There is a wonderful book that has been appearing often enough in my various discussions that I’ve become compelled to read it. That book is Seeing Like a State, by James C Scott, and it describes how States change the world so that the world becomes “legible” to the State.

The State needs things to be legible in order to administer them. Nomadic people need to be settled, forests need to be tamed, names need to be rendered orderly. It is only thus that the State can then do its administrative thing - taxation, conscription, regulation etc. Anything outside the bounds of legibility is “beyond the pale”, or unable to be administered by the State. It is dangerous territory.

So, for instance, a State needs to be able to clearly “read” who each person is, and so every person must have a fixed identity. In the particular context of the Anglo world, this was a defined surname. A fixed surname was not always the way, and its introduction dissolved centuries of nuanced local names, but was required if a State was to be able to identify its citizens.

And there are many more examples. Prussian forestry was unable to see natural, wild forest as valuable, and so, to make the forest legible and thus value-able, the forest had to be converted into plantations. Now the forest was able to be understood, the number of trees calculated, the practices to improve productivity optimised and so on. Of course, this collapsed the natural richness and complexity of the ecosystem, and in so doing, destroyed a considerable amount of value, however this value was never “legible” to the State and so did not matter.

It was in the conversion of complex localism to simplified scale that items become “legible”.

As I read the book, I had a realisation that a significant reason for the generation of waste is because it is material that is “illegible” to its generator. Hear me out.

In the context of waste, the management of materials is a function of scale. More particularly, the scale of materials being managed needs to match the scale of resources available to decision makers.

For example: the dumping of 1,000 tonnes of glass as waste, for instance, would be unthinkable for a local community, and yet is commonplace for a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) that sorts recycling bins and has to deal with the contaminated “glass fines” that pass through the system. This glass is not legible to the MRF operator because it is low value, and its contaminants are too mixed up. The generation of such a quantity of waste glass would be impossible for the local community.

Taking the notion further, the operation at scale NECESSARILY creates more waste. This is because administration at a large scale can only deal with large things. Large organisations are leveraged in that they produce more economic output with fewer people. This is the point of a large organisation. Part of what is lost is the efficiency of using materials.

For example: entire office fit-outs are torn out and discarded because there is no ability to interrogate different ways to recover the materials. Even though the materials might still be useful if attention to detail was possible, it is impossible. Scale makes the cost of paying attention to detail increase, whereas the value of that detail does not change (or doesn’t change by much).

Scale is the enemy of resource efficiency.

That’s a controversial statement given most recycling operators would argue that they need scale to make their operations commercially viable. Which is true, because their threshold for commercial viability has increased. They have grown to extract more profits from more waste recycled, and in so doing, they have made the threshold for legibility also higher. It is a self-perpetuating cycle, and it leads to a natural business case to invest in more and greater machinery to (ultimately) recover less and less of the waste delivered.

To reiterate, a corporation makes materials legible by a few steps:

• increasing the scale of the materials considered (from kilograms to tonnes to hundreds of tonnes to thousands of tonnes)

• treating materials as a standardised commodity,

• introducing processes for handling the waste that can be implemented without thought.

Materials that are unable to be made legible in these ways are illegible, and so become waste and are discarded.

To go to the other end, it is simple and straightforward for a community to recover seeds from old crops, to create stock feed, mulch and compost from residuals and pay attention to soils. These materials are legible at the scale of community, and they are meaningful. It makes sense for a community at a small enough scale to put in the time and effort for the reward that is earned, and a community can value non-financial benefits such as general resilience. It doesn’t all boil down to money.

Here is where we start to see that a path to a world without waste is a world of greater community. A fractal world that doesn’t seek to centralise all recycling in a large corporation that can afford facilities that cost tens of millions of dollars, process hundreds of thousands of tonnes of waste per year and so make huge, government assured profits.

It is a world that is humble in the volume processed, and yet highly aspirational in what is recovered. It is completely conceivable that everything is recovered and returned to a useful purpose, that nothing “goes to waste”.

Complete recovery of materials was once commonplace, even as recently as 100 years ago. Less.

The usual story of why this changed is because societies became industrialised, people became wealthier and so didn’t want to spend their increasingly valuable time in the waste recovery activities. That may be true.

An alternate explanation is that, at the same time as societies became industrialised, community was dissolved and replaced with increasingly large-scaled entities. These entities promised to take care of waste, and households, no longer within the embrace of community, were overwhelmed and isolated. They naturally handed the responsibility over to municipalities and corporations. They no longer had the right community scale to make waste legible.

This fractal world looks quite different. It looks to move in the opposite direction of societies, where scale is favoured over diversity because scale is legible to States and corporations.

It need not be an agrarian world. community can be established in cities or suburbs. Communities can achieve many smaller scale things, witness the repair cafes, community gardens and similar activities.

Once community forms and starts to pay attention to local waste, it can also pay attention to local scale manufacturing. Indeed, the two are closely linked. Community composting feeds community gardens. Local industry producing only that which can be locally recycled - this is a virtuous cycle that is possible because the size of the organisation has been reduced so that materials are legible. They can be seen, understood and managed better, locally.

What does this all mean? Is there a future where waste no longer exists because it is being managed at a community scale? Perhaps, though it should be noted this is a significant step away from the current trajectory.

The point is less to prescribe a fix to waste (I am highly resistant to simple fixes), and more to open out the thinking. In this case, let’s think about how materials become waste because they are not legible to organisations (States or corporations) at the scale we make the organisations.

Since organisations are only getting larger, this problem will only get worse. Furthermore, all of the measures we take can only make this worse. Large scale aggregation of data. Consolidation of waste into a few types of bins for collection. Processing into highly defined commodities. All to make materials legible at scale, all creating a large waste shadow.

An alternative is to think about how to change the scale to make waste is legible. This article suggests smaller scale community leading with waste. Another way might be fine-grained management through robotics without the need for community. There are no doubt other options that may emerge over time, and through this writing.

The key point, the take-home point, is to demonstrate a simple idea: