Waste is an address, not a thing.
Waste is any resource that is thrown away or not fully used, or any step in a chain that is no longer needed. Its value almost never lives inside your own silo. So the question is “where is this worth something?” instead of “what is this worth?”
The map
Two axes. Is the resource fixed, bound to a place and form like a building or a heat flow? Or is it flexible, like people, trucks and data? And is it actively used, or unused? Plot your organisation and the comfortable illusion dies quickly.
“The business”
what the annual report sees
- Energy
- Assets
- Trash
people & data in use
- Capabilities
- Information
Five categories of wasted resources
Every organisation has all five. Almost every organisation manages only one or two.
Trash
The leftovers with a shape
Byproducts, offcuts, expired stock, worn-out gear. The only category most companies manage, usually by paying someone to make it disappear.
Energy
The leftovers without a shape
Heat, cold, steam, pressure, gases. Often purest at the exact moment somebody nearby buys the same energy at full price. Real, but never free.
Assets
The value that stands still
Machines, trucks, warehouses, offices: bought for the peak, idle in the valley. The average car is parked twenty-three hours a day.
Capabilities
The value that goes home at five
Skills your people have that your processes never ask for. The maintenance engineer who paints, the analyst who codes, the retired expert ten minutes away.
Information
The value that doesn't wear out
Data about machines, flows, customers, failures. Around eighty percent of industrial data is never used, and it is the only resource you can trade without losing it.
…and the chain
A pattern of steps
Steps accumulate. Each charges its margin and adds its delay. A step whose function could now be done at a fraction of its cost is a useless step, even when it looks like “how the industry works”.
Two breaks
Break 1: sideways
Break 2: straight through
After the break, is every remaining party better off by its own measure, on the scoreboard each silo already keeps? “Better for the planet” is a different test.
Four steps
Scan
Map the five leaks and the chain's steps, and put numbers on them, however rough.
Match
Find the address where your waste is an input: inward, nearby, across.
Design
Build the trade on the seven conditions.
Guard
Watch for the failure modes. They arrive after the ribbon is cut.
Match in a fixed order: inward (your own chain), nearby (your postcode), then across sectors. And learn the matcher's twist: your waste's defects can be its value.
Seven conditions
Thirty-five documented cases (the successes and, more instructively, the wrecks) keep producing the same seven conditions.
- 1Both keep their own goal, and both earn
- 2Proximity, or something that abolishes it
- 3A neutral broker carries the transaction costs
- 4Enough value per transaction
- 5A standardised, predictable stream
- 6Legal product status
- 7Demand validated before investment
Design the default, not the drama.
The exchanges that last are boring by construction: a standing tariff, a norm, a broker, a contract that renews itself. What happens on a rainy Tuesday in November, when nobody is watching? That is the day the exchange has to work.
How each condition works, the seven failure modes, and the 90-day playbook are in the book.