Numbers rarely make for good company. They’re confusing, not particularly pleasing to look at, and when you introduce them to your friends they don’t even bother to dress up nice. Brad Pitt found out in Moneyball. As he tried to sell his team of baseball scouts on the concept of batting averages, they looked back bewildered. You knew a good baseball player through the shape of his jawline and his proclivity for partying—numbers had nothing to do with it.
In 2016, wood engineer Felix Böck found himself in a similar situation. Pursuing his PhD in Vancouver, he discovered that the city annually produced 600,000 tonnes of construction waste, all bound for landfills. For him this was a startling revelation, but others in the wood industry didn’t seem to share the concern. “What does that have to do with us?” they wondered.
It frustrated Böck to no end that his project proposals fell on deaf ears as he suggested putting discarded material to new use. “I had to find a better way,” he explains. “To communicate, in an easily digestible format, what a devastating impact this waste has on the environment.”
This story is from the April 2021 edition of Esquire Singapore.
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This story is from the April 2021 edition of Esquire Singapore.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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