Trash. What if we renamed it our Children’s Inheritance?

Now THAT might catch your attention! Just in case this has not got you really thinking, let me put it this way. Today our behavior is completely bizarre. We go to work, work hard, bring home wealth that we have created, then go shopping, buy stuff and after a few short months/years (hopefully this long, though in some cases it is after just a single 15 minute use), we trash what we bought. Somehow bizarrely, we have convinced ourselves that there is no value left in the item when we trash it, so it is OK to do so! Is there another choice?

You got it this time right? We actually take our money, place it is a garbage bag and give it away free to the garbage man, who by the way then expects a Christmas present at the end of the year!

I don’t know about you, but if I described what I do with my hard earned cash in these terms to my dad, despite his grand old age I believe he would give me a sharp clip across the back of the head and ask what exactly I think I was doing. Believe me, I half wish he would because I am staggered by our behavior.

But since I am a nice ordinary guy just like the rest of you, I know you will have sympathy with my present plight and fully understand all the excuses I have for not changing this.

Here is the list. I need you to all agree with me on these points and show copious amounts of sympathy – please! I don’t want to feel alone here.

1. There are very few recycle points in my city.

2. They don’t take back that much besides some plastics, paper and magazines, old fridges and sometimes batteries. I think they take tires, but I have never had a spare tire to give to them.

3. I have no idea what they do with the stuff, I don’t see a smoke stack, so I guess they are really recycling versus incinerating it all.

4. They don’t give me any money for it, but it cost me a fortune.

5. There is no way to get this stuff to people who could use it. Well I lie, there is the semi at the church that gets loaded up every now and again and the charity semi at the dump that gives me a little tax stub for my junk.

6. My weekly trash still by far out numbers the weight of stuff that I get to the recycle depot – by a huge factor. This is true even though we more than fill our recycle bin every week.

7. Trash is not very glamorous or high tech. I mean I would rather be out skiing or seeing a movie with the family than dealing with the trash (Oops, I mean the kids inheritance – oh, I’m not so sure this feels true to me anymore!)

8. It stinks, it seems to be rotting and it is a big mess - all that stuff in the same bag?

9. There really is no money in trash. It is worth only a fraction of the value of the stuff when it was new. It costs more to disassemble it than to assemble it!

These are the issues or design criteria that stand in the way of trash being considered as wealth. They are the points that we need to find solutions to in order to create a system of wealth in recycling. If we can solve these points we can really start to think in terms of trash as our children’s inheritance. In fact all we actually need is the equivalent level of sophistication of a model T system of trash handling and we will be on a path towards wealth in the future! By this I mean a mass production/reduction way of processing trash into useful raw materials that can be re-input into the industrial cycle or sold to

Asia

instead of ending up as a useless waste in a landfill.

Trash is probably worth about $300-900 billion a year in the USA

 

That could pay off our national debt in less than 10 years, or become part of my inheritance to my children, probably both.

Entrepreneurs, I think it is time to get our hands dirty again. Didn’t you enjoy doing that as a kid! I did.

 

How do you go about transforming trash into wealth?

Comments

[Zia]

clive, interesting notes in this vein from cradle-to-cradle: though we are called consumers there is very little that we actually consume. other than food and drinks everything else is designed to be thrown away when done.

another: 90% of materials extracted to make durable goods in the US becomes waste almost immediately.

- zia

[Clive Roux]

Yes, I agree. I think most people are aware that we make a lot of trash. I am trying to explore what might trigger people to act. The next blog will start to explore ways that we could enable a trash to value system, but first I think we need to make people go, "this is not something I want to continue to do" What trigger would achieve that response?

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