Composite plastics from waste

I regularly find incredible surprises through social media. People doing great work, sharing, helping out.

One such surprise was Cibele Oliveira, from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. She got in touch in response to my scoop.it magazine, alerting me to work she has done on the manufacture of composite plastics using a mix of plastic and organic materials. Composite plastics are not particularly new.

The work that Cibele drew my attention to was the production of these composite plastics using a mix of plastics sorted from Municipal Solid Waste and bagasse. A paper presenting her work is contained in a book containing prize winning research into sustainable cities (pdf - go to page 166).

Since the work is published in Portugese, I did a rough and ready translation using Google Translate so that I could get a sense of what the work was about. Of course, any poor writing is entirely my fault, and I invite readers to offer corrections where necessary.

The thrust of the work is that composite materials were able to be manufactured from a blend of waste plastic and bagasse, without affecting too many of the mechanical strength properties. However, the rigidity and thermal stability are considerably affected, a thermal anti-oxidant would need to be used if the recycling composites were to be used in applications where thermal stability is important.

Bagasse reinforced composite plastics, in the proportion of 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% and 25% bagasse 

It is important work, and has many echos of the work being done by Waste for Life, a group that describes itself as:

Waste for Life is a loosely joined network of scientists, engineers, educators, architects, artists, designers, and cooperatives working together to develop poverty-reducing solutions to specific environmental problems. We use scientific knowledge and low-threshold/high-impact technologies to add value to resources that are commonly considered harmful or without worth, but are often the source of livelihood for society’s poorest members. Our twin goals are to reduce the damaging environmental impact of non-recycled plastic waste products and to promote self-sufficiency and economic security for at-risk populations who depend upon waste to survive.

We, ourselves, are not interested in profit, but are keen to disseminate a technology that upgrades waste plastic and natural fibers into composite materials for use in domestic products and building materials.

This is all really interesting work. To be able to take plastics of no value in MSW and make it into useful products, whilst at the same time assisting to resolve poverty, is an impressive undertaking. It is pure entrepreneurship, with very limited safety net in the event that it fails.

So thanks Cibele, and thanks to the contacts at Waste for Life who I've dealt with in the past.

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.

Waste and peer-to-peer

It is one of the pleasures of Twitter to have a constellation of different ideas emerge, combine with your existing framework of knowledge and form new concepts. And so it is with Michel Bauwens' writing on peer-to-peer (tweeting at @mbauwens)

In the waste management context, Michel's description of the failings of information and production hoarded is spot on. Waste is the most obvious symptom of a failed mode of production.

Waste is not intrinsically waste. It is only waste because the holder has no value for it. In a different context the waste is a resource.

The difference between the two? An inability to connect the waste context to the resource context. This inability to connect is driven by a lack of information. That might be a lack of information where a local user of the waste is not aware that the waste exists. Or a potential business cannot be unveiled because nobody has the aggregated information to piece it all together. Or maybe as stupid as the timing of a byproduct doesn't match when it is needed, for no better reason than the parties didn't know. And so it goes to waste.

Think about it. Waste is generally managed by waste companies. They do not usually share their daae for fear that competitors might step in. This is not to say that they don't try to direct waste to where it can be used as a resource. But the problem is structural. It is endemic in the way business is done. They cannot anticipate all of the solutions to the problem.

Government tries to fix this by attempting a wholesale aggregation of all of the data around. So there are innumerable studies presenting the quantity of this or that waste, but it is never enough. In fact, it probably sets the industry back.

Why? Well, for one, the data is never provided in sufficient detail to enable any sort of real understanding of what is happening. It is presented in a manner that presupposes a certain type of infrastructure-bound solution. Having data creates an impression that government should then try for a waste infrastructure plan. And the whole exercise reinforces the structure where data is a resource to be monopolised.

Imagine an alternative where it is in the interests of the data holder to share it. I don't know why just yet, but set "why?" to one side. Once you have the situation, then the infrastructure is more than available. There is immense social media, immense data networks that can quickly and intelligently process data into information.

Furthermore, with the data freely available, entrepreneurs can see new patterns, new opportunities. They can slice and dice in ways that nobody could anticipate. They can open the field for collaborative solution making, a mode that is far more nimble and intelligent than silos of information hoarding experts. This has been demonstrated in "immaterial production" (ie the web), and there is no reason why it cannot also be true in material production.

You could see a world in which there is some clever way of quickly and effortlessly sharing information on waste generated and resource needs, which then leads to pop-up businesses who connect the dots. Perhaps anticipating needs, perhaps transforming wastes to meet unthought of needs.

Framed like this, I think that waste starts to look a bit silly. A problem that has arisen because we are too dumb to raise our voice and just...Share. Our. Knowledge.

Charities and waste

I think most people understand that charities are an important destination for pre-loved clothes. Indeed, I think everybody has been touched by the great work charities do in recycling clothing, either through buying clothes at an op shop, or by placing second hand clothes in a clothing bin. Probably both at different life stages.

The quantities involved are staggering. According to the National Association of Charitable Recycling Organisations, charities in Victoria received an estimated 55,800 tonnes of goods. Of this about 65% was diverted away from landfill through reuse/resale, recycling into a range of materials (such as wiper rags) or exported to developing countries. The remainder went to landfill. The full report (pdf) can be found on the NACRO website.

Considering Victoria has about a quarter of Victoria's population, there's over 220,000 tonnes of goods handled by Australian charities each year. That is a monumental contribution.

Behind this story is a disturbing reality. Of the goods received by charities, about 35% goes to landfill. About 77,000 tonnes per year. You'd think this was avoidable, and it probably is, but it is a massive cost for charities. At a landfill cost of $100/tonne, this is an $8m problem. Each year. Not to mention time and resources sorting rubbish from good stuff, taking it to landfill and so on.

So a problem for charities, but an opportunity for some astute operators in the waste industry. Or perhaps operators outside the waste industry who don't accept the status-quo.

Imagine a partnership, charities doing their bit taking quality goods back to the community, and processors dealing with the waste (and establishing better channels to keep the waste from the charities in the first place). Working together to get some of that $8m back for charities to do their thing. Creating value from the reprocessed materials.

This has to be part of any vision for a new waste world. Crazy, entrepreneurial businesses who refuse to believe that charities have to shoulder the burden of rubbish, and that rubbish is even necessary.

Social media, entrepreneurship and waste

Sometimes it's fun to grab three apparently dissonant ideas and rub them together. So here we go: social media, entrepreneurship and waste.

If we take social media and entrepreneurship as orbiting waste, then the two almost contradict what we currently do.

A common thing in rubbish is to have an education campaign. This goes something like this: an educator prepares a waste minimisation or recycling message, delivers it, and then perhaps measures the effectiveness of that delivery a while later. It is a megaphone. It is not a social media.

Instead, social media would require the educator to be educated as much as he/she educates. Social media in waste management would involve creating the space where a community can speak with itself, and the educator becomes facilitator. This space is, so far, unmapped. It has remained so for fear of "blow back", where the failings of the host organisation are reverberated and amplified through the community until the host reputation is shattered. The Western Earth Carers is feeling its way through the space through a series of facebook pages: Western Earth Carers and Plastic Free July. Together with twitter feeds, this is not for the faint hearted. However, it has been quite amazing thus far.

Throw entrepreneurship into the mix, and it gets even more interesting. For me, this is where social media starts to move outside the realm of communication, education and facilitating community action, and begins to move into the realm of building up new businesses. 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.

To get to this point, I suspect there is a fair amount of design work to enable network effects to be unleashed for a business. A lot of thinking is needed to understand what might actually resonate, and how. It must be driven by ethics rather than morality (a future blog surely rests on ethics and morality in waste management).

There needs an immense amount of authenticity - the bullshit detector runs red-hot when people can see everything you do. But it is only by seeing what you do that people trust to engage their own passions around "your" cause. And only then can this precious space at the intersection of three dissonant concepts form and thrive.

You don't know quite how this space will turn out, or even if it will form at all. It is a bit like the "scenius" described by The Technium in "Scenius, or communal genius". A bit different too, but the idea is that it erupts when the conditions are right, and also easily dissipates where it is forced into formality.

So they are my thoughts. I'd like to develop them further over the coming months, and would love any comments or suggestions for further reading, case studies, ideas.

What would a Silicon Valley for waste look like?

We are all familiar with the awesome reputation of Silicon Valley as a hotbed of entrepreneurship. It is a classic example of the synergistic effects of an ecology of excellence growing up around an industry. Ideas attract brilliant minds attract venture capitalists.

More important, however, is the prevailing ethos that you have a crack. Trying and failing is better than never trying for fear of failing. Or trying to cover yourself against all risks before you begin. Business is risky. Good business people accept that, minimise their risks and then begin.

This sort of culture is sorely missed in waste management. It is a field that has managed to convince itself that it needs government support, that it is only able to succeed if it is big. An enormous risk averse edifice that grinds out incremental improvement only when led by the nose by government. An industry that leans heavily on public underwriting of private profits, and even then manages to get it wrong (no names here, of course).

Imagine if the norm in waste management was for entrepreneurs to get out there and start creating little eruptions of businesses. Or, more accurately, little disruptions. What might that look like?

You might see some very nimble companies focusing on serious product differentiation in otherwise bog standard markets. This would be great for customers. You would certainly see exciting solutions to avoid the capital intensive and largely monopolised landfill. Indeed, clever ideas would sidestep high capital requirements and barriers to entry across the board. I reckon you'd also end up with an ecosystem that drove landfill close to its deathbed.

A Silicon Valley of waste would emulate the start-up process for technology companies, starting as bare bones business that delight their customers, and growing into business that are so prevalent that you can't imagine the world without them. It would also provide the space for ideas to be tested and abandoned without disgrace.

To get to this point will be a tricky chicken and egg problem. Some sort of venture capital is required to get this off the ground, but that won't happen until there is a track record. And a track record is hard to achieve without funding. And, finally, brilliant minds are especially tricky to attract in the absence of a track record or funding.

I think it is a nut that can be cracked, and will be cracked by innovation in business models. I will blog on this in a later blog. I will also blog on what a constellation of small waste businesses might look like.

Thanks for following this tale, and I welcome any comments or suggestions you might have.