A Zero-Waste Lesson from the
Serengeti
Lessons
about a highly efficient future of zero waste often come from the most advanced
facilities in the most developed economies in the world: factories that produce
goods without
sending truckloads of junk to landfills;
urban buildings that produce as much energy as they consume;
school cafeterias that minimize food
waste.
These efforts are all very impressive. In the
developed world, we have abundant and comparatively cheap resources, including
water, food, steel, and electricity. Even so, it takes an
immense amount of careful planning, thoughtful design, and adherence to best
practices to operate with minimal waste. To a degree, you must possess the
capacity to make investments in conservation technologies and systems if you
want to live as if you are poor in resources.
However,
it’s clear to me that we could learn a lot about avoiding waste by spending a
little time in what may be, by design, one of the least developed places on
earth — Tanzania’s Serengeti
National Park.
Earlier
this month, I spent several days at the Nomad Serengeti
Camp Number One, a mobile encampment with no fixed
structures in a country of wide-open rolling savannah, isolated trees, and more
zebras, elephants, elands, and gazelles than you can count.
This is not an easy place to deliver goods
and services. There are no paved roads, no villages or towns inside the
5,700-square-mile park, no power lines, and no cell towers. The camp is a good
hour’s drive from the Kogatende Airstrip, 90 minutes if you stop to watch the
wildebeests make the precarious crossing of the gurgling Mara River.
It’s only when you live off the grid — even if it is while
glamping for just a few days — that you realize how many resources are used to
run many of the hospitality and food-service businesses in developed countries,
and how it is possible to operate these businesses with very little in the way
of resources.
The Serengeti gives a new and different meaning to the term
“garbage in/garbage out.” There’s no garbage collection or landfills. All the
trash brought in by guests and their hosts has to be brought out. And so
there are none of the plastic water bottles that are so ubiquitous in the U.S.
workplace — everybody is issued a metal one that is refilled from water
purified on-site. The toilets are rudimentary but highly functional, flushed
with a tiny stream of water. Showers last about 75 seconds — water is heated
over a wood fire and poured into a large bucket above the showerhead. (Gravity
provides the water pressure). Heat, when necessary, is provided by hot water
bottles. There’s laundry service, but the sun is the dryer. Each tent has a
battery, which is charged by a diesel generator that runs for a few hours each
day; the battery then powers a half-dozen very low-wattage light bulbs. When
you’re not in the tent, every light goes off. In other words, this “hotel” runs
with virtually no power.
To be sure, a lot of the conveniences and necessities most hotel
guests (especially those traveling on business) need, or think they need,
aren’t present in the Serengeti. Because there’s no Wi-Fi or cell power, you
don’t have to keep computers and smartphones running. And there’s no cable, so
you don’t need to power televisions. (There is, the joke goes, one channel, Bush
TV — i.e., the parade of large mammals ambling by.)
But the experience does make you think (especially because there
is only Bush TV to distract you from your thoughts). Count the number of light
bulbs, appliances, and other devices that are either turned on or just drawing
power from a wall socket when they’re not being used in your office and home.
Or consider the amount of time your house or workplace is heated or cooled and
lit when nobody is in it, or the volume of trash even the most environmentally
conscious teams and families produce.
The contrast in the way food is delivered is also immense. For a
week, we ate virtually no processed or packaged foods. Everything that was
prepared — fruits, vegetables, meats, grains, and drinks — was trucked in and
carefully measured. Food waste is buried on-site. Because all recyclables and
trash plastic have to be trucked out a great distance, tremendous care is taken
to avoid their use. No paper napkins or plastic plates, no disposable cutlery.
In a week, my sustenance at the park generated about as much material waste as
a single trip to the deli near my office for a cup of coffee and a turkey
sandwich: the paper bag, the paper wrapping of the sandwich, the plastic
clamshell container, napkins, a plastic stirrer, packets of salt, pepper,
mustard, mayonnaise, and sugar, all placed in a plastic bag.
Of course, this is an extreme example. And there’s no way to
analogize directly between a safari camp and a midtown Manhattan office tower.
But extreme situations serve to highlight useful contrasts. Nobody would argue
that you can live, work, and deliver high-value-added services in New York in
the absence of modern infrastructure, and by using as little power and
generating as little waste as a tourist operation in remote Tanzania. But it’s
only when you’re around a business that treats every resource as precious that
you start to realize just how much waste there is in your own daily life.
http://www.strategy-business.com/blog/A-Zero-Waste-Lesson-from-the-Serengeti?gko=98dbf&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20160823&utm_campaign=resp
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