Collaboration Chronicles

A foreclosed home “trashout” business employs 73 people to empty 15 houses a day, and puts it all in the dump. Look at how much good stuff they’re wasting- I’m disgusted. (Also jealous- why not stash it in some of that empty property and have an auction?)

Meanwhile, Tent cities are growing with unemployed people left in the dump by corporate america.

There could be all kinds of benefit from those destroyed goods, but nobody has a chance to collect them. The cleaning company wouldn’t pay workers to do more than blitzkrieg the houses. The banks who own them don’t care. Expensive stuff doesn’t get saved from the dump. The homeless don’t get work or help.

In cases like these, the saying “capitalism is self correcting” means “people who own the system can screw it up without correcting the problems they make”. It’s someone else’s problem.

Accountability- what a great idea.

The guy who owns the trashout business has a good idea too, too bad it only makes private benefit.

For people interested in business opportunities, stories like these make a good reminder about human costs and costs to the planet.

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As Susan Strasser noted in Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash, shameless landfill-stuffing practices are a product of modern consumer society. Previous generations left room for institutions like the house-to-house rag-and-bone man (who could now be the rag-and-bone-and-ebay man), but today’s corporations would rather create mega-waste.

This reminds me of Michael Pollan’s critique of modern industrial food production. Previously, cattle fertilized crops that fed cattle that fed people. Now, on one end we pump chemical fertilizer into the ground for unsustainable monoculture to fatten sick mutant cattle. At the other end their toxic waste is killing the gulf of mexico. Workers such as migrant meat-packers suffer the harshest conditions. Consumers experience a national eating disorder with a glut of artificial food-like substances.

The loops are broken, bent into weird fragments through abstract bottom-line thinking. Crazy, huh? Smart thinkers who solve these problems will create the businesses of the future.

Here’s a cool example: At Burt’s Bees, “employees waded through two weeks of garbage and found recycling opportunities that cut the company’s waste in half while generating $25,000 in estimated annual savings.”

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I think good business means making things (or re-making things) instead of wasting things. As a dealer, that’s how I try to work. (OK… I just can’t help being a pack rat too). When I left the east coast, some industrial shelving that I salvaged free from a bankrupt business was good enough to bring 3000 miles and keep using in San Francisco. When it gets full, I make room by trading away stale stock. Today I spent a beautiful morning hitting moving sales and stocking up. Then I hauled a load of old leftovers to a swap meet, and came home with free cases of mailing supplies that I usually pay for. A trade like that just feels good.

My disgust about the house trash-out situation inspired a funny thought. Bad bank execs and people who sold phony mortgages should be required to do community service, to boost good business and repay bailouts. There could be a 1930’s WPA-style program that benefits homeless people and gives them work on foreclosed property. The execs could be their assistants, and their sentences would be over when they pay back the bailouts with sweat, counted at minimum wage. Take AIG, who got $180 billion: with federal minimum wage at $6.55, payback would only take them 27 billion man-hours.

Since this is a somewhat silly post, in conclusion:

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 29th, 2009 at 2:34 am and is filed under Vision. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.