A Sustainable Train of Thought http://www.d4v3.net/blog Interaction design, service design, and a little bit of green Mon, 07 Apr 2008 05:09:07 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0.7 en Extended Producer Responsibility http://www.d4v3.net/blog/2007/03/12/extended-producer-responsibility/ http://www.d4v3.net/blog/2007/03/12/extended-producer-responsibility/#comments Mon, 12 Mar 2007 09:14:07 +0000 Dave Research Thesis Business Sustainability http://www.d4v3.net/blog/2005/12/13/extended-producer-responsibility/ 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.

You need mp3 music download for ipod mp3 player, You find where download mp3 music for ipod mp3 player

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...

]]> http://www.d4v3.net/blog/2007/03/12/extended-producer-responsibility/feed/ Worst. Idea. Ever. http://www.d4v3.net/blog/2007/02/07/worst-idea-ever-2/ http://www.d4v3.net/blog/2007/02/07/worst-idea-ever-2/#comments Wed, 07 Feb 2007 15:30:11 +0000 Dave Service design Business http://www.d4v3.net/blog/2007/02/07/worst-idea-ever-2/ Straight from Wired (IPod [sic] Will Be the New CD – the “I” in iPod should never be capitalized, since it’s a trademark, but what do I know):

Well, the iPod could become the new CD, especially if Apple starts offering cheap shuffle iPods pre-loaded with hot new albums or artists’ catalogs. Imagine a whole range of inexpensive, special-edition iPods branded with popular bands containing a new album, or their whole catalogs.

Flash-memory drives are now so cheap, software companies are starting to use them to ship software. H&R Block, for example, is selling the latest version of its tax-preparation software on a flash drive for $40—the same price as the CD version. How much would it cost Apple to add a few music chips and some cheap earbuds?

Three major problems with this proposal:

1. Apple will never turn the iPod into a commodity. Period.

2. iPods have sex appeal. Taxes do not.

3. The ecological ramifications would be enormous.

Regardless of how “cheap” a “disposable iPod” might be in terms of manufacturing costs, we all know that prices in our current economic system fail to account for the true cost of products and services. For example, what about the e-waste generated by all these cheap, disposable iPods?

Here’s what would ideally happen in the H&R Block scenario painted above: you bring your existing iPod into the store and you get a discount on the software which accounts for the costs not associated with: packaging; transportation of physical materials, including tolls, fuel, pollution, etc.; licensing fees to Apple; materials to construct the CD or disposable iPod; storage of the CDs or disposable iPods; labor to manufacture, assemble, distribute, the CDs or disposable iPod, etc. etc. etc.

But of course I need to wake up and smell the….pragmatism? I thought the whole point of having things in a digital medium was to speed their distribution and reduce costs. Silly me. Marketing trumps reality.

]]> http://www.d4v3.net/blog/2007/02/07/worst-idea-ever-2/feed/ Cause conversations to take place http://www.d4v3.net/blog/2006/11/13/cause-conversations-to-take-place/ http://www.d4v3.net/blog/2006/11/13/cause-conversations-to-take-place/#comments Mon, 13 Nov 2006 17:42:01 +0000 Dave Marketing Business http://www.d4v3.net/blog/2006/11/13/cause-conversations-to-take-place/ In one of those roundabout ways of stumbling onto things that the Internet tends to enable, I ran into the following video of Seth Godin giving a talk at Google. The video is a bit long at 45 minutes, but I found it interesting to watch for a couple of reasons: he makes some good points and he hardly ever uses filler words like “uh” and “um” (I pay attention to details like this because I find it tends to say something about the speaker and his or her message).

Anyway, the big takeaway for me was: “Cause conversations to take place.” And he has some good comments about Google Maps which I thought were particularly telling.

Yeah, as usual I’m late to the party—the video is from March of 2006—but I think it’s still worthwhile to watch.

]]> http://www.d4v3.net/blog/2006/11/13/cause-conversations-to-take-place/feed/