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”.

How is this relevant to waste?

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.

The power of community scale

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”.

An aside - an alternate history of recovery

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.

We return…to a fractal world

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.

Take home points

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:

Legibility matters for waste.

Sometimes, when the moon is full and the breeze settles still on the waters, I like to imagine a world that could be. In particular, I like to imagine a world where waste does not exist, where humanity lives in perfect harmony with the planet, and everything that is produced has its place. A world without waste.

I imagine this because I’ve been working in the field for almost 25 years and the vision of a world without waste feels further off than it ever did. There are all sorts of statistics to demonstrate the point, but do not tell a story. Waste generation is increasing, even though society is (apparently) working hard on the problem.

It seems that, unless society takes a different approach, waste will continue to  grow until it eats us all. At that point, we end and nature takes over.

We can do better.

To do better feels like a journey of not just solving waste, but also solving society. It feels like a radical thing, something that upends the status quo and replaces it with...a different approach.

Let’s be clear here. I don’t know how it will be done. I am not in possession of the fix that just needs funding. I am not trying to persuade anyone of the rightness of my technology or system.

Instead, I propose a process to bring solutions from “what might be” to “what is”. They will be nuanced, local, bespoke. This process is collaborative, and I write to call the process into existence. This article is the first of what shall become many, 100 articles that hope to lay out the foundations for how we might create a world without waste.

The foundations will underpin a DAO that will be formed to deliver a world without waste. The DAO will bring together what is needed for this world, as described in the foundations, and the foundations will also create the first elements of a DAO manifesto. The manifesto will, in turn, guide how the DAO is to execute its mission.

At the moment, there are no foundations. There are just leitmotifs that need development. Ideas that feel important, that keep recurring in their own way.

I list the leitmotifs below, in brief, and will expand on them in later articles. I will also return to this list and hyperlink subsequent articles. This creation is constant.

The leitmotifs

• Spirituality. This might not be the first thing you’d associate with waste. Why infuse spirit into a material problem? To which I would answer that the treatment of waste as a physical problem has not brought us closer to a solution. I’d suggest that waste is a failing of the mystical, and the world that needs to emerge also returns spirit to the material.

• People. People have created the waste problem, both through their systems and through their lack of imagination in how to deal with what the system generates. As a result, people are vital for its resolution. People who are expert and non-expert. People with a range of backgrounds and views and positions of authority. All are part of the solution.

• Story. Stories are important, partly in the obvious and almost cliched way that stories are how we create meaning. This is true, however I suggest that stories are important on a far deeper level.If we look at stories as the Aboriginal Australians did, as songlines that connect places across the Australian continent, and generations across 60,000 years, then you get the sense of the deep and constructive power of story. They do not interpret the world, but they make the world. Especially when rich, evocative and beautiful, filled with poetry and power.

• Complexity. Waste emerges out of complexity. It is poorly understood, and any understandings that we currently hold are likely substantially incomplete. Waste is the byproduct of society, in itself complex. There is little conscious thought given to it, and so-called “perverse outcomes” from “managing waste” are legion.

• Interdependence and Self-Sovereignty. These are not contradictory, but rather describe the need to be a complete regenerative person in relationship to community. The status quo is a partial self squashed into an extractive box, separate from community. This is true of waste as it is of people. How do we make materials show up as their full potential? How do we make bring waste materials back into relationship? How do we shift an extractive model to a regenerative one?

• Web3 / cryptocurrencies. Web3 offers immense potential for humanity to shift. At its fundamental level, the blockchain that Web3 is built upon offers a way of assuring peer to peer trust rather than mandating centralised trust. This, in turn, promises to open up a new world of doing and being. That’s a big deal, and is nowhere near mapped out. DAOs are one element. Decentralised Finance (DeFi) and Regenerative Finance (ReFi) another. Non Fungible Tokens, tokenomics, yield curves are also part of it all, along with so much more. There is a bright and flourishing world emerging in Web3, and it is a part of the solution to waste.

• Connection. Waste is, quite possibly, a problem of connection. Of connecting people with each, of connecting ideas, of connecting materials with their home in time and space. It feels an important part of the map, to understand the disconnection and form new connection.

• Technology. Technology clearly plays a role, although in a different way to how it is currently conceived. Technology currently enables scale. Large scale waste plants filled with robotics and machinery and sensors. And extractive profits. A new solution takes high functioning technology and applies it at the edge, the local, the small scale. Technology, but different.

• Sensors. Connected to technology, but worth its own consideration. This is creating systems that can sense materials, and at the very simplest level this is detecting what they are (or even more interestingly, what they might be) when collected or processed. On a larger level this is about building a broad picture of the movement of materials, without impinging on human privacy, to then understand opportunity points. Sensors on rubbish bins to know when they are full is a simple, simple first step. There is so much more to be achieved.

• Artificial Intelligence. I am fascinated by the potential for AI to steer imperfect decision making. Connected with an increasingly sensed world, as we gather increasing amounts of data, we can see more distributed mapping of what is happening with our materials and so design intelligent, self-learning approaches for the recovery and regeneration of those materials. A nervous system, if you will, that is far more intelligent than what we have now. And for that nervous system to work best it needs to be highly distributed rather than centralised. Just as it works in the human body, so too it needs to work in the social body of humanity.

• Decentralised and distributed. A system that does not refer back to a centralised source of truth, and distributes decision making away from the centre to the edge where things are felt far more true. This is anarchistic thinking, not in the “blow everything up” way, but in the “mutual aid” way of Kropotkin. It is a form of localism that is highly antifragile. In times of uncertainty it turns to local support rather than centralised direction. It is nimble, adaptive and generative.

• Micro-economies. A communal world where micro transactions form a new economy, releasing economic value for everybody in the economy, and not just those who control the means to production (ie the wealthy and already fortunate). That’s less about Marxist rhetoric and more about creating a world of abundance. How can we claim to realise humanity’s full potential when the majority of people are essentially excluded from fully participating?

• Moonshots. This feels very Silicon Valley, but 10x thinking has been liberating for me. It sparks an internal dialogue that spirals progressively higher. Testing lots of ideas to quickly come to a BIG idea — 100 ideas for the one killer idea means that you’ve got to be comfortable with failure. Doing a pre-mortem of a project you’re in. Devising action lists ordered by priority of learning rather than priority of importance.

These are the leitmotifs that I can currently think of. I’m sure there are more. I’d love to hear what I’ve missed.

This is not to be left to the engineers

I write this as an environmental engineer myself. Engineers are not equipped with the tools to solve this problem. In fact, engineers create the problem of waste in the way they need to reframe and solve the problem of waste.

Put another way, following the vibe of “Seeing Like a State”, to make waste legible to engineers, they must strip out all of the elements that solve the problem of waste. Some of these elements are discussed in the leitmotifs above. Others will emerge through discussion.

Developing the leitmotifs

To be clear, the leitmotifs currently feel like a grab-bag of concepts, a potentially meaningless list of things that nobody would object to, but equally, no-one can do anything with. What the hell do they mean for a world without waste?

This is where the fun begins. The leitmotifs are just that, notions that need to be expanded upon. I will do this over the coming articles. There will be a lot of articles to build the picture. I’m aiming for 100. Some will be highly tangible, dealing with particularities. Others will be philosophical.

The work will be done best where it is done with others. The work will be done as a collaboration to make the leitmotifs whole, the foundations solid and capable of supporting a DAO designed to take action in the world.

Finding the others will take time. It must, because there needs to be enough substance for people wandering by to gather around. The idea needs to take form, even if it changes its form quickly.

Formation and transformation

The analogy here is of the silkworm. As a caterpillar, it eats fiercely, consuming huge amounts of mulberry leaf and grows fast. Eventually it knows that its time has come, and so spins the cocoon, encases itself and is changed into a moth.

By analogy, it’s not important to get all of this perfect, right from the start. The idea and the collective need to grow through feeding on concepts, growing fast until they are ready to spin the cocoon for transformation. This will be the 100 article threshold, at which point everything comes together into a thing of great beauty, transforms and emerges the same, but completely different.

This is the start of a journey to create a world without waste.

Thank you for joining me. I look forward to getting to know you better as the journey unfolds and more channels unfurl for co-development.