Systems Founded in Byproduct Management: Ingenuity 101

Lucid Energy, Stormwater X, Toilet 3.0, and Africa's Tech Sector and Scrap Sector might solve 4 problems with byproduct management.

If you are an agent of conscience, and choose to either be perfect, or become someone guided by perfect intent, you need maintenance. Like a regular teeth-cleaning or oil change, you need to regularly evaluate your interior motives, your pridefulness, your righteous indignation, and cognitive biases.  Preemium primum non nocere.

Like a machine that has been well maintained, you will, through the cumulative exposure and effort towards the improvements you've devoted yourselves to, be in the right place when the right time for an insight, inspiration, or opportunity occurs. If, for example, you care about people living in slums in emerging markets, you might spend years doing Mother Theresa one-on-several assistance, and begin to be inured to the scale of the problem. Keep your ego in check, and your eyes open, because someone else may have a good idea and never have your insight into an application that would "save the world", or your piece of it.

Where is this going? Downhill to the problem, whose byproduct is opportunity

Blogger V. Twitter - Recycling News Happens Fast [StormX]

There are two reasons why the number of Good Point Ideas blog posts has declined in the past 24 months.

The first relates to an increase in use of Twitter. As I noted 5 years ago, Twitter is misunderstood as a "squawking box". Sure, there's lots of inane squawking on Twitter. But the most important thing on the Twitter site is in the top right hand... the Search Box.

"Following" a thousand people is pretty impossible. I trim it down with a FairTradeRecycling list of twitter posters I follow more closely. But it is the "saved search term" feature that we need to pay attention to. It allows you to get an early scoop... and if it turns out to be clickbait, it's only 160 characters or whatever.

So ten years ago, the incredible idea below would have been subject of a blog, which would take me 45 minutes to write (and if readers are lucky, another hour to re-edit).  Now I post it bam on Twitter.

Storm Water Trash Catch Nets

I saw this on a repost from an old pal Wim Roskam on Facebook, who in turn found it on Architecture and Designs rather cool Facebook page.  The problem with stormwater carried litter is obvious if you've been to an African city like Accra, Lagos, Dakar or Douala.  The litter on the beaches is depressing and ubiquitous, and no amount of white savior plastic straw abstinence is going to save the sea creatures there.

STORMX is the license holder (image above is from North American licensee StormWaterSystems.com). The net baggies allow water to run through, but catch the debris... which is the actual culprit of urban flooding - falsely blamed on scrappers of Agbogbloshie 40 months ago. 2015 was the same year that Twitter helped a youtube video of a turtle with a straw stuck in its nose go viral... which led to a LOT of journalist ink going into the plastic straw bans.