Steam and waste

At the turn of the 20th century, there was nothing bigger than steam locomotives. They ruled the world, and you couldn't imagine the world of transportation without them. By 1950, the steam locomotive had been refined to an immense variety, with extraordinary engineering.

The locomotive below, the Mallard, holds the record as the fastest steam locomotive. It was built in 1938 and saw service through until 1963. It reached 202.58 km/hr.

"Mallard" at the National Railway Museum at York. Source: Wikipedia

Perhaps the best known steam locomotive, George Stephenson's The Rocket was built less than 110 years earlier in 1829. It had a top speed of 45 km/hr

Contemporary drawing of Rocket, Source: Wikipedia

For the years between, there was immense innovation in design to achieve a whole range of objectives. Steam locomotives achieved all sorts of outcomes, made the horse and cart all but redundant and ushered in immense change.

When the Ford Motor Company launched the Model T in 1908, the world of steam could never imagine that its world had just changed forever. But it did. In the space of a few decades, the car and personalised transport had changed everything. The urban form, the cultural psyche, even our modes of production.

At the turn of the 21st century, there is nothing bigger in the world of waste than a grand waste facility. They are imposing and yet sleek, and attract some of the most incredibly beautiful architecture. They dominate a world where landfill and waste is a problem to be solved by bigger and more sophisticated waste processing plants.

Isle of Man incinerator. Source: AEC online

They really started with the invention of the "refuse destructor" in 1875.

Just as there was significant diversity of design and application of the steam locomotive, so too there has been diversity in waste processing facilities. They have not yet, to my mind, had their Model T moment.

That moment is coming.

It will be a moment where waste ceases to be seen as a waste to be treated in isolation from an economy, but rather a resource to be incorporated into the economy.

I suspect that the change will radically dentralise waste, just as the car decentralised transport. I also suspect it will be driven by the capabilities that come from essentially free data, leading to a "peer to peer" waste handling system.

Just as the car removed the need to rely upon railways to get you to where you wanted to be, you just took yourself there, so too a peer to peer waste network will see waste transferred as a resource outside the infrastructure channels.

It will see data around waste becoming ubiquitous, creating a whole new market of intermediaries who "arbitrage" waste from a generator and deliver it to a manufacturer who needs that waste as a feedstock. Those intermediaries may, of course, refine and repackage the waste to suit, but they will not see themselves as waste operators.

When this change happens, the "economies of scale" which drive current waste handling will quickly become a liability. The new world will go to the nimble, the small scaled, the infinitely diverse. Sure, the world will rest on some pieces of infrastructure, but that infrastructure will no longer define the world.

I would take it further. The new world of waste will redefine how we see our manufacturing, our cities, ourselves. I don't quite know how this will happen, but I think it will run as deep as the cultural reverberation of the car (individuality and freedom getting an especial boost from the car).

To have the world shift from its current "single pass system", where materials are extracted, consumed and then dumped, and to a world in which materials are cycled through the economy over and over will be immense in its cultural impact.

For the time being, we continue to look at waste as a problem to be solved by large, sophisticated and incredibly complex waste processing plants. Just as transportation was seen as a problem to be solved by large, sophisticated and incredibly complex steam locomotives.

When this paradigm flips, it will flip rapidly. Fortunes will be made and lost, and waste will cease to be. We will have made another step forward in more efficient consumption of resources. This shift will, no doubt, bring with it a whole new set of problems. Problems that we cannot even conceive right now, but we need to make the shift all the same.

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.