I firmly believe that we may be approaching a turning point in the volume of waste that is produced around the world. To illustrate, lets just say that we are moving from a 3 Michelin Star world to a family restaurant world! Let me explain.
A 3 Michelin starred restaurant has to have everything perfect. As such, if something isn't crispy enough, is a little overcooked or isn't perfectly round, it goes in the trash and the chef starts again. A family restaurant is different. The chef knows that he has to maximise his ingredients. As such, today's roast beef is tomorrow's cottage pie. Today's fresh fruit salad is tomorrow's trifle.
Over recent years, it has been easy in many quarters to behave like a 3 star restaurant. A good example is palm oil. As the price has risen, it has been standard to focus on selling the vegetable oil alone, leaving the crushed kernals and residual oils as waste. However, these 'waste' products have value. Residual oils can be converted to biodiesel, crushed kernals can be fertilisers, animal food or biomass.
Companies such as Lanza Tech are converting all sorts of waste into biogas or similar fossil fuel replacements. The use of many types of waste is increasing within building materials. I could go on.
I firmly believe that the world is about to enter (or has already entered) far more difficult times than we have seen for many years. This will cause us all to tighten our belts. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps we should have not wasted the energies of politicians by travelling to Durban to discuss environmental policies, and just left it to the basic human instinct that comes from necessity in difficult times.
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