A Sustainable Train of Thought

Along the lines of my earlier post on packaging, an article on TriplePundit talks about a contest called Our Daily Bread, What Does It REALLY Cost? that’s being run by Sustainable Ventures.

Anyone who can measure the “true cost” of a loaf of bread is eligible for a $10,000 prize. This seemed like an interesting task, but the more I think about it, the more daunting it seems. The biggest question is, where do you stop? If we talk about the cost of transporting the wheat, do we consider the cost of the tire wear on the truck? How about the wear on the road surface? If the road surface is implicated in a traffic accident, does the loaf of bread have some liability? (Continued)

Photos from my excursion to Trieste with Syd are now up on Flickr.

I’ll add the Venice ones soon…

Syd got a bottle of lotion for the holidays, which arrived in a HUGE box.

Yes, the only thing inside that box, aside from more packaging and bubble wrap, was that bottle of lotion. The iPod is there for scale.

Now, I know there is probably some argument within industry for shipping a relatively tiny bottle of lotion in a relatively gargantuan box, and that such an argument would probably fall along the lines of economies of scale and money. While the price might be right, in the end the customer is faced with a wad of bubble wrap, packaging for the lotion bottle, and a huge box. All of which is going straight into the trash, unless they have the inclination to repurpose or reuse the packaging. If this big box goes straight into the trash, its effective use-lifespan is somewhere on the order of days (depending on how long the shipping company took to deliver the package). Seems like a bit of a waste to me. (Continued)

I’ve been trying to catch up on my newsreader, which at time seems a superhuman task (2,257 more entries to go), but I ran across this older post from Grist which talks about the Green Gauge Report, a “poll on environmental attitudes, based on the results of 2,000 face-to-face interviews”. The results of the poll attempt to reveal public opinion on a variety of environmental issues.

One thing that struck me while reading the review on Grist is that the questions of environmental issues are too often abstract. While we may decry the fact that Global Warming was last on a list of concerns, what exactly are people supposed to be concerned about with Global Warming? As a concept, it’s too abstract, too broad in scope. The name says it all: global warming. (Continued)

To better record and communicate our work this year while we’re in Milano, and to help remind the world that IDII still exists and that we’re still doing interesting and cool things, we’ve created a new microsite: Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Milano.

One particularly cool feature on the front page is the idii live section, which displays the most recent posts IDII students have made to their thesis blogs. The idii live page has a more thorough listing, and even an RSS feed.

Although my name is on the front page for the milog entries, Didier Hilhorst, Nicholas Zambetti, Tristam Sparks, Victor Szilagyi, and Aram Armstrong have been doing the heavy lifting to get the site up and running. Thanks guys!

A recent article in RealEstateJournal | Global Climate-Change Island Guide: Weather-Proofing Your Vacation highlights what will probably be a growing trend in the future: choosing island vacations based on environmental risk factors.

Fiji, for instance, may have a romantic South Pacific ring to it—but four severe typhoons have made landfall there in the last 20 years, which helped put it near the bottom of our rankings.

While this list of island vacation rankings is more of an interesting spin on global climate change than any real index of risk, the thought nevertheless crosses my mind that such an index could eventually be compiled by insurance companies. Check out Code 46 (thanks, Victor!) as an interesting glimpse into a possible future that such activity might produce. (Continued)

A recent article in RealEstateJournal | Global Climate-Change Island Guide: Weather-Proofing Your Vacation highlights what will probably be a growing trend in the future: choosing island vacations based on environmental risk factors.

Fiji, for instance, may have a romantic South Pacific ring to it—but four severe typhoons have made landfall there in the last 20 years, which helped put it near the bottom of our rankings.

While this list of island vacation rankings is more of an interesting spin on global climate change than any real index of risk, the thought nevertheless crosses my mind that such an index could eventually be compiled by insurance companies. Check out Code 46 (thanks, Victor!) as an interesting glimpse into a possible future that such activity might produce. (Continued)

I was just reading the Salon.com Books review of Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, and several pieces of the review stood out for me:

The dominant sentiment evoked by “Hungry Planet,” however, is not one of shame but one of anxiety. Out of the 30 family portraits emerges a larger picture of a global civilization rushing headlong toward an economy in which food is a thing produced remotely by machine labor and a handful of experts and then sold (or given away) by multinational organizations—an economy in which we identify a piece of food by its logo rather than by its biology. This is an economy already familiar to many of us in what is called the developed world, and it is growing grab by grab on the international market. (_My emphasis_)

Shades of branding again. What about considering a future that’s the inverse of what’s suggested here, where people are more concerned about where something comes from and whether it is GM or organic than if it has a certain company name on the packaging? Branding can still exist, of course, just as Italy is fighting to retain the “brand” of Parmigiano Reggiano, but the focus will be on more substantive qualities: location, process, ingredients. (Continued)

I think I’m going to have to start a “Truth is Stranger than Fiction” category or something, reserved for those phenomena which would probably be considered impossible or highly unlikely…until someone or some company does it.

Like in this case…

Mazda, the Japanese car manufacturer, is encouraging its employees to walk to work for health and environmental reasons (yes, a car manufacturer is asking its employees to walk to work): (Continued)

I think I’m going to have to start a “Truth is Stranger than Fiction” category or something, reserved for those phenomena which would probably be considered impossible or highly unlikely…until someone or some company does it.

Like in this case…

Mazda, the Japanese car manufacturer, is encouraging its employees to walk to work for health and environmental reasons (yes, a car manufacturer is asking its employees to walk to work): (Continued)