Re-Gain

Deliberate waste directly depletes our earth’s resources. It eventually results in many forms of loss through a degradation of our planet. Improved inventories of what we discard will stimulate a greater understanding of how we can best manage waste. There is a critical connection between waste and prosperity. Our living standards have provoked increased consumption. However, such resource mismanagement taps our limited energy and materials. Better tracking of the entire material generation cycle and material use flows can provide us with a more holistic approach to “best use” of our scarce resources. Over six billion people now live on this earth. In the next 30 years, another 2.5 billion people are estimated to increase our ranks, making the world’s population estimate in 2030 around 8.5 billion. How we determine to best measure, manage and sustain our current resources has crucial future implications. Each year Americans use, discard and recycle more than 17.3 billion tons of waste ...

A few weeks ago I was talking with a friend who had hired me 25 years ago to build and manage a used oil recycling facility in the Washington DC region. My friend commented how remarkable it is that we have made such few improvements. Interestingly, in the early 1990’s, this friend and his partner in the oil recycling company founded another company that revolutionized the golf industry. Their company, Softspikes Golf Cleats, created a tipping point when they championed a ban on metal spikes, thus forever preserving golf greens around the world. You would think we could show similar innovation with used oil. Tragically, Americans have learned little regarding the price for our vast wasteful consumption of petroleum. We need a car fluid recovery tipping point! How we can collectively better manage oil has global significance. Years ago there was a Pogo cartoon with a picture of an oil tanker in a backyard, and the caption read, “We have met the enemy and it is us.” At George Washi...