Waste is a Red Herring

People like to worry about waste. Food waste, energy waste, industrial waste, you name it. "Reduce, reuse, recycle" is the mantra that we sing to our kids.

But waste is a red herring. It's a fraction. It has both a numerator and a denominator and they both matter. Waste is a convenient number that fools us into making the wrong comparison.

Thinking about waste as a fraction triggers a cognitive bias called loss aversion. Put simply, we hate to lose. In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel prize winning economist Daniel Khanneman demonstrates how the idea of losing $100 has much more psychological impact than gaining the same amount. Likewise, wasting a resource feels a lot worse than gaining the same.

Waste also tricks us by resembling a failed commitment. Robert Cialdini writes about our desire to remain consistent in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. One of the six principles of persuasion, Commitment/Consistency, is a tool that compliance practitioners routinely use to get you to say yes. Since waste represents unused or underutilized resources, it can feel like we're not following through on a commitment.

Putting these cognitive illusions aside, it's important to remember that at the end of the day, what matters is the absolute amount not the relative amount. The $100 in your account doesn't care whether you earned it all at once, or a little at a time.

So don't be fooled by fractional accounts of waste. If you use 10 bottles and recycle seven of them, then you have a recycle rate of 70%. Say your neighbor has a recycle rate of only 50%. Is that better or worse?

The answer depends on how many bottles they used. Did they use only two? Or did they use 20? It makes a big difference in absolute terms, the only terms that matter.

And one parting thought. They say that one man's trash is another man's treasure---what is waste today will be a resource tomorrow.

What waste can you turn into a resource? This is selling sawdust.