A Sustainable Train of Thought

Following up on an earlier post about the Wii and energy consumption, I ran across the concept of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR or “Producer Takeback”) on the SVTC site:

In May of 2001, the European Union (EU) Parliament adopted a directive that requires producers of electronics to take responsibility – financial and otherwise – for the recovery and recycling of E-waste.

Right now, EPR is aimed at E-waste, but one could imagine this extended to include all environmental consequences associated with a particular product, including energy use or perhaps even embodied energy. More to the point, it would be great to see some incentives for companies to adopt better alternatives, such as bioplastics.

The take-back initiatives are funded through “advance recovery fees” paid by everyone who purchases new products, similar to the bottle deposits in some US states.

But the onus lies on the company to pay for the net cost of recycling electronic materials, or the cost of proper disposal for those materials which are not recyclable.

Like most stuff in the environmental sphere, EPR isn’t all that new: Wired ran a story more than four years ago about E-waste and how both Japan and the European Union have adopted progressive e-waste recycling laws.

We really need to reduce the uptake time between identifying problems and resolving them. We need agility...

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Last week I was in San Francisco for CookCamp and Calls For Change at ETel. Now I’m just getting back from a two-day, last-minute trip to Switzerland.

I’ve written about my experiences at CookCamp over at Tasty Thinking, but in brief: we pulled it off without a hitch, and more importantly there’s interest in taking CookCamp forward in a variety of directions. One possibility is a larger event in a few months. Another possibility is a model which integrates CookCamp into other barcamps.

As was the case for my last trip to San Francisco, where I attended both HealthCamp and the Internet Identity Workshop, I was able to combine multiple conferences into a single trip.

CookCamp’s been in the works for several months, but at the last minute Victor pointed out Calls for Change at ETel. As a nice side-effect, during the breaks I wandered around and chatted with some of the conference attendees. I ran into (the guy from) Jaiku Surj, one of the conference organizers with O’Reilly; and one of the guys who worked on Platial.com.

Perhaps most interestingly, we met the guy behind Open Moko. After telling him of the BarCamp experience with CookCamp, we kind of threw out the idea of an OpenMokoCamp, which he got rather excited about. I think it would be a great way to build buzz around the phone and develop a cadre of core users and proselytizers.

I don’t know how much I can talk about the trip to Switzerland at this point, save to say that it ended with this....