Transparency: The Essence of Waste Management

The current idea of dealing with residential waste is basically, "out of sight, out of mind."  Let's bury everything, and not worry about it.  However, every waste handling system eventually fails.  If it's out of sight, we probably don't know about its failure until long after it happens.   most people don't worry about it, even though it's a significant contributor to water pollution.  In larger urban systems, the same philosophy means that there are a lot of broken pipes, catch-basins and other components that  are secretly sabotaging efforts to clean-up precious water.  At least at the larger sewage treatment plants i have visited, there is great transparency.  You can actually visually follow the fluid as it is processed, and you can observe the condition and efficiency of the processing components.  They are very transparent facilities that keep everything in the open, which facilitates their management and inspection.  At Nascent, transparency is a foundational concept that we feel is missing from current residential waste water technology.  Sure, there are warning lights and bells, and there are various shut-off options; but all are associated with invisible components.  The systems we propose to invent at Nascent will be visible systems that are much easier for the homeowner to interact with and personally manage.  In addition having observable sub-systems, our inventions will enhance the concept of visibility with advanced computer technology (voice activation, sophisticated performance analysis, maintenance scheduling, quality control and so forth).  Image a house that doesn't release much waste water at all; rather water is continually reprocessed through a systematic series of filters, pumps, chemical interventions (e.g., chlorination), physical manipulations (e.g., ultraviolet light) and storage to produce a water systems that optimizes the quality and utility of the water resource, while minimizing environmental impact.  Having transparent systems the can be efficiently managed seems to be crucial to the development of the residential waste water recycling systems we are attempting to develop.

Some sub-concepts that seem to re relate to the ideals of transparency:

• Miniaturization
• Homeowner responsibility (or effective sub-contracting)
• Data collection and processing
• Quality control and testing