Shifting From "Where" to "Why": Tom Passmore on What Waste Data Can Actually Do

There's a moment Tom Passmore describes that is, to us, emblematic of people’s relationship to waste. The instant you decide you don't want something, it stops existing to you. The nostalgia goes. The value goes. Whatever else you might have thought about that object five seconds ago is replaced by a single instruction: get it gone.

"As soon as someone's made that connection in their head that they don't want it anymore, it's just dead to them," Tom says. "Like literally, it's just like, right, throw that in the bin and it's gone."

Barry has a name for where it goes. The magic away place.

Tom is the CIO and co-founder of Dsposal, a UK web platform that's spent ten years building tools for organisations that deal with waste. He joined Barry on the latest episode of HappyPorch Radio, and the conversation we want to delve into here isn't really about waste at all. It's about data, and what changes when people start using it.

What's actually being collected

The UK quietly has something most countries don't: roughly a decade of structured public waste data. Tom uses three datasets in particular. The Public Register lists every licensed and permitted waste site in England. Waste Data Interrogator, published annually by the Environment Agency, aggregates what those facilities received and what they sent on. Waste Data Flow tracks what local authorities collect from households and where it goes next.

None of this is exotic. "People like to throw around words like big data. We don't have big data in the waste industry. We just don't. It's almost fine in Excel," Tom says. The point isn't volume. The point is that it exists at all, and that almost nobody is using it well.

Dsposal joins these datasets together so you can trace a facility's footprint: where it sits physically, what it received, where it sent the next consignment on. That sounds dry. The interesting thing is what happens when customers start looking at it.

From "where did it go" to "why did it change"

Ten years ago, Tom says, customers cared about compliance. Permits. Insurance certificates. ISO 9001. Whether the paperwork was in order. The questions were transactional and the answers were yes or no.

Then they started caring about destination. Was this going to landfill or to energy from waste? Was it being recovered or disposed of? Then it shifted again, to distance travelled, to reclamation versus dispersal, to the carbon implications of the route. And recently, Tom has noticed a different kind of question entirely.

"It starts by going, 'What is this? It's only waste. I don't care about it,' to, 'Oh, I've seen this before. I know what these codes are. Last month it was 100 tons, the month before that was 95 tons. Why is it 120 tons this month?'"

That's the move. From who, what, where, when and how, to why. And once a customer is asking why their waste tonnage jumped, they're not far from asking whether they should be buying differently, specifying differently, or designing the problem out further upstream. The data doesn't answer those questions. But it provokes them. And as Barry put it during the conversation, that's where real change begins.

Eight years of nothing, then a year of everything

There's a story Tom tells that's worth dwelling on, because it captures something true about how behaviour change actually happens, which is to say: not gradually.

Dsposal built a customer portal for waste management companies to share data with their own clients. They launched it. And then for eight years, almost nobody used it.

"Literally no one cared about it," Tom says. "And then after COVID, probably about three, four years ago, we see the usage of that customer portal just accelerate."

What changed wasn't the product. The product had been sitting there the whole time. What changed was that the clients of his clients started caring. They wanted reporting. They wanted documentation. They wanted to know the difference between long-term storage and storage, between recovery and disposal. They wanted, in other words, to ask why.

It's a useful thing to remember when you're building software for a sector that isn't quite ready for it. Sometimes the work is finished years before the demand arrives.

Gappy data still has something to say

One of the things we like about Tom's work is that he doesn't pretend the data is complete. He's spent a decade staring at it, and he's clear about its holes. But he's also clear that the holes themselves are useful.

He gave Barry an example. In Waste Data Interrogator, a particular code, covering waste generated by waste management companies, has been declining steadily since 2019. On paper, that's a good news story. It suggests the sector is getting better at properly classifying what comes out of its sites.

But look closer and another number is moving in the opposite direction: waste recorded as coming from an "unknown" location. "This waste stream is waste from a waste management company that is permitted, and if you are permitted, you have a location. How has another waste management company received this waste and not known where it's come from?" Tom's careful to say correlation isn't causation. But that increase tracks against the rise in illegal waste sites currently being reported.

That's the second thing the data can do. Not just answer the why, but point at where the next why ought to be.

The technology is the easy bit

Tom is what he calls a critical friend of DEFRA's new Digital Waste Tracking programme. He's broadly positive about the direction. He's also direct about what's missing. Phase one captures what arrives at a site. Phase two looks like it'll track the vehicle carrying the waste, but not the waste itself, which is roughly equivalent to your courier confirming the van arrived without confirming your parcel was on it.

But the technical critique isn't really the headline. The headline is this:

"Without a shadow of a doubt, the technology is the easy bit. The biggest problem is getting human beings to go, 'I've received this waste at this date and I've put it into a computer.' That is the biggest problem we have as an industry."

This season of HappyPorch Radio is called Technology Isn't Magic, and Tom's line is about the cleanest expression of that idea we've heard yet. The API isn't the bottleneck. Behaviour is. Habit is. Whether anyone bothers to type the thing in is.

A pipe dream worth having

Asked what's next, Tom landed somewhere we found genuinely exciting. He'd like to use a decade of data, plus the right tooling, to map where things can go in the country. Coffee pods. Unused paint. Inhalers. End-of-life products that have a legitimate route home if only anyone knew where to look.

"I don't care about marketing," he said. "I care about if I send my waste there, what will happen to it, and why do I know that's the case? And that you have to do with historical data."

It's the kind of thing AI is supposedly built for, except that, as Tom points out, the data quality isn't there yet to fully trust it. Which loops back to where the conversation started. Data isn't useful in itself. It becomes useful when somebody can look at it, understand it, and do something with it. And the people most likely to build that are the ones who've spent ten years cultivating a nuanced understanding for the culture in a sector. 

That's the work we keep finding ourselves drawn to at HappyPorch. Not the flashy promise of transformation, but the slower craft of helping people ask better questions of what they already have. Tom's been at it longer than most. The episode's well worth your time.

🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Tom Passmore on HappyPorch Radio, or find Dsposal at dsposal.uk (Yes, that’s no "i", and no ".co").