Why waste matters. To me

For some reason I ended up working in waste.

I never intended to be here, never went through my childhood and youth wanting to be a garbologist. Never even planned it when I enrolled in environmental engineering at university.

Back then I was all about a permaculture infused worldview, of designing systems that integrate humans with their environment, that recognise the role of people in designing and nurturing systems that are better than the sum of their parts. Using natural systems to repair degradation.

It is not an obvious path from there to waste management.

And yet here I am and have been for the best part of 20 years. I suspect I’ll be here for some time to come.

In the course of my 20 years, I’ve come to realise that I have a particular view of waste. I guess it’s suggestive of my own personal value system, and it goes something like this:

• Waste is a design flaw in human systems
• Resolving the design flaw that is waste represents an immense opportunity
• The opportunity is best realised through the interplay of many small players, recreating an ecosystem within human systems
• We are only just now getting to understand how we can do this, and it will be a combination of technology, people and planet

It’s a model that can be traced back to permaculture thinking, about creating abundance through diversity, that monoculture is highly inefficient and relies upon all sorts of support systems to be sustained.

I like the notion of markets pushing improvement, but don’t think people should be reduced to consumers. There is a strong role for political action, for people agreeing to be decent to each other.

The observation of wasted resources is also, in my mind, a metaphor for wasted opportunity. And that plays out in many ways. The waste where people cannot thrive. Where spaces are dulled and deadened. Where public discourse is replaced by slogans.

I am involved in waste, and try to apply my ideals, because this is a way for me to interact with broader problems of civilisation and its discontents. It is not the only way that I interact, nor is it the most important thing that I do. But it is the most public thing that I do.

I’m into the tech and I’m into the community. The politics and the marketing. The stories, the hope, the frustration of arguing again and again for steps that are in our collective best interest.

It’s a conversation that I keep attempting but often fail at. Caught in the optimism of opportunity and the exhaustion of endless “realism”. Reconciling the two is not something I’m particularly good at. It’s something I want to get better at.

There is huge scope for hope, and I want to write more about that. I don’t anticipate an audience other than myself.

Waste is personal, it is political, it is the world in microcosm. It cannot be understood but we nevertheless take our best steps for its design. It is all of the complexity that we live with in human systems, the perfect problem to solve.

It’s perhaps best summed up by comments I made in another time. A time when I was bold and saw more clearly how I might personally make things happen. A time also characterised by immense hardship. I may write more on those times later.

And that’s where I’ll end this monologue. With a rather wonderful video hosted by Sid Thoo and produced by Henrique Mendonça and Ian Ferriche — the “Inspired By” series.