Permaculture, me and waste
As I grew up, I was surrounded by the teachings of permaculture. Permaculture One and Permaculture Two lived somewhere in the scramble of books that threatened to take over our childhood home, and our half-acre block was a testament to numerous experiments in permaculture design. I’ve owned and lost many copies of Permaculture: A Design Manual.
Notwithstanding this longstanding exposure to permaculture, it didn’t actually fall into place until I completed my Permaculture Design Certificate way back in 1995 (roughly), Hepburn Springs, Victoria. This course, led by David Holmgren (one of the co-originators of permaculture), had a huge impact on me. And of course, I never utilised those skills again.
Or so I thought.
It turns out permaculture has formed a vital part of my life, unnoticed but essential in the same way as breathing, eating or sleeping. Those few weeks over twenty years ago laid the (subconscious) foundation for the rest of my life.
I also feel that permaculture principles inform my thinking about waste. Not in an idealistic sense where people should just get back to nature, but in a way where I can engage fully with society as we live it. I am, after all, an engineer.
How? Well let’s go through the permaculture principles as set out in the Permaculture Principles website that was developed by David Holmgren. Let’s see if they hold for waste work.
Observe and interact
Watching and understanding the situation you are designing is critical. One part of that is understanding the data around waste generation, but it’s not limited to data.
I feel that a designer should also understand the circumstances in which the waste is being generated. What is going in the area? What does the waste look like? What does the local society look like? What lifestyle matters? What industry, retail and general trajectory is significant to the people and place you are looking to intervene in?
Here it matters to make haste slowly. Let the story gradually develop.
Catch and store energy
Waste is not just the material that sits before us, but also the energy that went into producing it. This is obvious, but also easily forgotten. For instance, glass is sand plus energy. Aluminium is bauxite plus energy. Food is nutrients plus energy, as well as being an energy source itself.
Just looking at the materials as they present, we risk overlooking all of the energy that went into it. Again, aluminium is the classic example: recycling aluminium uses only 5% of the energy required to produce it in the first place.
The more subtle point is to acknowledge that “energy recovery” is a last resort because it reduces the subtlety of the energy stored in waste, and extracts it as heat. Which may be the best we can do, but we should also ask if heat is the best use of the energy.
Often there are better uses.
Obtain a yield
Permaculture doesn’t have a lot of time for the purely ornamental, preferring to create systems that produce a yield. And sure, some elements of the system are designed to increase yields elsewhere, but the goal is to have a highly productive system.
Applying this to waste, we ask ourselves how we can extract a return from the waste materials. Can we refine them in some way to produce a material that is of renewed use? Are we doing something purely symbolic, or are we really adding value? Are we expending effort on the real problem, or are we pursuing a high profile problem?
A small example of this is the kerfuffle about disposable coffee cups. Sure, look to reduce them with reusable cups, but coffee cups are insignificant in the bigger picture of waste. So encourage reusables, institute systems for recycling in public and work settings, but focus the real attention on where we can obtain the best yield. Materials such as organics.
Ultimately, waste presents a raw material that we can seek to extract a return from.
Apply self regulation and accept feedback
Positive feedback loops can do a lot of work for us. They can amplify our work. If we can design systems that naturally support themselves, then we are creating systems that maintain themselves.
This is the logic behind Extended Producer Responsibility. EPR is about designing a system where feedback is received by the people most able to make systemic changes — the designers of the products that end up as waste.
Similarly, Container Deposit Schemes are intended to utilise the natural feedback system of redeemed deposits to reduce litter and increase recycling. They stand in contrast to public education around littering and recycling, which requires continued inputs of energy to sustain.
There are many, many cases where self-regulation and feedback can be designed into a waste system to enhance its effectiveness.
Use and value renewable resources and services
In case it is not clear — when we design a waste system we are looking to create a circular, renewable system rather than a linear, extractive system.
This can seem hard for waste managers. After all, we just deal with what we get. Again, this is where design comes into it. Perhaps we receive a lot of waste timber. Can we use that to design a system where we “lease” animal bedding, supplying clean woodchip and removing soiled bedding for composting?
The goal is to design systems that do not consume resources, but instead utilise the attributes of materials as they pass through. We don’t need to consume an aluminium can when we drink a beer, but we are keen to utilise its attributes as a package that contains a cold and fresh beer. The aluminium can go back to package more beers for more people.
Produce no waste
Waste managers can do this really well, or they can do it poorly.
Done well, waste managers will look to produce a cascade of value from everything they receive. Done poorly, the waste manager will take perfunctory efforts because it’s getting thrown out anyway and because efficiency — a poor system is wasteful by design.
For instance, a mattress recycler can simply shred the mattress and pull the steel out of the finished product, landfilling the remainder. That’s efficient, but also wasteful.
The alternative is to dismantle the mattress, separating out springs, foam, as well as coir, kapok and timber (where they present). The springs can be sold in bulk as pressed steel blocks, but also into niche markets for shop displays and garden climbing frames. Foam for carpet underlay. Coir for gardening. Kapok for stuffing in yoga bolsters. Timber for furniture.
Every product should be considered closely to ascertain the hierarchy of value that can be developed.
Design from patterns to details
Perhaps the greatest lesson from permaculture is the focus on patterns over details. What does the big picture show? How does waste move in general? What are the key attributes of the system?
The system patterns reveal a great deal. They indicate feedback loops that might be nurtured. They suggest how to work with existing forces, how to make small interventions rather than a sweeping overhaul.
Once the patterns are understood, then we can work out the details. But it is vitally important to always understand the big picture.
Waste design is not like accounting — getting all the details right does not necessarily mean that the overall system makes sense.
Integrate rather than segregate
I keep on describing waste as the ultimate integrative discipline.
A good waste manager will need to know a little about a lot of things. That’s why the job is never done. There is always something new to learn, always some new connection, some new facet that has some bearing on what we do or how we can do it better. As we progress in this career, we realise how little we actually know, and how much more we need to learn to do our job well.
And so we learn politics, law, civil engineering, logistics, psychology, agriculture, technology, sociology, contracting…and on and on it goes. The list is endless, the opportunities to integrate countless.
In my view, the very best waste solution will integrate many different strands of knowledge, many different fields of endeavour. The outcome is the creation of something new that is elegant, subtle and effective.
Use small and slow solutions
Waste is a graveyard filled with the wreckage of big ideas. Driven by egos, by the wish to come up with the “Final Solution”, all sorts of hare-brained solutions are put in place. Whether that be a huge piece of infrastructure, or a bold new education campaign, or even a complete revamp of collection services, these solutions end up wrecked on the shoals of society in all its glorious complexity.
Small and slow solutions are not sexy. They require patience (something I am short on myself). They require an ego-free understanding that designing a great waste system is a journey of many, a journey that requires time to let feedback loops develop, to observe how solutions unfold.
Crashing through with a bold solution is the ultimate in deluded arrogance. It presumes perfect knowledge and a disdain for anything that sits outside the project assumptions.
Use and value diversity
I might be a bit contentious here, but we hear a lot about how we need to consolidate to create scale. That solutions won’t work unless we get everybody aligned, that we need to choose the one way to do something. And yes, this makes sense. But only up to a certain point.
It is very tempting to find a solution that sort of works for everything, but is not ideal for anything. It’s simple, it’s efficient, it requires less attention. It’s also dangerously prone to failure and misses out on immense amounts of value.
The harder work, but also the more interesting work, is to design a system that works with natural diversity rather than shunning it. Does a bin collection system not work for a particular community? Well, design a separate one for them that does. Can materials be separated to create extra value?
Think closely about how all the different waste products can be kept separate for maximal value add, think about the different perspectives that can be taken to make meaning in different ways. What support does diversity need? How can people be assisted in creating a multitude of solutions? Who else has a stake here?
Use edges and value the marginal
It is much, much easier to design for the commonplace. To strip out the interesting interfaces and replace it with a bland homogeneity that services most.
This is not where productivity lies. The greatest things happen at the edges, in cases where things are marginal. It is important to create space for edges, indeed, to design around them.
This is where we can come up with really interesting industrial ecology effects, using the interface between “inside” and “outside” a particular industry to maximise yields. We can look at institutional “grey zones”, those areas where it is nobody’s particular responsibility, but where there are immense opportunities. Paying close attention to the complexity at the edge, and letting the edges inform the core design.
Creatively use and respond to change
Ah, change! That universal bugger-upper of best laid plans. The thing that torpedoes the brilliant solution that took ages to design. The people suddenly buying goods online, and so producing tonnes of cardboard waste. The apps giving people all sorts of on-demand services. The plastic packaging that gets ever more complicated, ruining recycling efforts.
We can rail against change or we can work with it. Because within the turmoil of change is also the kernel of opportunity. That kernel is only recognised when the change is not perceived as a threat. Which, of course, it is, but only if you are attached to a particular outcome.
Good waste managers will try to ride the waves of change, always trying to get better at what they do. Never resting on “we’ve always done it this way”.
Ok, so this article has become rather long. Probably too long for people in a short attention span world. So it goes.
What writing this article has done is clarify for me just how important permaculture principles are for waste management. For myself.
The principles are not at all obvious. Life (and design) can be approached very differently. That’s good — there is no point in adopting the self-evident as principles.
People may disagree with some or all of them. That’s also good. Diverse opinions matter. I do believe that these principles make for elegant, long lived design. That doesn’t matter to everyone. It matters to me.
Because, ultimately, I believe that my life work is to live out my humanity. To understand and express what it means to be human, to live in this world, to be a part of society, to unfurl. These principles have formed a subconscious guide to achieve this.
