Don’t Waste Your Waste
Earlier this week I pulled up to a stop light and the car in front of me had a bumper sticker that read:
We support the idea that each member of society, no matter who they are, can make some difference in the world. Something as simple as composting really can make a difference. It seems a small thing, but the act of turning waste into something useful is redeeming something that was going to be bad for the world into something beneficial.
There are actually many kinds of waste. If we waste the opportunity to make a difference then who is going to take our place in making difference? We have learned the hard way that the “someone” in someone needs to do something about It… is us. We found that if we changed our attitude from “them” to “us”, we could see things start to happen. More than two decades ago we saw that all of us were wasting our waste and that most of us do not have an opportunity to do anything with our waste other than put it in the bin, where it goes to a landfill. We are committed to helping people who do not currently have any options when it comes to reclaiming waste. Sometimes we are asked why we are working on this project, and why is it so important. It’s true that it can be hard to understand the size of the problem. We found some rather startling statistics for just the U.S. as we moved forward in changing our own minds and understanding the problems our world faces. Take a look at these and hopefully you will find them as shocking as we have.
40% of the food goes uneaten.
$218 billion in food is thrown away every year.
21% of of the fresh water supply is used to produce wasted food.
20 billion pounds of fresh produce goes unharvested or unsold each year.
It is obvious that we could slow the way landfills grow by changing our habits on compostable food waste and the results would benefit us all. There are a few companies that compost food waste, and a few programs to help raise awareness and education to make it easier for restaurants and food producers, but not nearly enough.
However, there are other ways to slow how landfills grow and reclaim food waste in addition to the very necessary and beneficial act of composting.
This is how Watogy came about. In our next blog I will cover how Watogy will give us another opportunity to slow how landfills grow. We know that there are a number of ways we can all work to slow how landfills grow and it is our belief that every person has the opportunity to make the world we live in a better place to live. Olen Creative Group exists to help people do just that. It is exciting to see what each of us can do and we hope that more ideas will be developed and momentum will pick up on this major issue that is facing all of us. As this project succeeds, more people will have opportunities to participate in reducing waste, pollution, and loss while contributing to a cleaner, healthier future. People will have opportunities to do many things, from just being able to empty their waste bin into Watogy instead of a landfill, to starting whole companies and projects around the new waste-as-a-commodity economy that will be created when waste has value, going from being a liability to an asset.
We can all contribute to making the world a better place.
Jim Geselle - June 9, 2020