A Sustainable Train of Thought

An interesting installation in San Francisco put together by rebar.

While it definitely makes an impression and statement amongst its grey concrete surroundings, the installation also provides real function: people could actually sit down and use it. I’d be curious to see if a real business could be set up with a park-in-a-box that’s rotated throughout the city. Perhaps even as a city service. (This is just idle thinking, as rebar allows reproduction of the installation for non-commercial purposes only.)

Besides offering a mental respite from the crushing banality of empty concrete parking lots, putting people into parks is a potential way of counteracting the broken windows theory which I first read about in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. And it addresses points that Jane Jacobs raises in the Death and Life of Great American Cities, where she describes the need for people to be on the street as a way of maintaining community and crime prevention, among other things.

My idea at the beginning of my thesis of a bottom-up approach to tackling climate change is bolstered by an article (The New Dynamics of Climate Change) on ClimateBiz which talks about the 11th Annual International Summit on Global Warming under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The meeting was held in Montreal in early December (I’m just getting through a bunch of old email now).

The gist of the article is how local city and state governments are making real strides in reforming industry and business, while the federal government continues to drag its feet. The work of these local agencies has produced meaningful results and interesting revelations:

In the 1990s, experts estimated the cost of reducing GHGs to exceed $50 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, constituting intolerable burdens to the gross domestic product of developed and developing nations. But actual project-based reductions secured by The Climate Trust—most of which come from U.S. projects—now cost less than $10 per metric ton of carbon dioxide. This is far below the cost of supporting non-commercial technologies which may or may not achieve real reductions in the future.

I’m happy to read these kinds of articles because they show that local changes can have larger-scale impacts and that these local efforts are in fact effective and ground-breaking.

An article in today’s Salon.com looks at “the intimate connection between Americans expressing their free will at Wal-Mart (or Target or Home Depot, etc.) and the ripping up and shredding of American jobs…”

My thesis is gravitating towards this area. Specifically, I’m looking at combining the idea of storytelling with information streams. Naturally, as Salon.com points out:

More information won’t necessarily lead to a more perfect world, of course—when one doesn’t have a whole lot of dollars in one’s pocket, the lowest price makes a compelling argument. But it’s an essential part of any comprehensive solution, a place where government and the media both bear a clear civic responsibility.

The question of civic responsibility brings to mind the City of Berkeley in California, which has a ban on polystyrene foam. Many of the reasons for imposing the ban cover civic issues such as urban blight and solid waste management:

A. Solid waste that is non-degradable or non-recyclable poses an acute problem for any environmentally and financially responsible program of solid waste management. Such waste covers the City’s streets, parks, public places, and open spaces.

G. The City of Berkeley has the duty to responsibly dispose of its solid waste, yet existing landfill sites are rapidly approaching capacity, and additional sites are increasingly unavailable.

The question of stakeholders popped up during the last thesis review in December, specifically around the compost economy concept. This subject is related to regulation, and I think it’s more productive for me to talk about them in my thesis report.

I’m working on my Thesis Report outline right now, and as I finish particular sections, I’m going to post them online. As I catch up to the present, I’d like to perhaps in essence blog my thesis report. Hopefully the connections will become clearer as I describe my process in more detail, as this blog has been tracking areas of interest, but not specifically my process. I think it’s possible to get a sense of what I’ve been looking at over time, but it’s not clear at all what exactly I’m designing. The interesting thing, though, is that in some cases I’ve forgotten what exactly I’ve posted on this blog, only to later find that I’m slowly heading in that direction anyway.

One area in particular is branding, although I think I’m dealing with branding in a way that’s quite different from what I’ve been commenting on in previous posts. Another area is storytelling and its relationship with information, conspicuous consumption, and motivation.

An area which I haven’t really been exploring as much as I initially thought I would is that of feedback. I think it may be because I’m considering feedback an implicit part of gaining more information. That is, if information alters behavior, then people will buy different things and their feedback will be received and perceived through those purchasing channels. I’m still interested in this area, although it remains to be seen exactly how I integrate it into my thesis.

A GreenBiz article entitled Hybrid Drivers Cash in on Premium Insurance Rates talks about an insurance rate which is preferential to owners of hybrid cars. The curious thing is that Travelers couches its decision in the language of “innovative products” and “changing needs”:

Additionally, hybrid vehicle sales have at least doubled every year since the first car was offered in the U.S. in 1999. This trend shows no signs of slowing, and Travelers intends to serve this growing market with innovative products to meet the changing needs of our customers.

And while at first this might seem like a welcome recognition of the larger impact that hybrid cars intend to have, such as reducing dependance on oil and reducing emissions, the real reason appears to be the type of driver:

According to the company the average hybrid owner is 41-60, married and a responsible driver.

In the spirit of “everything is connected”, I wonder when the real value of driving a hybrid, or any alternative fuel car, will be recognized. And by this I’m referring to the exposure that insurance companies have with regard to environmental issues.

I am always interested in the facts trotted out about how hybrid cars don’t actually meet their advertised mileage per gallon. A recent Car & Driver article about the Honda Civic Hybrid essentially put the kiss of death on hybrids with the words “In a hybrid, the trick is to drive like a grandmother.” (Consider this is a magazine which typically showcases cars like the $1.25 million Bugatti Veyron 16.4—top speed 253 mph.)

The EPA testifies that the Civic hybrid gets 49 mpg in city driving and 51 on the highway. But those numbers are rarely achieved. To get mileage in the high-40-mpg range requires gradual acceleration, timid cruising speeds, and cautious use of the throttle. Suffer a short lapse in concentration or accelerate immoderately, and fuel economy will suffer. Fact is, to do this right, you will drive more slowly than you ever have.

Not exactly the way to sell hybrids to the go-fast crowd.

Car & Driver magazine has a point when it comes to the numbers, though.

Producing an accurate gas-mileage evaluation is so difficult that most folks don’t think even the federal government can do it.

So if people don’t can’t have faith in the accuracy of the gas-mileage numbers, why do they buy hybrids? Shouldn’t the reality of hard results taint the ostensible value of hybrids? Well, as Car & Driver points out (in 2004, mind you):

Wearing a Toyota Prius has become … a sought-after badge among the greenies…

I was surprised to discover today that Panasonic has pretty detailed environmental assessment information available on the web. It’s much more than I ever would have suspected they’d be interested in cataloguing. But it’s there…

Some basic information about CO2 emissions from Panasonic products.

On this page, notice the amount of detail:

The amount of resources input is calculated not from the amount of materials procured but from the raw mined materials based on the composition of each product component. Products imported from overseas manufacturing business units are included.

And I was surprised to see what steps they plan to take in the future:

Moreover, when Matsushita Logistics Co., Ltd., replaces trucks, it will replace them with highly fuel-efficient hybrid trucks. It is aiming to switchover its entire fleet of 353 trucks (as of the end of fiscal 2005) to environmentally conscious trucks, such as hybrids, by the end of fiscal 2007 (30% of the fleet in fiscal 2005).

It’s great that Panasonic is doing this, and I’m curious as to whether other companies have, hidden away in their corporate websites, similar information.

Had a thesis advisor meeting today, and a topic of interest which came out in the course of the discussion was an idea of personalization of personalized information.

I’m describing this idea as allowing people to personalize an object with whatever information they want to know about that object. So, not only can you get information that is specific to your circumstances, but it’s information you have selected for delivery.

This all started with the idea of having your name written on an egg, similar to how the expiration date is printed on eggs. What if your egg told you where it came from, how many you’ve eaten this week, or was your entry into the egg lottery?

There is perhaps a binary opposition between conspicuous consumption and personalization of personalized content. The former relies on common symbols for the conspicuous part of the consumption, while the latter is all about unique information. Unless there is a value inherent to uniqueness, or the unique information is expressed in a common symbol-system, then I’m not sure there’s a relationship between the two. Just an observation.

An older Environmental News Network article talks about the first-mover advantage Toyota has over rival car manufacturers when it comes to hybrids.

Even Toyota’s rivals acknowledge that the company’s head start gives it an advantage.

“They were there first,” Larry Burns, GM Vice President in charge of research and development, said while in Tokyo for the Tokyo Motor Show, which opens to the public Saturday. “That’s an advantage to have had real experience with real customers.”

In addition to the technology lead and the public perception and branding lead, there’s a very important component of customer experience related to having new technology in the field first. It’s kind of like experience prototypes, in that you can refine your products more quickly and surely when you receive direct feedback. Other car manufacturers, such as Ford, who are observing on the sidelines may think they have an advantage in that Totyota is doing all the hard work which Ford can later reap the benefits of, but the reality is that Totyota is also building a relationship with customers in the process. And I’d wager that those relationships will be just as valuable as the other advantages (technical, financial, market, etc.) Toyota is gaining on its competitors.

As this Treehugger article describes, the Natural Resources Defense Council has released a wallet guide [.pdf] for selecting paper products. It covers toilet paper, paper towels, facial tissues, and paper napkins. Companies such as Kimberly-Clark which use virgin wood for their products are marked as AVOID, while others are rated on the bleaching process used and the amount of recycled and post-consumer content.

This is a start in the right direction, although my thoughts ultimately have companies eager to list the ratings on the products themselves. Think of it as something like those “My child is an honors student at XYZ school” bumper stickers.