The Importance of the Mind Shifting for a Waste Management Company

Discover Which is the Mind Shifting that Your Company needs if you Want to Increase the Volumes and the Quality of Collected Waste.

I know that nowadays a lot of people talk about mind shifting, change of mentality, empathy and a lot of similar topics, using them as the cause and the solution for all the problems.

Unfortunately no one told how to do it or better how to do it in a company.

But believe me that’s the turning point also for your waste management company.

For that reason I decided to unveil how to do it.

Or better, how to do it in your company.

Before I go ahead, let me describe which is the common situation in the field.

In fact if you are one of the virtuous companies that is possible to meet at the same time there are thousands and thousands of companies that still consider wastes as simply waste.

And that normally all around the world.

In Europe, in India, in Africa, in the USA, in Australia… nothing different.

Unfortunately, let me say.

That’s due to the wrong habits that we acquired during our growth.

I remember very well my grandparents and their approach with wastes.

They were born in 1917 and 1918 at the end of the first World War in a small city in Sardinia. Although they belonged to wealthy families, at least for those times, wartime had created hardships for them as well.

These hardships were accentuated during the Second World War when my grandfather was engaged on the front lines and my grandmother was busy running the family business: the cultivation of the land was not done alone.

I remember how many times they told me about the difficulties in finding food and goods other than what they produced themselves.

In short, it was not an easy situation.

That has led people to be unable to buy a simple household appliance or a new item of clothing, over foods.

A situation that fortunately almost all of us do not know.

Situation that, however, has produced an important backlash.

Yes, because the transition from a condition of difficulty to one of social and economic tranquility has fueled the desire to make a cut with the past.

Cut made by constantly eliminating everything that was old and obsolete.

Irresponsible elimination.

Irresponsible considering the approach that we could use today.?

In fact if you think about how the wastes were collected and treated in the 70's and in 80’s and how they could be treated nowadays there is an important gap.?

Fortunately.

But what I want to share with you is the fact that a lot of people inherited the same approach that my grandparents had for waste.

They considered any unused item to be a waste.

It was not important that it might have a function for someone else.

It was only important to dispose of it.

So it ended up together with all the other waste, without any segregation, or unfortunately, often entrusted to improvised emptiers who abandoned it on the street.

Horrible, I know.

It was something very diffused and it still diffused, considering how many people don’t do segregation on their wastes.

And that’s the point.

In fact my grandparents lived in a situation of scarcity, due to the 2 World Wars, and after, when the situation was a little bit more quiet they started to be consumist.

That’s created an advantage: the growth of production and the consumption of goods.

At the same time created a problem: the production of not segregated wastes.

Problem that was amplified by the absence of creation of processes of collection to segregate the secondary raw materials.

Yet the world knew well the importance of reusing materials from waste since, for example, the Romans used the remains of old jugs or vases for the production of “cocciopesto” , a waterproofing material.

So what's happened?

Wars created scarcity and when people saw the light it created consumerism.

Consumerism created a mind shifting in people.

In fact people changed their mindset starting to dispose of all the old goods.

Unfortunately production was completely concentrated in that and they didn't consider the creation of processes to collect and treat the waste properly.

As Steve Chandler said about mind shifting?

A mind shift is a change of focus and perception.

That is what happened.

And that influenced and still influences our generations.

In fact when in 2003 in Italy some regions started with the waste segregation the most important obstacle to win was the obstacle of people.

Not the waste collection companies.

Not the municipalities.

But people.

It's for that reason that it is very important to create a mind shifting if you want to increase the volume and the quality of waste collected.

And it’s something achievable only in one way: educating people through marketing.

I know that you are asking “Educating on what?”

Let me answer your question immediately.

Indeed marketing has multiple functions and one of them is called nurturing, in technical terms, but it means that you produce contents and materials to educate your audience on how to treat the electrical and electronic wastes, as an example.

Using that function is possible to create a mind shifting in your target audience.

But not only this mind shifting in fact will resonate on the advantages that they could obtain by changing their approach to their waste.

Think for one moment what happens with your old car.

When you decide to change it you can follow two ways.

The first one is to bring it in a car scrapper and, in some countries, pay for its destruction.

The second one you could sell your old car to someone that collects the spare parts to resell them to other people that have the same car.

That’s the same situation.

In fact if people start to think about their wastes as materials everything will change.

In terms of waste disposed, in terms of waste abandoned, in terms of quality of waste collected, in terms of secondary raw materials produced.

In a few words: everything will change.

And it will change for all of us.

That’s something possible only with a marketing process that involves your company and that work involving people, citizens, considering them as suppliers and not as a passive part of your waste collection process.

For that reason December 8 at 10.00 am EST I organized the event “From Waste to Material: a Mindset Shift” where Ken Alston and me we’ll discuss why it’s so important to do this mindset shifting and how to do it.

Join us going here.

I’ll wait for you there.

Sam

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