7+ years in waste management — hands in the material, not behind a desk.

I built prototypes for local sorting stations that collect recyclables before compression — once a garbage truck presses trash, come on, you've already killed the recycling.

We found a way to recover 86% of recyclable material. What was missing wasn't the method — it was sorting capacity. AI and robotics are solving that now.

50% of waste is organic. We convert that into organic fertilizer and insect protein.

Here's the uncomfortable part: most materials simply aren't recyclable. Plastic recycling is largely a scam — every cycle degrades the polymer, making it more brittle and shedding even more microplastic. Microplastic isn't a future problem. It's the epidemic of right now.

Paper, cardboard, composite materials — these genuinely get reused. We're heading toward 100% recycling, which means Space-Friendly materials from the start, not fixes after the fact.

I've walked through landfills — where even magic stops working. I've personally opened and sorted recyclables by hand, no distance, no theory.

And this isn't happening somewhere far off in the ocean. I documented it at the Presidio, a national park in San Francisco. It's terrifying up close.

We're at the exact right point in time — the technology exists, and civilization is finally asking for this.

Every person on Earth generates about 0.74 kg of waste a day on global average — closer to 2.5 kg/day in high-income countries like the US. Across 8.2 billion people, that's roughly 2.2 billion tonnes a year, worldwide.

Step one: Planet Earth. Then — everywhere else.