The WEFe Nexus and the Absence of “W” for Waste
Good morning, everyone. Today I want to talk about something hiding in plain sight inside one of our most important frameworks for sustainability—the Water–Energy–Food–Ecosystems (WEFe) Nexus. We use the Nexus to name and navigate the interdependence of these four pillars of survival. But have you noticed what’s missing? There’s no “W” for waste.
That absence is deliberate. And it matters. By the end of today, I want you to see why not adding a “W” is more than a naming quirk—it’s a disciplined stance. It’s an invitation to stop reifying “waste” as a thing, and instead design systems that treat every output as a resource in the wrong place, form, or concentration. It’s a shift from “waste management” to resource choreography. It’s also a shift from “less bad” to net good—from circular to vortical, where flows spiral upward in quality, value, and benefit.
1) The Jar of Trash and the Psychology of Waste
You’ve probably seen those talks where someone holds up a little glass jar stuffed with twist ties, candy wrappers, and plastic film and declares: “This is all the trash I produced this month.”
How does that make you feel?
Do you cheer—“Yes! It’s possible!”
Or do you feel overwhelmed—“I could never get my waste that low; what’s the point?”
Or do you slip into a quiet moral relief—“Heroes exist. Maybe I don’t need to change much.”
Behavioral research tells us both discouragement (the “drop-in-the-bucket” effect) and moral licensing are common reactions when we compare ourselves to exemplars. So let’s name those feelings—not to wallow in them, but to step through them. Awareness is the antidote to paralysis.
Confession: my family—despite living light, composting, and teaching sustainability—still fills one of those bottles every couple of days. (Holds up bottles.) This is last week’s tally. Disappointed? Relieved I’m human? Curious what we actually do with them?
Let me also confess something else: I no longer think about reducing the number. In fact, looking through my Nexus goggles and seeing what these bottles really contain and can do, I am on a quest to produce MORE, not less!
Curious?
Good. Curiosity is the right doorway.
2) From Guilt to Craft: Ecobricks to Trashcrete (field practice)
For the past 10 years I’ve joked about my confrontations with the trash collector at Rosebud Continuum Eco-Science Center where we leave. I pretend to hold a shotgun in my hand and… chechik … Pretend to load it and say as the garbage truck pulls up, “Hey, get off ma land! That there’s my S-H-I-you-know-what. You don’t get to steal it from me for free – I paid my cold hard cash for that Banana at Walmart, I brought it home in the plastic bag, and the part of the banana that went through me – well that’s literally my S-H-I-you-know-what and it goes into our composting toilet, turned back into life giving soil. The banana peel – that goes into our biodigester, turning into free clean fuel and liquid fertilizer. And the plastic bag that I took, because I forgot to bring my canvas bag – it's no longer single use. I use it over and over and finally I use it to make bottle bricks and trashcrete forms for our wildlife sculptures. So get off our land. We don’t need no ‘waste disposal’. This is my S-H-I-you-know-what… nobody gets it unless you’re willing to pay for it!”
That’s the narrative. And then people inevitably become curious about our composting toilets and biodigesters and precious plastics projects, the bottle bricks, the trashcrete sculptures…
Let me tell you how all that came about, and why I no longer try to limit how many so-called “consumption residuals” my family produces, and no longer feel guilty about my trips to the supermarket.
When we had made our National Geographic “Planet or Plastic” Pledge and had officially chosen “planet” onstage at Nat Geo in Washington 10 years ago, my wife and I had stopped taking out the garbage. We cleaned and sorted everything, washing all organic residuals into our biodigesters, and put everything else into big 27 gallon totes. After a few years, despite crushing the bottles and packaging, we had stacked up about 25 of these totes. We had made the commitment not to “give away our trash” but hadn’t yet figured out what to do with it.
Fortunately, our Honduran student, Mariolym Soto, introduced us to ecobricks: PET bottles hand-packed with non-biodegradable plastic wrappers until rigid enough to be used as bricks. Millions across the Global South use them for benches, walls, planters, even schools. There are community guides on bottle selection, safe packing densities, and construction techniques. It’s not a silver bullet; it’s a community craft that reframes what used to be “unrecyclable.”
I went all-in. I started saving and stuffing everything. I graduated from half-liter to 1L, 2L, then 5-gallon containers. To increase the density and reduce the labor I shredded caps with a Nutribullet (RIP), then abused a paper shredder (RIP #2), and finally invested in a Precious Plastic–style shredder so I could densify all the “soft, unrecyclable” plastics—chip bags, toothbrushes, floss, metallized wrappers—into bottle bricks. After five years, I had enough to start building.
But I didn’t want blocky, Minecraft walls. I wanted curves and creatures. Inspired by Disneyland “shapecrete” sculptures, I began mixing my plastic shred directly into cement. For sand, I crushed our saved glass: first with a hacked Insinkerator grinder, then—thanks to Rosebud Continuum founder Maryann Bishop—with a professional glass crusher that produces clean glass cullet sand.
That’s how our trashcrete emerged:
1 part Portland cement
2 parts glass cullet sand
2 parts shredded plastic (any type—#1–#7, including film and metallized wrappers)
We’d rough the form with ecobricks or trashcrete “loaves” made in grocery bags, add lath, then stucco successive layers: first trashcrete, then a glasscrete finish (cement + glass sand only) to fully encapsulate and weather-seal the plastics. Painted, the surfaces read as stone. Strength under heavy loads? Mixed; for artistic/landscape applications, excellent. For structural loads, proceed with caution and testing. (Research on plastic aggregates in cement suggests both possibilities and limits; mix design and encapsulation matter.)
Then the paradox: we ran out of “trash.” One family’s monthly output is mostly packaged air. Low-density, high-volume fluff. Once you densify with shredding and crushing, it becomes surprisingly manageable—and valuable. The part we were paying to have hauled away was largely empty space wrapped in materials we’d mis-specified for a one-way journey.
Lesson: “waste” is often a geometry problem (volume/shape) before it’s a chemistry problem. Density is destiny.
3) Waste: Noun, Verb, or Design Flaw?
We treat waste like a noun—a dead-end category. The instant we slap that label on, we excuse ourselves from further responsibility. The bin becomes a metaphysical portal. But what if we demoted “waste” to a verb? To waste is to mis-design, misplace, mis-specify, or mis-time. Verbs we can change.
Nature doesn’t produce “waste” as a noun. Every output is an input elsewhere: leaf → litter → humus → microbiome → nutrient cycle → leaf. That is living metabolism. Indigenous teachings echo this: take only what cycles; return what you take; design with reciprocity. The Japanese word mottainai captures the grief of squandering value—a daily nudge to respect materials. (The Wiki will tell you that Mottainai (もったいない) is a Japanese cultural concept rooted in Buddhist philosophy, expressing regret or sorrow over waste, and advocating for mindful consumption and resourcefulness to avoid wasting valuable things. It was popularized in the West by Kenyan Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai who used the word mottainai in an environmental protection campaign)
But the point isn’t to romanticize; it’s to re-specify our design logic.
4) Waste Through the WEFe Lens
Let’s apply the reframing across the four pillars.
Water
“Wastewater” is a misnomer. With membrane filtration, activated carbon, and UV disinfection, used water can be turned into high-grade reclaimed water for industry and even potable blends. The more interesting design question is not “Can we do it?” but “How many jobs can one water molecule do before we let it go back into the ecosystem?” Heat recovery from warm effluents can preheat process water. Nutrients can feed aquaculture or fertigation. Salinity-tolerant crops can use brackish streams that would otherwise go to drain. A molecule is a worker; why retire it after one shift?
Energy
“Waste heat” is district heating waiting to happen. Industrial heat that used to be vented to the sky can warm buildings, greenhouses, or water. Absorption chillers can turn waste heat into cooling. Rankine organic cycle engines turn low grade waste heat, such as I saw in Chena Hot Springs in Alaska, into clean electricity. The hot springs water provided by the earth is going to cool down anyway. Why not capture and use and transform the heat before that happens? Thermal cascades match temperature grades to tasks—high to low—wringing value out of each kilojoule before it finally dissipates to ambient.
Food
A third of food is lost or wasted globally, but policy and design flip the script. Source separation of organics unlocks biogas and compost. Pay-by-weight bins or volume-based fees drive behavioral change. “Edible surplus” recirculates via donation platforms and food hubs; “inedible organics” feed microbes and soils through digesters and composting. The question is never “waste”—it’s which metabolism and which next job.
Ecosystems
“Ecosystem waste”? It doesn’t exist. Natural systems metabolize everything—if given time, diversity, and intact cycles. Our job is to restore those cycles, not burden them with novel compounds and geometries (microplastics, PFAS, laminates) that resist re-metabolism for centuries. When something doesn’t cycle, it’s a signal: wrong material, wrong application, wrong timescale.
Across WEFe, the key is designing outputs as inputs. It’s choreography, not cleanup.
5) Waste-to-Energy (WtE): Promise, Pitfalls, and a Design Test
On paper, WtE looks irresistible: abundant or negative-cost feedstock (you might even get paid to take it), continuous supply, firm power. But process matters.
Incineration advanced dramatically, yet still raises concerns about toxins, ash handling, and siting—often in communities with less political power.
Gasification/plasma promise higher efficiencies and cleaner outputs but face capex/opex hurdles, tar management, and scale complexity.
Anaerobic digestion of organics is a biological WtE that, when well-managed, produces biogas and digestate with far fewer toxic byproducts.
And here is a design test: If a WtE pathway forces upstream redesign (cleaner materials, disciplined sorting, non-toxic residuals), it can be part of a regenerative transition. If it enables the status quo (more mixed laminates because “we can burn it”), it fails. The measure is externality internalization—using Logic 3 we have to ask: are all downstream costs accounted for and made safe?
6) All Economically Produced Energy Began as “Waste”
Here’s the big idea. Historically, human energy is the alchemy of leftovers: we look at what nature or society labeled “valueless,” “nuisance,” or “dangerous” and figure out how to harness it. The economics only penciled out because the inputs were cheap or “free,” and the externalities were pushed off-book.
Coal & oil were cursed seams and foul seeps—until someone priced their combustion. They stayed “cheap” only because black lung, acid rain, climate were not charged at the meter.
Natural gas was long flared at wellheads as a safety hazard before pipelines turned it into a commodity.
Hydropower channeled flood destruction into electricity; rivers and fish paid the bill.
Wind turned a sailor’s peril into propulsion and millwork.
Biomass swept from fields and barns became heat, biochar, and fertility.
Solar was always there—stellar leakage—photons we ignored until PV made them legible as kilowatt-hours.
Nuclear tapped elements that are, cosmologically, residues of stellar furnaces; “spent fuel” remains so potent we keep trying to tap it again.
Even district heating is “waste → resource.” Industrial flare gas once burned as an eternal flame; scrubbers producing gypsum became feedstock for wallboard; steam and warm water that were once liabilities became municipal assets. These are not anomalies; they’re the logic of industrial symbiosis.
My insight about energy-was-waste formalized: Energy has only been “profitable” when its inputs looked like waste and its outputs could be externalized. Once we decide to internalize the outputs—put a fair price on CO₂, ban toxins, steward residues—many “cheap” fuels lose their advantage. That is good news: it nudges us toward sources whose byproducts are benign (sun, wind, ambient flows) and toward bio-industrial metabolisms that close loops rather than exporting harm.
Historically, even some great chemists, like Lavoisier in the late 1700s, preferred clean heat (solar furnaces and converging lenses) over smoky combustion for precision, safety, and neighborliness. There’s a lineage of scientists who chose non-toxic heat not just for accuracy but out of respect for people and place.
So yes—all energy is waste-to-energy in origin. The question now is whether our next conversion step creates new wastes we can’t metabolize…or folds outputs back into safe, productive cycles.
7) From Circular to Vortical: Designing for Negative Waste
“Circular economy” is a powerful corrective to linear take–make–dispose, but circles can feel like hamster wheels: we go round and round and still feel stuck at “less bad.” I substitute the metaphor of a vortex which is more evocative and more in tune with what we see in nature: a pattern that draws in abandoned value and lifts it to higher usefulness—upward spirals of material quality, ecosystem health, and human well-being. I insist we don’t really want a “spin our wheels in the muck" we've made” circular economy but rather an ever uplifting vortical economy that takes us out of the trauma vortex and into the healing vortex where energy, food, water and ecosystem services grow with each turn and twist of the wheel..
This isn’t just rhetoric. Regenerative design insists we create net-positive outcomes; cradle-to-cradle differentiates biological and technical nutrients and designs for perpetual safe cycling; doughnut economics – especially when those doughnuts are stacked, using the principles of “function stacking” from permaculture, keeps human activity within ecological ceilings and social foundations. Our concept of the vortical economy slots in here as a narrative of lift and quality increase, not just “closing the loop.”
And maybe “closed loop” is a red herring – should even herring, many species of which are anadromous and migrate from salt water oceans to distant freshwater streams, ever be raised in some closed loop? Why do we insist on closing loops when what we really mean is simply “systems that don’t produce waste”– waste as a noun, systems that don’t waste as a verb…? If there is no such thing as waste then we don’t need to close the loops do we? The vortical economy lifts outputs to higher value states where it can participate in other loops elsewhere, ultimately even “off world”, participating in ever widening extraterrestrial ecosystems...
Flights of fancy? Perhaps. For now.
In practice:
Biodigesters. What many call “waste”—manure, food scraps—becomes biogas (cooking/electricity), digestate (nutrients), and pathogen reduction. Done well, this is biological industrial symbiosis: farms, kitchens, grids, and soils collaborating through Archaea, the very first life forms to inhabit this spaceship Earth, from which we all evolved and with whom we continue to co-evolve after 4 billion years..
Industrial Symbiosis. “My outflow = your inflow.” Exchanges evolve as plants retool; resilience requires adaptable agreements and diversified offtakes.
District Energy. Capturing “waste” heat is thermodynamic kindness to the atmosphere. It’s often cheaper to decarbonize cities at the district scale than building by building—if policy, pricing, and pipes line up.
Materials Upcycling. Our trashcrete is a micro-symbiosis: glass cullet and plastic shred become durable art/landscape elements, with a sealed glasscrete outer skin to prevent microplastic shedding. Mix design matters; our encapsulation move is exactly the practical mitigation many lab papers suggest but seldom implement at community scale.
8) Translating Philosophy into Practice (Design Moves)
Let’s turn this into a checklist for our projects:
Cognitive Reframe
Replace “waste” with: resource misplaced/misformed/mis-timed.
Ask: What job did this material already do? What next job can it do?
Material Strategy
Densify low-density materials (shred, granulate, crush) to improve handling and conversion.
Specify for the next life: mono-materials, disassembly, clear labeling, standardized fasteners, toxin-free additives.
Process Strategy
Cascade heat and water: match temperature and purity grades to the right tasks.
Biometabolize organics first (digest/compost), then consider thermal options for truly residual fractions, under conditions that create inert, safe outputs.
Network Strategy
Map regional residuals and needs; broker exchanges; stress-test: what if node X goes offline?
Use pricing signals that reflect externalities (carbon fees, landfill bans, extended producer responsibility) so “cheap” never means “someone else pays later.”
Ethical Strategy
Borrow from Indigenous reciprocity: take only what cycles; return value; ask permission of place. If a process produces residues no neighbor or ecosystem can safely metabolize, redesign it.
9) Our Trashcrete Protocol
For those who want to replicate and improve upon what we are doing:
Mix: 1 part Portland cement : 2 parts glass cullet sand : 2 parts plastic shred (any #1–#7, including films and metallized wrappers). For the outer finish: glasscrete (cement + glass sand only) to seal and weatherproof.
Forming: build mass with ecobricks or bag-molded loaves of trashcrete; shape beyond blockiness to curves and creatures.
Armature: lath for mechanical keying; then successive stucco layers—trashcrete base, glasscrete finish; final paint/seal.
Performance: excellent for artistic/landscape applications; test coupons for compressive strength, freeze–thaw, and leachate if you’re pushing into structural roles.
Supply Reality: a single family’s “trash” turns out to be way too slow if you’re ambitious—we invite student partners (with tight sorting discipline and a commitment to shredding and cleaning up after yourselves) and we need to arrange post-consumer streams that meet our non-hazard specs.
10) Studio Cases to Ground the Nexus
Reclaimed Water at City Scale — Proof that “wastewater” is a resource if you design quality control and public trust alongside the tech. Use this case to discuss social license, risk perception, and the politics of “drinking yesterday’s water.”
Organics-to-Mobility — Food waste + sewage sludge → biogas for municipal fleets (buses, waste trucks). It’s WEFe in motion: food ↔ energy ↔ urban services ↔ air quality.
Industrial Symbiosis — “My outflow, your inflow” in real life: refinery gas exchange, flue-gas desulfurization gypsum to wallboard, steam sharing, water reuse. Also a cautionary tale: symbioses evolve as plants reconfigure.
District Heating (Nordics) — Waste heat recovery as urban climate policy. Pair with a local mapping exercise: where are your city’s hot leaks? What is the shortest, most cost-effective pipe you could lay that would decarbonize the most homes?
Organics Policy — Volume-based fees and RFID bins drove source separation of food scraps in dense cities. Translate that into a campus-scale pilot: infrastructure, messaging, metrics, and incentives.
11) Discussion Prompts (Relational Mode)
When you hear “zero waste,” do you feel inspired, guilty, or skeptical? Why? Name one design change (material or social) that would shift your feeling a notch more empowered.
Pick one “waste stream” you personally touch weekly. Map three next-life jobs it could do at three scales (household, campus, city).
Which WEFe pillar offers the quickest “waste → resource” wins in your context? Draft a one-page action memo to a local decision-maker.
Circle vs vortex: which metaphor works better for you—and why? Sketch the flows in a system you know.
What externality (hidden cost) in your local energy or water system is most glaring? How would fully pricing it change behavior?
What would count as “negative waste” in a project you can actually build this semester? State the before/after metrics.
12) Metrics and Safeguards (because “what gets measured gets managed”)
Mass & Density: Track volume and post-densification mass. Celebrate density gains (kg/m³) that enable storage and manufacturing.
Embodied Energy & Carbon: Use simple calculators for rough embodied carbon of your inputs (cement, glass crushing energy, etc.) and compare to avoided disposal and avoided virgin materials.
Leachate & Shedding: For trashcrete, run small leachate jars; for surfaces, verify that your glasscrete and paint seal fully. Consider sacrificial topcoats for UV and abrasion.
Thermal/Acoustic Performance: Lightweight plastic fractions can add insulation and sound damping; document with simple IR images or sound tests.
Social Metrics: Track hours of student engagement, skill accrual (shredding, mixing, forming, finishing), and the number of households diverted from the trash stream.
Economic Metrics: Cost per unit of useful output (a bench, planter, wall segment), including depreciation of tools. If you can deliver at or below market while sequestering liabilities, you’ve got a repeatable model.
13) Anticipating Critiques
There are a lot of haters out there. They will discourage you, or at least try to. I’ve been pounced on, our students have been pounced on, shamed publicly, challenged in mean-spirited ways…
Here are some of the criticisms you may face:
“You’re greenwashing plastic.”
Response: We’re encapsulating genuinely residual plastic in a sealed mineral matrix, after upstream reduction and substitution. For art/landscape, it’s an interim sequestration with utility while markets for high-quality mechanical or chemical recycling mature. We also test for shedding and seal with glasscrete.
“Cement has a high carbon footprint.”
Response: True. We mitigate by using glass cullet (displacing quarried sand), right-sizing projects, trialing supplementary cementitious materials (e.g., fly ash, slag, calcined clays) where available, and prioritizing biogenic WtE (digesters) and reclaimed water/heat first. Trashcrete is not the first resort; it’s a responsible end-use for residuals within a larger reduction-redesign strategy.
“Ecobricks trap plastic that could be recycled later.”
Response: Only after we’ve pursued higher-value recycling pathways; ecobricks and trashcrete target low-value, multi-layer, contaminated fractions that lack viable markets today. We design for accessibility—elements can be cut and the material remilled if better tech emerges.
“WtE encourages more waste.”
Response: Our design test filters out perverse incentives. We only support WtE pathways that force upstream redesign, document benign residuals, and align with local externality pricing.
14) Conclusion: Why There’s Still No “W”
Now you can see why the Nexus leaves out “waste.” Because once we name it as a separate pillar, we risk reifying it—designing for it, budgeting for it, tolerating it. Instead, we make a discipline of refusing the noun and fixing the design.
We remember: there is no “away.” There is only here, later, and rightfully NIMBY neighbors. And energy itself—the engine of civilization—has always been about harnessing what once seemed useless. The difference now is that we must end the habit of turning one waste into another and instead vortex all outputs into safe, beneficial cycles.
So the next time someone holds up a jar of trash, don’t measure your guilt against theirs. Ask: What hidden resources are in that jar? What network—biological, industrial, civic—could lift them into the next useful life?
We don’t manage waste. We compose resources—intelligently, perpetually. That is the promise of the Nexus without the extra “W.”
Thank you.
Suggested references
Benyus, J. (2002). Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature.
Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Circular Economy primers & case studies.
Hoff, H. (2011). Understanding the Nexus (Stockholm Environment Institute).
Lyle, J. T. (1994). Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development.
McDonough, W., & Braungart, M. (2002). Cradle to Cradle.
Raworth, K. (2017). Doughnut Economics.
Saikia, N., & de Brito, J. (2012). Plastic waste as aggregate in cement composites. Construction and Building Materials, 34, 385–401.
Werner, S. (2017). District heating & cooling reviews. Energy, 137, 617–631.
Case resources on NEWater (Singapore), district energy (Nordics), industrial symbiosis (Kalundborg), municipal organics diversion (e.g., South Korea/Seoul), and city biogas (e.g., Oslo).
Freedom to disobey: Culhane's classes explicitly state, "nichts erzwungen, alles ermutigt, was funktioniert und nachhaltig ist" (nothing is forced, everything that works and is sustainable is encouraged). Students can choose their own structure, schedule, and deadlines, and there are "no right answers except to play and experiment". This liberates students from authoritarian structures and the fear of saying "the wrong thing".
