Don't Let Wishcycling Affect Your Pipeline

Wish-cycling. A ‘loose’ definition (via google ‘featured snippet’);

“the practice of tossing questionable items in the recycling bin, hoping they can somehow be recycled.”

Ever since council recycling collections began in England I’ve been happily including all plastic showing the trusty triple-arrowed triangle. That makes for two decades now.

I was devastated to learn only this year, that such labelling was wildly misleading. Not a single municipal scheme can recycle any food plastic, even if stamped this way, which is black. A gaping hole not unique to the UK.

As seen above, America needs to tackle similar flaws. Each facility then must go to the trouble of sifting out all un-reclaimable materials. Before sending on to – oh the horror – landfill or incinerator.

Someone has the job of manually stripping unrecyclables from the teeth of the huge industrial crusher. Such a waste, all round. As one eco-watcher puts it;

1. Wish-cycling Wastes Time
2. Wish-cycling Wastes Money
3. Wish-cycling Can Create More Waste

We want to do good. So much so, we send items to recycle that cannot be so. That’s quite the wish.

Also, quite the analogy for a forecast full of unsellables.

Time you donned the thick rubber gloves, stopped the rotating shredders, and removed the non-buyable debris clogging up your funnel-filling ambitions?

I’ve long blogged on the perils of the hopecast. A list of your potential business which bears little actual resemblance to the reality of what might salvage your numbers.

These definitely ‘waste time, money, and can create more waste’.

Think not only who might buy, but who is fitting your process. Yes, ticking the boxes inside that repeatable, sustainable formula. The steps within which when they take place, make you pretty much nailed on to convert.

Perhaps the wishcycling metaphor is needed to clean out the rubbish which is no good to anybody. Least of all you. No matter how well-meaning.