Your arrogance not ignorance is driving the global waste problem
Curtin fall. Lights out, the city of Helsinki says goodby to another crowd of diehards — innovators, provocateurs, go getters. Slush 2023 was again its magnificent self — impactful, energizing, nerve-racking, fun. Just amazing.
What a difference two years has made for our young company. I won’t say we were exactly the event’s superstars. Neither in 2021 or in 2023. But we were definitely a hot potato. For the first time venture funds came knocking. Techies came asking. Media was intrigued. Of course, it feels great to be vindicated, to some extent. And no, it’s not about small egos getting a boost.
What stood out at this year’s Slush was the attention and center stage given to all the clean tech and sustainability impact start ups. Finally, I thought, the spotlight is on the correct problem: climate change. I must admit, I never quite understood the Meta thing and the NFTs; it all seemed a bit over the top, a form of escapism from the shit we are dealing with in our physical world.
Trash included. And amazingly, we are still quite bad at it — that separation thing that we are being asked to do. We still throw over +50% of the stuff that can be recycled and composted into the waste bin. And apparently, we are even worse at separating at work than in the home. From Austin Texas to Helsinki Finland, people continuously send organics and other materials to the landfill or the incinerator. Of course this is not an issue of ignorance. Both of these cities have sophisticated and regular campaigns around waste separation. As do other European and American cities. People know what the right thing to do is. And yet, they fail, week after week. Why?
Attitudes. On some level, we don’t care. On another level, it’s a bad habit we’re saddled with, a subconscious arrogance that comes across as ignorance. And there’s no penalty for our bad behavior, because waste collection, for the most part, is still relatively inexpensive. Some 20 euros in Europe a month for waste hauling and disposal, and some 30 USD in the US. This is nothing compared to what we pay for water and electricity. Which is why we are better at turning the taps off and flipping the light switches when leaving our homes.
Developing a new pricing regime, where households are allotted an average amounts of waste and charged progressively for every pound after that, makes a lot of sense if the municipalities can also ensure people won’t start dumping their waste in forests and rivers to avoid paying high waste fees. Probably, most people won’t bother cheating the system.
But there is also the bottom up approach, which we are developing at Binit. We are building a waste tracking system for households based on the psychology of self improvement. The system tracks all you throw, nudges you towards making the correct choices in the moment, and supports you in setting overall reduction challenges and meeting your targets. The system is designed to rewards your consciousness; enables you to exist in the space of problem solving; and brings individual accountability to the forefront of the municipal efforts aimed at waste reduction.
The gap between what people know is the correct thing to do when it comes to disposing of waste, and what they end up doing on a daily basis is in some cases as big as 80%. This is a huge margin of error, especially given that the awareness is there. But what is missing, again, is accountability. Many have asked me, if I could explain the magic of Binit, of how we get 40% reduction in just 3 weeks? I often half jokingly say, we’re selling you accountability. First and foremost to yourself. Because we know that you know what the right thing to do is. But we also know that if you could be tracked (your actions reflected back to you in a mirror) you would be less likely to slack off.
And while we are a tech company basing our system on computer vision and machine learning, we are also a gaming company, using the power of challenges, competition and comparisons, to flip the accountability switch in your brain to on.
Just as I think that in order to reduce waste we need to innovate at the material level and change what packaging is made off — namely we should have nothing in the near future that can’t be composted or 100% recycled — I also think that we need solutions that help correct behavior on the demand side. As long as people continue to pack in the mixed waste bins, no mater the material composition, we’re not getting any closer to reducing global waste. What an opportunity missed that would be.
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