Trash: The Handshake Economy

If the method from Part II works, it should already be running somewhere, preferably somewhere unglamorous, for a long time, making ordinary money. It is. It runs in a small Danish industrial town of sixteen thousand people, and it has been running there for over fifty years.

Kalundborg, two hours west of Copenhagen, hosts a refinery, a power station, the world's largest insulin factory, a plasterboard plant, and the municipality itself. Around 1961, the refinery needed water and the town had a lake; someone proposed a pipeline. In 1972, the first real waste deal followed: the refinery's excess gas, instead of being flared, went to the plasterboard factory next door as fuel. Then steam from the power station to the refinery and the pharma plant. Then warm cooling water to a fish farm. Then gypsum (a byproduct of scrubbing the power station's flue gas) to the plasterboard plant as raw material. Then yeast slurry from insulin production to local farmers as pig feed. Link by link, handshake by handshake, over decades.