The Revenue of Waste: Inside the Waste Business with Ramana Kari

What if the rubbish we throw away every day is not waste at all, but one of the world’s most overlooked economic resources?

We rarely think about what happens after the bin is emptied. A plastic bottle disappears from our sight. A cardboard box is collected. Food waste, construction debris, electronics and household chemicals leave our homes and somehow become someone else’s problem. But what if the real story begins there?

In this episode of Brown Business, part of our Member Stories series, we explore that question with Ramana Kari, P.E., BCEE, Executive Director of the Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County in Florida, and discover an industry where waste, technology, infrastructure, energy, environmental responsibility and economics intersect in fascinating ways.

With more than three decades in the solid waste management industry, Ramana offers a perspective shaped by years of watching what society consumes, discards and increasingly learns to recover. His journey is remarkable: an engineer who arrived in the United States from India to pursue a master’s degree, entered waste management through his first job, and eventually found himself leading one of the country’s most sophisticated waste management organisations.

But the conversation quickly moves beyond his personal journey.

The composition of waste has changed dramatically. The newspaper-heavy waste streams of decades ago have given way to e-commerce cardboard, increasingly lightweight packaging, electronics, and entirely new categories of materials. At the same time, the idea of waste itself is changing. In Palm Beach County, nearly four million tonnes of waste are generated annually, yet the objective is not simply to bury what society no longer wants. The goal is to extract whatever value remains.

That means recycling aluminium, plastics and cardboard, but it also means generating electricity from waste. The Solid Waste Authority generated approximately $50 million in revenue from selling power and another $14 million from commodity sales in the year discussed in the conversation. Those revenues can ultimately help reduce costs for the communities being served.

Then comes an even more surprising statistic: roughly 1.5 million tonnes of Palm Beach County’s waste stream comes from construction and demolition debris. Concrete, rebar, wood and other materials can be recovered and put back into productive use rather than occupying valuable landfill space. The county currently projects landfill capacity through 2071 and is working to extend that horizon further.

Yet technology alone cannot solve the problem.

Waste is unpredictable. Unlike an industrial process with a consistent feedstock, household waste changes constantly. What people buy, consume and discard can be completely different from one day to the next. Scaling technologies that can safely and economically handle that complexity remains one of the industry’s greatest challenges.

The conversation also confronts some uncomfortable realities around recycling. Not everything that looks recyclable actually has a viable market. “Wish cycling”, putting things into recycling bins simply because we hope they can be recycled, can undermine the very system it intends to support.

And then there are lithium batteries, an increasingly urgent safety challenge. Improperly discarded batteries can trigger fires, forcing waste organisations to rethink public education, collection systems and recycling processes.

Looking ahead, the biggest challenge may not be technology at all. It is people. The industry needs the next generation of workers to collect, process, manage, and safely transform the enormous volume of material society produces. Automation may advance, but waste management remains deeply dependent on human expertise.

Palm Beach County is also preparing for its next major chapter: a new waste-to-energy facility expected to require approximately $1.5 billion in capital investment, with plans to approach the bond market in the coming years.

Ultimately, this conversation is about far more than rubbish. It is about how communities design systems, how economies assign value to resources, and how long-term infrastructure decisions can shape the environmental future of generations.

Ramana’s message is perhaps the most important takeaway: transformative infrastructure is not built overnight. It takes political will, community cooperation, investment and decades of sustained effort.

Listen to this episode and rethink what happens after you throw something away.

Disclaimer: The perspectives expressed by the guest are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of our platform. This discussion is intended solely for knowledge sharing and should not be interpreted as an endorsement.

Produced by Global Indian Series for the Global Indian Network.

Script by Rajan Nazran
original idea: Rajan Nazran

Introduction music: (https://freesound.org/people/Timbre)