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.

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 will the IT revolution look like when it hits waste?

I often wonder about different perspectives on something I'm looking at.

One perspective that has been bugging me lately is the IT revolution and how it might affect waste. Specifically, the sort of hyper-innovation that has ripped computing from the basement and lab coats into smartphones and cloud computing in the space of 50 years.

This is not a question of how computing per se is affecting waste. Of course, there are some interesting things going on with data management and so on, but it is fundamentally a business built on people circling big and expensive plant: lab coats circling big, expensive machines. Computing has not changed this, and isn't really what is bugging at me.

What bugs me is how and when waste will make the shift from mega-machines to become personalised. When will it become something that we can all find out self-expression through? It is the shift in attitude that interests me.

It sounds absurd to even propose that something like waste could ever become personalised, ever be a medium for self-expression. Just as a basement full of wires and punch cards and blinking lights could never be the genesis of an awesome flowering of personality. But it is, and so too waste might not only be disrupted forever, but might even disrupt everything forever.

How? Imagine first a series of business models that permit the citizen to easily take control of his or her waste for financial reward. The resource value within the waste drives this new perspective, and you start to see the sort of massive reverse logistics that so characterises scrap steel. You start to see a self-reinforcing loop, not needing capitalism to be overthrown for it to make sense.

Imagine this then driven by high-tech. You can imagine little bins that don't just store your rubbish, but deconstruct it for sale of the components, pocket sized units that deconstruct your rubbish when you're on the go. Tiny micro-factories at every street corner replacing the vending machine, taking materials in from people walking by and using them to make your next purchase as you wait, bleeping out little calls to people who have the stuff they need. Credits automatically credited for this, the end of bulk logistics, the ushering in of personalised consumption.

But it doesn't need high-tech, and it certainly doesn't need this high-tech, for the disruption. All it needs is a disruptive business model to start us down the path. That little disruption, that upstart, will set us on the path to changing everything. Just like the clunky mini-computer led us to the PC to the smartphone and cloud computing.

I wonder about this stuff. I'm not so egotistical to think I need to make it happen, but I can't help feeling it is about to happen and now is the perfect time to be involved. I am sufficiently egotistical to think I can be part of the happening.

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.