Today, we were looking at demolition, hazardous waste companies and cleaning up spills; a sector now called remediation. We wanted to know what matters in different sectors regarding waste materials. Once you begin digging, things turn interesting. Let’s say you have a building in central London. It needs to come down. You’re the demolition expert. A lot of your thinking is not in removing waste materials, but in addressing the concerns of neighbors, the utility company, the people in the blast radius, the water company, etc.
The IoT buyer may not be a demolition guy at all. The monitoring is often specified by the client, the developer or the utility. The contractor just has to comply.
Segregation is where it breaks down
On a building site in the same city (or even on the same lot), the concerns regarding waste are different. Segregation is where it breaks down. Sorting on site saves money, since it improves recycling rates and lowers disposal costs, but if there is no space? In a WRAP survey, only 63% of companies that planned full on-site segregation actually did it. 52% of the sites surveyed were urban.
A UK study found much the same: Contractors segregate where physical site space and project budgets allow. On a cramped city center site, five neatly labelled skips just don’t fit. For a site manager, a full skip blocks work and an empty skip collected early wastes money. The crux is not about waste, it’s about keeping his site and materials moving.
Let’s say the same project involved some marinas down by the Thames. In marinas and harbors, waste is mostly liquid. It goes straight into the water. The issues are oily bilge water, human waste and, once the boat is on the hard; scraping, sanding and antifouling paint. This is a big step from our original premise and a whole set of different tools.
Waste thresholds
What keeps appearing is the sorting element. If our waste is industrial noise (for example), we have the ability to sort it. But, first you need to know at what threshold it becomes an issue. Many people are “fine” with a single jackhammer for two hours on a single working day. But, if that tool goes on, and stays on, during the weekend, things might get a little frosty. The tolerance level is different on weekends.
Something different also happens in our marina example. On a building site, the contractor produces the waste and controls it. In a marina, hundreds of independent boat owners produce it, while the marina operator carries the responsibility for the basin. The operator’s pain is having no visibility into what each boat is doing.
Unlock value streams
We didn’t come up with too many answers in this post. We left it open. No conclusions that might draw us onto a particular tangent. It is a topic we will come back to, because waste streams are not just waste materials, they unlock value streams for businesses too.
Here is an old story: One day I was hitching. A wealthy man driving a nice car stopped to offer a ride. He said that when he was younger, he lived close to some commercial horse stables. He also had business at a local saw mill. The mill owner told him of ongoing issues with large piles of saw waste. My friend agreed a fee to remove the “waste;” selling loaded trucks for many years, until the milling sector moved overseas.
