Uncovering the Hidden Economic, Environmental, and Social Costs of Waste For Humanity

The True Cost of Waste

Every year, humanity generates enough organic and industrial waste to fill millions of cargo ships, and hidden inside that waste is a staggering amount of untapped, valuable materials. The problem isn’t the existence of waste itself. It’s our failure to design turnkey, industrial systems that can extract value from them profitably and at scale. Modern waste streams contain a wide array of untapped resources: cellulose, proteins, minerals, metals, nutrients, and complex organic molecules, which are much needed by humanity.

Most human organic waste is rich in cellulose. While the water in wastewater is often recycled, the solids are turned into harmful, useless sludge. For example, every person produces around 80 gallons of municipal wastewater per day. Most treatment plants focus only on cleaning the water and separating harmful solids, not reusing them, ultimately creating useless sludge.

Instead of recovering valuable resources, we mix waste together, turning it into useless material, and throw it away all over the planet. We landfill. We incinerate. We pollute our air and water resources daily. Globally, trillions of dollars worth of usable materials are lost every year because we continue to treat waste as a burden, not as a library of materials as it should be.

Waste, in reality, is stranded inventory. A vast library of materials just waiting to be recovered and recycled back into human use.