Biggest tech deal ever, Microsoft Surface and the global challenges of waste management

Few days before the largest tech deal ever was announced, the one between DELL and EMC, I was asked to participate at a radio show at LA Talk radio a growing internet radio that is irreverent, cool and entertaining also. The show held on October 2 and it was about the global challenges related to waste management and the possibilities for a zero waste society.

My host was Diana Dehm, a curious social entrepreneur with a big vision and passion for connecting people from around the world to create our sustainable planet in the most non-traditional ways. She holds the Sustainability News & Entertainment Radio and you can find all her radio shows plus many other interesting materials at her website. Interestingly, she rubs the very successful project Trash your Back, a fun, high visibility 5-day campaign driving awareness and education on our own personal trash impact.

You can find the whole radio show here - I hope you will enjoy it

I found it really challenging to have such a discussion on waste management at the same days someone commented that "...according to the engineers, a full-scale quantum processor would have major applications in the finance, security, and healthcare sectors, allowing the identification and development of new medicines by greatly accelerating the computer-aided design of pharmaceutical compounds; the development of new, lighter and stronger materials spanning consumer electronics to aircraft; and faster information searching through large databases".

As I am writing those lines, the first review of Microsoft Surface first look - review has been already published, to my understanding this will be another step towards the new modular design of laptops.

And I am thinking, how far is the waste management sector from the third industrial revolution that happens right here, right now? How we can move inside this revolution and utilise it? Well, this is my understanding: either the waste management industry will be tuned to the pace of change of the third industrial revolution or it will be gradually undermined by the waves of social and techno innovation that are coming.

Wasted Health: dumpsites are global health emergency

At the same time the world makes huge steps to use mobile phones for health protection (as it the recent case where mobile phone records can be used to predict the geographical spread and timing of Dengue epidemics - See more here), important elementary problems that concern billions are still ignored. And of course we are all happy that the declaration for an Embola free Africa by the end of 2015, but looking closer it seems that the roots for pandemics are still growing in many cases in Africa, as its dumpsites are getting bigger and more widespread. 

Well, yesterday ISWA launched my recent report on the tremendous health problems that are generated from dumpsites - you can find and download the full report here and the press release here.

The video below describes briefly the report's highlights and captures its spirit.

First of all, the main outcome of the report is that dumpsites have become a global health emergency and not just an important environmental issue - its impacts influence the lives of billions of people, directly and indirectly. Some more comments:

1. The health consequences from dumpsites are not as dramatic than we all thought - they are much more worse and they are getting worse day by day just because the waste that is brought to dumpsites is increasing continuously, especially in the developing world, due to urbanisation, increase of the GDP/cap and the rise of the new middle class with its own intensive consumption patterns.

2. There are countries like Indonesia, Philippines and India where scientific evidence shows that the health impacts posed by dumpsites are higher than the ones posed by malaria! This is an unbelievable development, which shows that underestimating the waste management challenges creates a new health landscape dominated by dumpsites.

3. The rising e-waste stream is not yet fully studied and understood in terms of its health and environmental impacts - however all the available studies demonstrate new and very high health risks - in the report you can find a lot of references from China and SE Asia that document the impacts posed by dumping e-waste.

4. Using some elementary calculations, it seems that the annual cost of the health impacts posed by dumpsites are in the order of billions or decades of billions per year - using 50% of this amount of money for helping developing countries resolve their waste management problems will have positive economic, environmental and health impacts on the long-term and save many thousands lives immediately.

There is an urgent need for action by the international community  - as a good friend told me recently, our message for decision makers must be as simple as this "you can't say that you don't know".

Special thanks to David Newman, ISWA's president, for his contribution. Many thanks to Niki Mavropoulos (Waste Atlas manager) for her extensive research and acknowledgements to my colleagues Costas Velis (prof. The University of Leeds), Vivek Agraval (Chair of ISWA's Working Group on Collection) and Nikos Rigas (D-Waste graphic's designer) for their ideas and practical help.