Binit targeting the gap between 77 and 5
Over the course of the last four weeks, I stumbled upon two numbers that each in its own right says everything about why we started Binit. According to Forbes 77% of all Americans want to live more sustainably, of which 40% said they are most concerned about plastic pollution. And yet, the latest recycling statistics from the US show that only 5% of all produced plastic gets recycled. The rest is burned, trashed or otherwise wasted.
So here it is — the recycling fallacy. It’s a lie. Recycling doesn’t work. Much like the tobacco industry sold us filter cigarettes under the pretense that filtered smoking was somehow less harmful, the plastic industry is selling us recycling as a solution to the global plastic crisis.
And it is a problem. A massive one. Plastic pollutes every corner of our planet. It’s in our food, in our forest and waters. Microplastics are in our gut. We shit plastic. And yet, nilly willy, we keep doing our good citizen’s duty — buy and recycle this junk. We feel good because we think we are doing the right thing, and it is hardly fair to blame you and me for drinking the kool aid, because for so long we’ve been told that brainless instant consumption is OK, as long as you take the time to then separate and sort your waste responsibly. And from there, our dear municipalities will take care of the recycling. Sounds chummy.
But it’s bullshit. In our name, they are failing. On our dime, they are trashing our planet.
The solution is in reduction of what we waste, which comes from fundamentally changing what and how we consume. Waste is created at the moment we make a purchase decision, and not when we decide which bin we put the plastic bottle in.
A prevailing majority of us want to live more sustainably, and despite our best efforts, or what we think are our best efforts, our cumulative result is coming in at 5% of what is responsible. This is the gap that we, at Binit, are trying to close by developing a tracking system for domestic waste which is designed to help households understand, come to terms with and act on their current waste reality. Binit is a system of trackers, from weight sensors to CV powered by AI, all designed to help you, and me, understand and reduce what we are wasting.
One of the first solutions we are introducing to help households reduce waste is gamification, where each user is given their current waste baseline and prompted to set reduction targets. Each user is then nudged to compete against himself, and can opt in to have his/her waste scores compared against the entire Binit community.
What is the intended benefit / result of this gamification? Waste reduction. We are basing our hypothesis on human psychology. Humans are competitive by nature, and we tend to improve our behavior and our scores once tracked. Fitness watches, step counters and other trackers have more than demonstrated the positive effects of data on human behavior. We have no reason to think that the same would not be true in the case of domestic waste.
To this effect we are currently running a limited pilot experiment in Austin TX, where we have succeeded, despite several technical and human resource challenges, in deploying trackers with display units to a handful of households. The objective of this experiment is to demonstrate that a) by tracking a behavior we start to get curious about it; b) once curious we begin searching for solutions to improve it; c) we benefit from setting personal targets; and d) we improve even more when compared to our peers.
Many of us don’t immediately connect the dots between tracking waste and reducing it, let alone between domestic waste trackers and living a more sustainable life, but we have found (through our ATX experiment) that once a user tracks their waste, their behavior improves, and they feel inclined to keep pushing themselves to attain better and better results. So much so, in fact, that we already have requests from households to keep our beta trackers permanently, which for us, is very good news. It means our solution is sticky, and this fact gives us hope that we can scale our business sufficiently to close the gap between 77 and 5.
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