About Rewind Waste

For the last eight years, I’ve debated starting something to motivate businesses to create waste-free, circular products. The spark came when my first daughter was born in 2017. My wife and I had always been mindful about the amount of trash we generated, but with a newborn, our bins suddenly overflowed with dirty diapers, food packaging, broken junk, and so much more.

I spent a lot of time trying to reduce our waste footprint each year, but it always felt like an uphill battle. The lifespan of everything I purchased seemed to get shorter, no matter how much I paid or how carefully I treated it.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom, though. We had a few wins along the way—like when our city’s trash collection program began accepting food waste in green bins for composting. We also found retailers and specialty services that offered to collect our most commonly used plastic items.

But these systemic options are still not widely available (yet), and are only a piece of the larger puzzle. Recycling systems across the globe are breaking down, and landfills are piling up. In countries without waste infrastructure, people often resort to burning trash or dumping it into the ocean. Worst of all, the problem isn’t going away any time soon. Fast fashion, bulk ordering, instant gratification through e-commerce apps, relentless economic growth, and countless other factors are poised to make today’s waste issues seem minor compared to what’s coming in the next few decades.

Waste is a problem for so many reasons:

• It represents a massive economic opportunity loss.

• It’s a major contributor to a warming climate.

• It wastes precious resources.

• It pollutes every corner of the planet.

• It harms human health (looking at you, microplastics).

What Do We Do?

For many, the answer seems simple: Stop buying things! Use less! Live a completely waste-free life!

But here’s the thing:

I don’t believe this is a realistic expectation for most people right now—especially when capitalism drives the livelihoods of nearly everyone. I also don’t think it’s fair to vilify society for wanting access to convenience, innovation, and affordability—the same things I’ve valued my entire life. In fact, history shows that efforts to get people to “just stop” buying things have rarely worked on a large scale.

I believe the only way out of this mess is through the same way we got into it: human innovation. We need to rethink every product we use and challenge ourselves to make it as waste-efficient as possible (and while we’re at it, let’s get rid of the toxicity too).

The economic engine the world has built over the past 50 years is nothing short of incredible. Now it’s time to tune that engine to include circularity and waste-free design at its core. Rewind Waste is all about championing this vision—highlighting products that need redesigns, celebrating groundbreaking innovations, and sharing the most important ideas to inspire the next wave of entrepreneurial individuals and teams.

After all, no one really wants to live in a world like this:

~ Mike Hansen Rewind Waste (2025)