Change Waste to Resource

Basic physics tells us that matter can’t be created or destroyed, only transformed. When we transform matter, we get a combination of something useful plus waste. That proportion of usefulness to waste is efficiency.

We are all, always, focused on improving efficiency. If we are not, we should be. Most of what we do in this area focuses on reducing the amount of waste and that is as it should be. We will never get to 100% and we will always have waste. Perhaps more attention should be focused on what to do with the waste. Once the waste can be used, it is no longer “waste”.

Up to the mid-1920s cars used lots of wood and Ford had its own forests. Converting trees to lumber generates a lot of waste that must be disposed of. It can be burned, but unless the heat from burning can be used, that is just another form of waste.

Ford found an economical way to make a plastic, that could be used in Ford cars, from the “waste” wood. He converted the wood from waste to money.

In his biography, My Life and Work, Henry Ford tells how one process generated scrap metal disks that had to be disposed of. One of the workers found that, by using a double thickness of the “waste” disks, they could be stamped into radiator caps. They converted the disks from waste to money.

I once did some work with a pasta manufacturer. They dried spaghetti by draping it over hooks. When dry, they broke off the “U” shaped pieces and gave them to a farmer for animal feed. Someone in the plant had the idea that kids might like small pieces of spaghetti and they started packaging and selling it as “Hook Spaghetti”. They converted the hooks from waste to money.

What do you do with your waste? Are you paying to have it hauled away? Can you convert it from waste to money?

Yes, it is always preferable not to have any waste. Yes, we need to be constantly battling against waste. We’ll never get it all so we also need to be thinking about how to convert it from waste to resource.

To learn from a master how this is done, read Henry Ford’s 3 books: My Life and Work, Today and Tomorrow and Moving Forward