One of the ideas that's seized my imagination in the past two weeks is waste management and recycling. The case for opening a solid waste management center in Khorog is really strong on paper. There's a lot of trash there right now that isn't effectively collected, and what is collected is either burned or goes to a landfill that's already full. With a modest investment (something like $5.5 million) you could set up trash cans and dumpsters, buy a couple of trucks, build a new landfill, and build a small sorting facility that splits glass, plastic and metal out from the rest of the trash. There's a huge market for bulk recycled materials in China, which is right over the border to the east. Everybody wins, like with run-of-the-river hydropower.
Doing some research on that led me to the US recycling industry and made me curious what it'd take to do, for example, household-level material processing. Why couldn't people have a little machine in their house, like a trash compactor, that cuts up their plastic and metal and crushes their glass? Or if household level is too small to be cost-effective, what about smaller plants, like the one described above, for places in the States where no one has bothered to set up a processing facility yet but which don't justify the larger-scale plants that seem to be the norm there? What's the business case there? I'm reminded of a guy who came by our office last year to talk about his company, Blue Lotus, which sets up liquid natural gas plants next to food processing factories and uses the food scrap to make the biogas.
Stuff like that is really appealing to me (I mean, who wouldn't that appeal to?), much more so than a lot of the NGO stuff that's my current bread and butter. Grass is always greener, of course, but it makes me reeeeally curious about career opportunities on the other side.
Thinking about business also made me think about my own investments, such as they are. I've got a 401k through work, to which I contribute alongside my employer, but it's limited and I'm a bit dubious about how much they're charging us. Need to find out about that. But in any event, I think I'd like to set up a Roth IRA or some other kind of index fund investment, stick some money in it, and switch my contributions to that from my 401k. I like the idea of paying taxes now in order to avoid paying them later. Using those compound interest calculators, starting with $3000, contributing $400/month (which is what I currently put into my 401k), assuming a 9% annual return (the 25-year average of the S&P 500 for the 25 years leading up to 2011 was 9.28%) over 35 years gives me $1.2 million when I hit 62. More to the point, annual interest on that is $102K. What the hell am I waiting for?
Back to work.
Doing some research on that led me to the US recycling industry and made me curious what it'd take to do, for example, household-level material processing. Why couldn't people have a little machine in their house, like a trash compactor, that cuts up their plastic and metal and crushes their glass? Or if household level is too small to be cost-effective, what about smaller plants, like the one described above, for places in the States where no one has bothered to set up a processing facility yet but which don't justify the larger-scale plants that seem to be the norm there? What's the business case there? I'm reminded of a guy who came by our office last year to talk about his company, Blue Lotus, which sets up liquid natural gas plants next to food processing factories and uses the food scrap to make the biogas.
Stuff like that is really appealing to me (I mean, who wouldn't that appeal to?), much more so than a lot of the NGO stuff that's my current bread and butter. Grass is always greener, of course, but it makes me reeeeally curious about career opportunities on the other side.
Thinking about business also made me think about my own investments, such as they are. I've got a 401k through work, to which I contribute alongside my employer, but it's limited and I'm a bit dubious about how much they're charging us. Need to find out about that. But in any event, I think I'd like to set up a Roth IRA or some other kind of index fund investment, stick some money in it, and switch my contributions to that from my 401k. I like the idea of paying taxes now in order to avoid paying them later. Using those compound interest calculators, starting with $3000, contributing $400/month (which is what I currently put into my 401k), assuming a 9% annual return (the 25-year average of the S&P 500 for the 25 years leading up to 2011 was 9.28%) over 35 years gives me $1.2 million when I hit 62. More to the point, annual interest on that is $102K. What the hell am I waiting for?
Back to work.
No comments:
Post a Comment