Review : Optimistic view on our planet

This book has an ambitious scope: it outlines how the circular economy and fourth industrial revolution could be mutually beneficial – for the good of our planet. This is a huge topic and, as a result, the authors cover a lot of ground: from climate change, sustainable cities and carbon footprints to recycling and the scarcity of water and resources – and somehow, everything is connected.

Despite this, the reader never loses sight of the big picture – primarily thanks to the book’s very concise structure. Although the individual chapters build on each other and are always linked to waste management, at the same time they are deliberately written in such a way that they can also be read on their own. This enables the reader to home in on aspects of particular interest, whether this is digitalisation in waste management, the vision of a waste-free world or examples of best practice. Yet it is not just its structure that makes the book remarkable. It is also striking that the authors do not shy away from difficult questions – on the contrary, they seek them out: in the book, but also in WMW’s “Authors in focus”.

According to your ideas, the Internet of Things should contribute to the circular economy and the conservation of resources. Doesn’t that mean replacing one devil with another? After all, the IT sector already generates more CO2 than the entire aviation industry.

​What we explain in the book is that since IoT, sensors and AI are already used by global in- dustries to continuously monitor many types of products, they should also be used for ad- vancing circularities, life-cycle optimisation and service innovation. These digital tools are currently being used only to accelerate the linear growth model, delivering resource depletion, pollution and carbon emissions, as in all the previous industrial revolutions. What we say is that instead of using the advances of IND4.0 to accelerate the linear economy, we have the opportunity to use them for a more sustainable and wasteless future using the experiences and know-how of the waste management industry.

Anders Waage Nilsen is Business developer, design strategist, investor, technology columnist and public speaker

RFID chips on trash cans, movement data, real-time tracking: you want to design sustainable cities with the help of big data. Isn’t this a weird deal: to trade privacy for sustainability?

The rise of big data sets for city management is a reality and big data systems are what we design them to be. RFID

tags on waste bins or bugs are passive machine-readable devices that enable pay-as-you-throw systems. The geo trackers are connected to containers and trucks, not people. They monitor and optimise a logistical operation. Both of them are fair systems based on simple measurements, which are far less intrusive than all the personal information we leave behind every time we click on a link, buy something with our credit card or accept the terms of any digital service. The rise of surveillance capitalism does not mean that we can’t use the digitalisation of everything to achieve the same transparency and accountability in reverse logistics as we currently have in manufacturing and retail systems.

Antonis Mavropoulos is Chemical engineer, waste management consultant, founder and CEO of D-Waste, ISWA-President (2016-2020)