Teru Talk Newsletter

Teru's Trash Talk

Let’s allow ourselves to peer down this Circular Economy pathway, and explore the hands-on business of waste management, conversion, resource recovery, and return of reclaimed materials to the global flow of materials. And let’s look down this road through a ‘digital business’ lens.

We’ve got big landfills and heavy trucks, behemoth pick-apart stations, and every manner of technical platform to take discarded goods down to their fundamental bits and pieces. Now we need to identify, investigate, open, and develop pathways that enable direct digital access globally to resource recovery. This impacts every link in the now-circular Value Chain: collection, separation, pre-treatment, conversion, remanufacturing, and goods-distribution of waste-sourced resources that have been turned back into commodities.

We are witnessing an across the board shift from physical to digital, away from bricks-and-mortar infrastructure and toward on-line networking. Every aspect of our lives and livelihoods are now making this shift, willingly or not.

Moving stuff is governed to a degree by weight and distance. There is a paradox between local vs. global resource recovery, and the key linkage between these two ends of the commerce spectrum is Transport. The immediacy of the digitally-driven circular economy requires that no matter what the physical material needing transit from buyer to seller, there must be a ready method of secure transport. Not to be left out, the waste-sourced resource recovery linkage must also return the used goods to the materials flow and close that gap in the circle, and that transport also needs to be both immediate and secure. Trash trucks only go so far, and certainly not far enough: food waste is a good example. Whatever the resource material, transport distance to a reprocessing hub becomes the limiting factor.

The old transport model of trucks, trains, planes, and boats needs to be revisited and updated. Are Drones going to be the answer to the distance/impact dilemma? Or possibly, will it be the ‘autonomous vehicle’ expansion that would lower or eliminate the cost of human drivers? Growing pieces, but none will be The Answer. Rather, it is the overall low-energy usage / zero-emissions transit surge that will facilitate closing this gap. Yet once again this level of interconnected remote management must be Big Data internet / cloud enabled. Just over that horizon is the need for massive-scale proprietary bandwidth. Front and center: zero-impact transit mechanisms managed by video enabled big-data information management.

We must constantly re-define what the buzz-words mean in our own business endeavors: ‘Corporate Responsibility’, ‘Sustainability’ and for that matter, ‘Circular Economy’. The answers to these questions then inform and constantly modify our business approaches to each discrete yet overlapping emerging market.

Hey Rube!

The California Air Resource Board is looking for live bodies to participate in planning work groups to chart out where the state’s Low Carbon Transportation Investment and Air Quality Improvement Program money will go next year. Step up, dig in, and see if we can steer some of those buckets toward proving out the air quality benefits of waste-sourced resource recovery.

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Covanta , a leader in sustainable waste and energy solutions, has commenced commercial operation of the Durham York Energy Centre (DYEC). 02/01/2016

CARB Seeks Public Work Group Participants to Develop Funding Plan

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) has issued a request for participation in topical work groups focused on informing aspects of the 2016-2017 Funding Plan for the Low Carbon Transportation Investments and the Air Quality Improvement Program (AQIP). 02/01/2016