases become problematic, because they are not particularly dense, and the spring steel can cause problems for scrap metal shredders.

Olaf Industries has come up with a baling solution for the mattresses, and Mission Australia's Soft Landing is distributing them in Australia. Have a look at the video below to see what it can do.

In case you missed the box spring dismantling, here's another video of one of those. It doesn't seem to do quite the same job as the Goodwill Industries machine.

Shredding

Then there is the option of shredding the springs. There is a pretty cool video of a shredder chomping up all sorts of things. You kind of half expect the thing to chomp up the operators - their safety guarding is not the best.

Robotic mattress dismantling

And finally, the news that got me started on all of this, the Baxter Robot. It's a robot, that's not so exciting. The exciting bit is that it sells for $22,000 (USD). I can imagine a robot cutting apart mattresses using rotary cutters in a way that may be too dangerous done by people.

Unfortunately they are not for sale outside the US.

Maybe it doesn't need to be a robot. Maybe a rotary cutter running back and forth on a rail, with the mattress turning so that each side is cut. I wonder if that could be designed up by a clever mechatronics engineer.

Talking Rubbish With Garbologie

I've had a new idea.

Garbologie will create a series of short video interviews with people changing the world in waste. People who are creating a world without waste. Just a few minutes long, teasing out their key initiatives. A working title is "Let's Garbologise". Or "Talking Rubbish".

The idea is that these interviews will be with both the usual suspects, but also the people who are currently flying beneath the radar. The unknown. Especially the people who are unknown, the people with a dream that they are acting on.

Let me interview you. Source: Wikimedia

It won't be about currying favour with the people who should be creating a world without waste, the people who have the power, the resources, the authority to make a difference and yet with all of that behind them, do the minimum to keep their jobs.

The point is to create an ecosystem of learning. It is to promote a network where each builds off the other. To form creation spaces. To quote +John Kellden "In a network, the best place to store knowledge is in other people."

By shedding more and more light in the darker parts of the network, those darker corners can grow, the network can flourish, and we can scaffold into the world we are all working towards in our own way. A world without waste.

I plan to be doing some interviews over the next month, leading into a planned frenetic series of interviews during the 6th Annual Making Cities Liveable Conference in Melbourne from the 17th to 19th of June. I'll be flying over to present at the conference (paper title: "To create a world without waste"), and will conduct more interviews then.

If you know of anybody worth interviewing, please get in touch and let me know. My contact details are on the About page.

Might social tech hold a clue to waste management?

In discussions online (particularly in Google+), there is a very interesting strand that relates to how what I'm going to call "social tech" is creating a new way.

But first, a matter of definitions.

Social tech, to me, is that entire system of technologies that makes social interaction with peers far simpler. Sharing ideas, information, knowledge. Building friendships with people that you would most likely never have met, being exposed to new ways of seeing as a matter of course. The value of networks.

Search, and especially semantic search, to make the retention of knowledge less valuable than how it is dealt with. All ever so slightly related, and all building a web that becomes "social tech".

The value of networks. Source: The Upcoming

As is my wont, I tend to see how social tech flows directly into waste management, or more importantly, resource recovery.

Mattress recycling in Western Australia

Garbologie's big announcement

Yesterday I accepted the keys for a small warehouse at 5/30-32 Stockdale Road, O'Connor. That little warehouse will house a mattress dismantling and recycling business. It will be the start of a network of recycling operations.

Garbologie's new mattress recycling warehouse

I will be drawing on my experience in establishing a small recycling plant in Victoria, and then the first mattress recycling plant in Western Australia (the Hazelmere Recycling Centre when I was at the EMRC).

Garbologie will accept mattresses from anybody for a small fee, and for a slightly larger fee, will collect mattresses. We'll also be looking to spread the word with Councils, introducing dedicated mattress collection runs into verge collections. We will be the premier mattress recycler in Perth.