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...

Some other reputation management systems:

• Opinity
• iKarma

So far all the management systems I’ve seen focus mainly on online transactions. The Rapleaf blog mentions offline transactions, as does this article in SiliconBeat, but I’m not sure how they actually handle them. According to the article you have to go to the website and engage in a rating process which takes place online, complete with emails. Another aspect of the service that comes through from the description is that it’s more about judging transactions and not the use of objects. The example they use is selling and buying U2 tickets. I think that looking at these offerings will help me focus and get more particular with my thesis.

Didier pointed out Rapleaf to me today. It’s a reputation management system which is further detailed in an article on TechCrunch, as the actual service isn’t publicly available online yet.

The basic concept is the same as what we produced for the Applied Dream —trust and reputation built up between individuals—but it seems they are taking a web-based approach to their transaction management system, which is arguably more practical and “today” than a spime-based world (which for obvious reasons doesn’t exist at the moment). Obviously this impacts my thesis topic now, but I think there’s room to maneuver in terms of the actual off-line interactions and how people build and assess reputation.

Businessweek’s article The Top Ten Hybrid Myths contains a point which I’ve made several times before:

The car you drive sends a powerful message about who you are and what you think about the world. Hybrid drivers take pride in letting other drivers—especially those behind the wheel of gas guzzlers—know that getting from point A to point B doesn’t have to lead us to an uncertain environmental and economic future.

The article has several other points: your choice of vehicle can be tied to national security, political partisanship should be a non-issue regarding hybrid car use, and hybrids are only a partial solution, among others.

While none of the points the article raises are particularly new, I find it interesting that Businessweek is choosing to publish this kind of article, considering it’s more of a mainstream news source.

Amazon.com uses reputation in weighting reviews that people submit, giving “higher quality” work greater prominence on the site.

So how do they determine quality and reputation? Good question.

We also look at who authored the content. If the author has a strong reputation (the product of community feedback about the author’s past works), it’s likely his or her new work is of high quality.

Past reviews contribute to the assumed quality of the present work, although I don’t see any mention of time in their calculations.

What is my reputation? Your reputation is based on the Community’s assessment of your activity (e.g. content you have authored) at Amazon.com. Positive votes on your content will improve your reputation.

An additional aspect to their reputation calculation is the concept of Real Name™ attribution. In essence, you make public your real name (based on the name used on your credit card) and this type of honesty positively weights your recommendations. In essence, revealing your true name is seen as a statement that you stand by what you have written.

More interestingly, though:

Sometimes we have very little information about a piece of content because the author is relatively new and/or because there are few votes on the content. This is where Real Name™ attributions come in.

So an additional property of a Real Name™ is that it helps newbies establish a reputation. In essence, it’s a step you can take for free that immediately puts you on good footing for future recommendations and transactions. I suppose that for a newbie it speaks of intentionality and interest in participating, but there is another aspect of fracturing identity within Amazon which I’m not so sure about. I like the idea of a “free” step, but I’m not sure I like how it can potentially penalize people who don’t take that step.

As a methodology for approaching future scenarios, I’ve identified what I’m calling stepping stones and bridges. These methodologies are based on my personal experience and are useful as metaphors for describing my thought processes. I’ve talked about them in my thesis report, and I actually wrote this post before the thesis report process, but I figure it’s good to post this stuff online too.

Bridges: Projecting into the future by building a tenable link between the present and the future situation.

Stepping stones: Using existing circumstances to project a possible future as a guide-post for future development. The connection between present and future is uncertain.

When building bridges, you look around and assess the situation and use that situation in a literal sense. This approach affords you a specific and concrete implementation which is limited by the physical constraints of the real world, in terms of people, objects, technology, infrastructure, etc.

When using stepping stones, you acknowledge the present circumstances and then throw a concept (stone) into the water ahead of you. Based on the relationship between that stone and the shore you’re standing on you can get a sense of the directions it enables and the challenges it poses.

You might guess that I’m a proponent of stepping stones, and I am. I see several benefits. You might have to toss out several stones before finding a direction that works, but the overall cost of doing so is probably less than building a bridge and realizing halfway through that it’s not heading in the right direction. Even if a particular concept doesn’t work, it’s still out there and can serve as a guidepost as you proceed along a different path. And who knows…paths based on stepping stones tend to be crooked (or at least the interesting paths are), so it’s quite possible that a particular concept may become useful further on in your journey.

I’m certainly finding that the previous work and concepts I’ve developed over my thesis year haven’t gone to waste: in some way they are all present in everything else I do. Perhaps it’s cherry-picking, but perhaps it just makes sense. Not everything is going to work, so pick the best parts of everything you’ve done and see what develops.

I’ve spent plenty of time in my youth mowing lawns, and I always found electric lawnmowers rather odd. Partly because of the potential to mow over your extension cord, which didn’t seem too safe to me, and partly because I always had trouble taking them seriously.

To mow a lawn you need a motor, and motors on lawnmowers should be loud and smelly. Electric lawnmowers sounded at most like a swarm of angry bees buzzing about. Lawnmowers should also be heavy and made of metal—I’ve seen what the professionals use (those riding lawnmowers) and they’re never electric or plastic. As far as I could tell, electric lawnmowers were always made of plastic and thus just came across as more toy than tool.

I suppose you could apply similar logic to the perception of electric cars versus gasoline-powered cars. But that’s another story, and I’m writing this post because of an email I received from Amazon.com today, touting “Eco-Friendly Cordless Lawn Care Tools”. Naturally, I was intrigued, if not a little skeptical. The one part which jumped out at me:

As a valued Amazon.com customer interested in the environment, you might be interested in zero-emission electric trimmers and edgers. Best of all, you never have to hassle with oil and gas again.

If that’s not an abuse of the word “zero emissions” then I don’t know what is. Perhaps if you apply the term to the specific point of use, then yes, physically the object isn’t emitting anything. But that electricity powering the tool is coming from somewhere, and emissions were certainly involved in creating the plastics and components of the tools, their assembly, and their transportation and delivery.

Now, I know that small engines like lawnmowers and snowmobiles and so forth are actually pretty bad in terms of emissions, mainly because they’re not as regulated as vehicle engines. So in that sense I can see how it would be better to use electric lawn-care equipment. But something bothers me about the claim of “zero emissions” and I think it’s the cavalier omission of time in that statement.

Maybe I’m just more tuned into this kind of analysis because of my thesis work and general frame of mind, but then again language usage is really important and we really need to be clear on what exactly we’re talking about when we use terms like “zero emissions”.

A silly, simple solution would be to plant trees to cover the amount of lifetime emissions associated with the creation and use of the lawnmower. Better still would be a redesign which systemically eliminates emissions from the production, delivery, use, and disposal phases.

Quick post as I’m in the midst of preparing stuff for our exhibition at Salone del Mobile.

As I’ve mentioned before, I presented a concept during the review before Christmas which involved composting. The idea was to close the loop between consumers and farmers (consumers and producers), with supermarkets as intermediaries. (I cover this concept in greater detail in my thesis report.)

Sydney just sent me an article from Treehugger which describes a service currently running in San Francisco which takes food waste (primarily from restaurants) and turns it into compost which is resold to farmers.

My concept looked more at the individual’s contribution, and at the time I wasn’t looking at regulation or involving other parties…my focus was perhaps too narrowly aimed at supermarkets and only supermarkets. I’ve since opened things up in terms of stakeholders—while it may be hard to justify a supermarket’s incentives for collecting compost, a city can certainly benefit from such practices, and private companies would definitely be willing participants.

Another difference is that the actual composting in San Francisco occurs in Vacaville, whereas in my concept each individual was composting in their home. I think there would need to be an intense look at whether centralized methods of composting are better than individual composting, both in terms of convenience and in terms of material usage, and such things as transportation costs and emissions.

I think in the end, however, I wasn’t really interested in composting per se as I was the motivations for the individual to participate within such a system. It’s one thing if you have a recycling container which you dump things into: that’s easy enough to accommodate in your life. What’s harder is to get a sense of contribution and the role you play within the larger system and community. For those of us who get personal satisfaction from doing good, it’s enough to know you’re doing the right thing. But for others, a little more incentive and visibility is perhaps warranted.

“Third spaces” aren’t something I’ve really talked about or looked at during the course of my thesis work, but this article in the NYTimes about Paragraph and other writer’s spaces caught my eye. Paragraph is essentially a member’s-only space where writers can go to write.

Ms. Parisi compares writers’ rooms to gyms. In both, a large group of people share the same equipment. And, paying for membership helps writers take their commitment to writing seriously, she said, and gets them “off of the couch” and onto the literary StairMaster.
As Ms. Manghnani, who writes short stories, explained: “If I’m at home working, people don’t respect that that much; they call or text or e-mail, or make arrangements to have coffee. But if I’m at a place that sounds legitimate to other people – a library or a writers’ room – they don’t disturb me as much. No one calls you at the gym and says, ‘Lets go have a burger.’ ”

I really like this analysis of commitments. People paying money to prove to themselves that they are serious about their task, and the appearance of that commitment to others: do they respect it and encourage it? I suppose it’s as much about the public perception of your status as it is your actual status. You could be a complete faker or even just someone who is coasting along, but a membership affords you a certain amount of respect and heads off some questions which might otherwise be asked. You might be writing or you might not be. But the point is that you’ve entered into a mutual agreement of sorts with others regarding the meaning of your membership. It’s a symbol.

Perhaps it’s even a brand. But in this case it’s one with a clause: you have to write to belong. Once we consider time in this equation, then it’s clear that if you’re a faker, or you’re not really working, you will lose your membership. (A gym, on the other hand, is all too happy to let you aimlessly wander amongst the machines and weight stacks for as long as you want, provided you keep paying your membership dues.) So the brand in this case is one which becomes coveted because it has real meaning. Anyone can buy a certain pair of sneakers given enough money. But not everyone can be part of a writer’s room, because you are required to participate, contribute, produce. The agreement you make with the brand and your participation in its realization and fulfillment is a critical part of the brand’s meaning. A self-policing process is required to ensure its continued integrity.

The other part of the article which caught my attention:

...playwright Kirk Wood Bromley, a member of the Brooklyn space, says he finds the atmosphere bracing. “I think writers get jazzed by writing in a room with other writers,” he said. “Writing is a very competitive art.”

I think the same applies to designers in close confines…

During my last review, Alex mentioned tipping points in relationship to some of the concepts I presented. Malcolm Gladwell discusses tipping points as the moment when mass in a system shifts.

The relationship to sustainability is that you don’t have to convince each and every person of the merits of sustainability. Rather, if you can reach the tipping point for a system, then once the system changes, everyone has to go along with it. As an example, if enough people (say, 51%) petition for a bus schedule to change, then the other 49% are going to use that system regardless of whether they wanted that system of not.

Clearly, this is both a good and bad thing. But in this case I’d like to look at the positive side, which is that by reaching that tipping point (which is comparatively easier to do than changing the entire system), we can effect large-scale change relatively easily. I wasn’t thinking explicitly in terms of tipping points, but in retrospect I think this was what I was trying to achieve by framing my concept around the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement.

The US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement and tipping points are similar in that through their implementation they both preempt certain discussions. The hard-core constituencies which would fight tooth and nail against implementing certain resolutions or achieving critical mass become less of a concern because in the end it’s the implementation which matters. Once a system is in place, it becomes both harder to argue against it and harder to resist.

Thinking this way gets me out of the morass of trying to shift an entire society over to new systems and ways of thinking. Now it’s just a matter of shifting the right people, or piggybacking on the best opportunities.

I originally read The Tipping Point last year while working on the service design project, and I found it really helped my approach at the time. So all of this came back to me while I was reading this article in GreenBiz about investors who are filing shareholder resolutions to investigate corporate energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions. The connection to the above? It’s not about ALL shareholders filing these resolutions…it’s about enough shareholders filing. Granted these resolutions are largely on behalf of large institutional investors, but it doesn’t really change the point: get enough of the right people to effect change, and the rest will follow.