We all know that words have many meanings and that what we choose to call something is a reflection of the value we place on that thing.
CleanApp Foundation has been working in a field at the intersection of CleanTech/CivicTech & TrashTech for the past five years.
We know that to many people, words like CleanTech/CivicTech & TrashTech are empty buzz words. For some folks, they are misleading euphemisms or placeholders for something less exciting or interesting. We disagree.
Words Matter
There can be healthy disagreement about the scope of these various fields, but it’s undeniable that these umbrella categories allow us to imagine budding economic segments where there are numerous teams working to solve common problems using more or less similar tools, jargon, and so on.
The “-Tech” suffix is still very useful because it allows us to quality that thing that we are “-teching” — making better, easier, or faster, through technology (which is typically understood to some novel computing process, whether it’s hardware, software of a combination of the two).
TrashTech is a Thing
So, when we say TrashTech, what comes to mind are tech-based processes for emptying trash, sorting trash, reporting litter, responding to litter reports, etc.
TrashTech is both descriptive and normative. Just saying the word TrashTech is an assertion that there are numerous companies and teams working all over the world to solve a common problem. There are!
Teams like Litterati, @OpenLitterMap, CleanApp, Pirika, @WorldCleanupDay, SwachhBharat, and many others are actively developing technologies that are redefining our understanding of trash, litter, hazards, and cleanup responsibilities.
As a term, TrashTech broad enough to include low-tech trash collecting tools (pickers, tools, bags, etc.) but also super high tech tools like CleaningBots, RoboVacs, CleaningDrones, and different apps and blockchain based tools for tackling our trash/hazard processes. TrashTech also encompasses more theoretical tech — like different processes & methods for doing “trash collection” and/or “waste management”).
There’s only problem with this name. And that is … the name.
Every time we say the word “TrashTech,” we have to wince because it’s not a pleasant sounding word. The “-shhhh” ending like a depressing flat tire, signaling lost hope and an impossible Sisyphean task.
If we don’t like the thought of it, and we use it and don’t have any negative connotations attached to the underlying materials, no matter how stinky they are, we know there’s no way we’ll get a lot of people excited about “TrashTech.” It won’t happen.
Being the pragmatic idealists that we are, we think it’s time to reclaim the one word that best captures the work that CleanApp and the other teams above actually do — CleanTech.
Reclaiming “CleanTech”
As a term, CleanTech was all the rage 5–10 years ago, but it was so broad that it lost so much of its utility.
Because everybody was “doing CleanTech” the result was that nobody was doing CleanTech. The result was a term that was sucked of meaning.
The best barometer for contemporary usage of this term is a place like Reddit, that has CleanTech subreddit, but one that isn’t active, because it’s not clear what belongs there.
If you walk up to someone on the street and you ask them what comes to mind when they think of CleanTech, they’ll probably say something like windmills, or just … you, know … making something green.
CleanTech seems ideally suited for describing technology that is used to help humans clean, such as RoboVacs, cleaning drones, and supporting processes.
As an umbrella category that includes different methods, best practices, technologies, processes, and research on trash, waste, pollution, CleanTech can have immediately positive associational links.
CleanTech is enabling, it’s forward-looking, it’s proactive — it denotes movement towards the closest thing humanity has to a truly universal ideal — a clean safe living environment.
As a term, CleanTech is also devoid of any political stigma or baggage. It’s undeniable that while the prefix “Green-” is generally well received — as in GreenBuilding, GreenCrypto, GreenTech — it also has negative connotations in the minds of those who make subconscious linkages to “Green” political parties of “tree-hugging hippies.”
For our purposes, CleanTech gives us the advantage of a clean start. There’s little baggage attached to it, except maybe its inherent vagueness or ambiguity. And that means that we can fill that vessel with clear connotations of our own choosing, such as technologies that facilitate trash collecting, environmental cleanup, as well as indoor cleanup technologies, broadly construed.
While We’re At It, Let’s Ditch “Waste”
As we started thinking about how language structures our behavior, it dawned on us that how we describe the “trash,” “litter,” “waste,” and “pollution” also influences social relationships to those phenomena.
How can we expect people to realize that there is so much utility still left in that plastic bag or that metal can or that cardboard box, if we ourselves call it “waste” or “trash” —?
Words have enormous power to unite or fragment. When we gathered and thought deeply about this, we realized that the English words “waste,” “garbage,” “litter,” “fly-tipping,” “rubbish” are as much a part of the problem as the underlying human practices of #StartingABin & #FlyTipping.
If we have so much incoherence and uncertainty as to what to call that crumpled cigarette pack — whether it’s “litter,” (with all the diminutive connotations that that evokes) or whether it’s “trash” (with all the loaded sociological content that attaches to that) — then it’s much harder to have shared conceptual orientation regarding how we’re going to solve all the underlying problem.
Even when describing our deepest admiration for that object’s “non-waste” “non-trash” core utility, we still say things like, “could you throw the glass bottle in the recycling trash, please?”
From “Waste” to “Resource”
If we want to succeed in a gradual move towards a zero-waste society, one of the first tings we have to dispense with is the use of loaded terms like “trash” and “waste” to describe objects and/or materials that still have full or nearly-full resource potential.
It’s time to call a spade a spade, and a plastic bottles and straws what they are, “resources.” A broken glass bottle is “waste” in a meta sense (“Oh, what a shame! How wasteful!”). But as those shards are laying on the ground, they’re just glass that happens to be broken. It’s still a resource, and it’s still recyclable.
It’s time to call “litter” what it is, a “resource,” perhaps.
To our ears, however, even the word “resource” can sound as awkward in American English usage as “post-consumer waste product.”
As firms, communities, and individuals continue to pursue “Zero Waste” goals — is there a better term for waste that we can and should converge around?
Name That Thing!
Here’s where we need your help. We know there are much better ways of capturing the essence of the thing, but we need your help to come up with a term that will actually take the English language by storm.
What is the name for this thing in the photo below? What should we call this, if we want to have an easy-to-understand term for this. “Sam, I can’t believe people still dump ______ on beaches and in parks!”
Without using the material itself (glass) or the object (bottle) in a description of this thing, what would you call it if our goal is a name that has zero emotional or political or normative connotation?
“Alex, I’m so tired of this! I just want to go to the part, I don’t want to see __________ everywhere!”
Please help us come up with a name that doesn’t trivialize or diminish the resource potential of this glass bottle and all those plastic bags and all those metal scraps that are dotting the planet; your health, our health, and our planet’s health depend on it.
