Garbage and Human Psychology: Don’t Ask, Don’t Smell

Reading about throughput makes me wonder if we could approach solving product or service needs by starting at what we now call the “end” of the throughput process or “the dump.” Let’s say companies were incentivized to change how they solved consumer and social problems by a government tax or regulation that penalized or restricted companies based on the waste produced by their products. (An analogy would be the tax on cigarettes that is connected to medical costs to society of cigarette smoking, or a carbon tax.)

Some talk about the necessity of behavioral change to save the planet and about the human psychological predispositions that stand in our way – our lost connection to nature, our inability to react to long term risk, our inability to process more than one emergency at a time and a sense of entitlement to pillage.
The one psychological area we almost never discuss is the innate human feeling about garbage and personal waste. Based on my limited knowledge, I believe that many, if not most human societies have managed their waste the way we do – by ignoring it in their midst, removing it to someplace where it can be ignored or even moving themselves when their dump is filled.

I’ll hypothesize that people hate waste and that since the dawn of humanity would have been happier without it. The societal default has been to ignore the problem – “don’t ask, don’t smell.” If it is true that humans innately hate waste, then beginning to solve human needs from a result that is psychologically desirable – no waste – may be a much more fruitful approach to promoting the kind of change we need.
So, what if we created economic incentives to have designers start at the result they innately desire – no garbage – and work backwards to solve a consumer and social need? Leveraging our innate programming, rather than fighting it, would, most likely, bring about a faster and more effective paradigm shift. In the words of John Lennon (sort of), we would instruct our inventors, designers, and product managers: “Imagine there’s no garbage.”
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Before attending the Presidio School of Management, Leslie Caplan was an environmental attorney. She helped develop regulations to enforce California’s Motor Vehicle Greenhouse Gas Emissions Legislation. She is also the inventor of a computer keyboard, a version of which is being produced by Logitech.