So you have a good idea?

Since moving to Penang, I have become more aware of 'green' technology, not surprising as I work for a private equity company who specializes in 'green tech' companies!

Part of my work is in research, so you can imagine one assimilates information quickly and perceptions change.

Now I am NOT a supporter of the global warming group that are promoting the concept that we will all fry unless we do something quickly, but I do see that there is considerable money being made in green tech stocks and ideas.

Two issues have been my focus recently, the first being the problem of global waste disposal, and the second being the efforts to clean up the BP oil spill in Florida.

Both oil and waste management are substantial business endeavors, and both generate huge profits in what is a never decreasing market cycle.

There is no recession in either sector, because folk always need more oil, and produce no less garbage in recession than they do in boom times. The demand for both services increases constantly.

One firm I have been studying (no name, no pack drill ) has a unique problem.... their waste management system is too simple and easy that governments have a resistance to implementing it as a waste control measure.

The firm in question developed over the last eight years a patented process that takes toxic waste into one end of their extensive machine, and treats it during the process producing inert waste material at the other end.

This is then mixed with standard cement and can be formed into anything that a form mold exists for, including building blocks, pavement slabs, roofing tiles and (I presume) even garden gnomes! - wonderful concept, and so simple, too simple in effect.

Just one of these machines will deal with 100 tonnes of waste per day, which sounds a lot, until you realize that just Texas alone produces 174,000 tonnes of waste each day.

All of which gets landfilled or incinerated after the recyclables have been taken out.

A word on landfills..... an environmentalist will tell you a landfill is perfectly safe, a geologist will tell you thats simply not true.

In Australia they found significantly higher cancer rates within 30 miles of a landfill or incinerator plant, incinerators still pump gases into the atmosphere, landfills seep toxic poisons into the water table.

The problem is that there are enormous profits to be made collecting your waste and disposing of it for you.

Apart from the fact that waste management companies get paid to collect in the first place, and sometimes very highly if (for instance) it's hospital or infected waste, or hazardous waste, they then make more money from segregating the recyclable parts of what they collect, so those aluminium cans and plastic detritus turn into new items from the salvage they sell.

Now profit means corruption in most instances, for where someone makes a good profit, there is always someone who owns the 'rubber stamp' that allows that profit to be made.

Not for nothing was Tony Soprano scripted as a waste management consultant!

So this brilliant idea, which is comparatively speaking very low cost to initiate and lower cost to run than land fill and incineration plants, which is how it's currently managed, is disadvantaged because it will create 'ripples ' in the profit centers that currently exist.

But it's time has come, and in our increasingly 'environmental conscious ' world, it will get exposure and hopefully success.

This process and company I cannot name, for we are involved in it and that would be a conflict of interests, but the following process I stumbled across, and was so impressed I will provide links to it, just in case B.P. or the President may be reading!

Needless to say they are not clients nor associated with my firm in any way.

The process is a simple way to suck up 32,000 barrels of oil per day from the sea, and will operate in waves up to eight foot high.

That's with just one machine.

Can you think of any reason why B.P. and the American government have not bought a hundred of them or even a thousand.... or however many needed to do the job?

Like I said, there's corruption where theres money.

If you are reading Mr President, this technology can be viewed here:

http://www.sps-oilswallow.com/

That's all folks...