I care deeply about trash. Some might say I’m obsessed. Last week, at Pop!Tech, I had a chance to get seriously esoteric about my favorite subject, garbology. Another attendee and I were discussing his recoil reaction to the subject. He expressed an underlying disgust at the idea of dealing with the unknown that lies within his company’s dumpsters. Our discussion led us to the Yin and Yang metaphor.

If you aren’t a student of the Yin and Yang, here’s a simple way to think of it. There is a little dab of black in the white side, and a little bit of white in the dark side. Most of us gravitate toward our metaphorical white side, and fear the dark side just like Luke Skywalker did. But both are represented within each of us. And, if we ignore the dark we do so at our own peril.

The Yin and Yang goes around and around in a natural cycle. When we get to the very peak of the white, we start to see the black on the horizon. And, to get back to the white we have to go through the dark. It may mean searching our souls, facing our fears, thinking past the end of our noses, or hunkering down for the long cold winterin order to get to the spring. The cycle plays out in our lives, in innovation patterns and in nature.

So, how does this apply to trash? Think of your company’s dumpster as the repository for the dark. It’s all the stuff you and your company don’t like to deal with. We literally and figuratively bury it away. We want our marketing, how we project ourselves to the world, to reflect only our best selves. We ignore the possibility that anyone would ever discover what or how much we have buried.

But the true damage is not in being exposed as human, or collectively human in the case of companies. The real risk is that we don’t see innovations that are right in front of our face because our eyes are not adjusted to the dark. We are literally blinded by the light, having believed too much of our own press.

That’s why I’m so excited to see more and more discussion around lifecycle analysis (LCA). Designing systems, processes, goods and materials with the full cycle taken into consideration. We have focused only on efficient manufacturing and consumption, ignoring what happens to the waste and what happens at end of life. By undertaking this difficult new approach, we will collectively discover amazing innovations that make our businesses and economy better, stronger, more efficient. By facing our fears, by touching the untouchable within our own businesses, we will find the path to the next burst of innovation. We will turn dark to light. We will turn waste into a resource.

Go forth and explore your dumpster.