Who (or what) is waste’s slowest hiker?
I heard of this wonderful book, Essentialism. A book about how to live a more meaningful life by doing less.
It is a wonderful book with all sorts of lessons for life and living. It’s also a book about waste. McKeown perhaps doesn’t realise that it’s a book about waste, but I read that all through it. A book about waste and recycling and how to make it work for our society.
On section grabbed my attention in particular. To quote:
But if you really want to improve the overall functioning of the system — whether that system is a manufacturing process, a procedure in your department, or some routine in your daily life — you need to identify the “slowest hiker.”
It’s about finding the constraint that is holding the whole system back, and then applying the full force of your efforts to resolving that constraint.
To take McKeown’s hiker analogy — put the slowest hiker at the front of the group so that everybody travels together, and then find the thing that can make the hiker faster. Does their pack need to be distributed amongst others? Music? Shoes? Whatever it is, solve for that problem and you solve for the overall problem.
We don’t do this very well with waste. I suspect we don’t even know what our version of the slowest hiker is. What is it that is holding up the waste and recycling system?
And I don’t think that answer is “capitalism”, or “consumerism”. I mean, sure. They are problems, but they’re as readily changed as the rainy weather is for the slow hiker. They just are.
The constraints to consider are probably far more prosaic. Maybe it’s procurement that defaults to low cost when it could deal with recycled content. Maybe it’s collection systems that convert potentially valuable materials into a jumbled up pile shit. Maybe it’s the narrative that sees waste as somebody else’s problem.
The point is not that I have the answer. I don’t. The point is that we don’t look for it. Instead, we rush in every which direction looking to do better at every other thing. Incrementally trying to push the dial on a million different things when we could pursue The ONE Thing that would make all the difference.
We have no sense that there might be a constraint worth removing, that there might be a slowest hiker worth assisting.
Maybe we pause in all of the hubbub of action to get this right.
Join me on a journey of ideas to create a world without waste. A journey exploring the intersection of waste, technology and society, and trying to map a new narrative within this space. Because it is here, I feel, that humans can not just deal with the negatives of pollution, but also create the positives of a thriving life and planet.
