everything in a pint of ice cream

another oldie, from 23 August 2005. My affinity for Ben and Jerry's remains unchanged, but I think the "all-time high" gasoline was something like $2.30 at the time.

This is the kind of thing that garnered me a "Most Likely to Start a Cult" award from my own MBA classmates.

I want to write everything, but it won't fit.

If I didn't have to take the time to nail down a series of words, sometimes coherent, expressing the way I feel and what I think, my thoughts would be much more accurate. It's the same thing being a musician, when the only tangible elements of a vast creative landscape in ones head are squeezed out like an empty tube of toothpaste. Musical inspiration came largely from capturing something the moment it was made--the "record everything" maneuver--or going with the flow of a new idea, leaving mounds of unexplored ideas trapped behind in the recesses of the mind. It's kind of like that. Just picking a subject to write about is a pain because that ignores all of the others.

And they're all connected. That's what I do with myself, figure out how they are all connected. How do you write about that? With an example, maybe.

Suppose you were inclined to head to the local mart and pick up a pint of the supreme ice cream of ice creams, Ben & Jerry's. If you're me, you would choose the Coffee Heath Bar flavor, whose exact name I forget. So you hop in the car, drive X miles to the mart, pick up the B&J, and head for home. Simple enough.

So what has occurred? You have traded money for a good--stuffs, product--pretty common. What else happened?

For one, you drove your car to the mart and back. It consumed some gasoline, a little oil, spent time travelling on the highway, parked in a space at the mart, used more gasoline and oil, spent more time on the road, and ended up wherever you park it.

I don't suppose I need to mention that gas prices are at an all-time historical high (not the "real" price, the actual cost compared to inflation--that peaked in the early 80's), and chances are quite good that you spent more in gas to get the ice cream than you did to buy the ice cream. You also converted that gasoline into three times its weight--pretty nifty, eh?--of emissions, notably greenhouse gases. And, you added another car to the roads, which contributed to the congestion that was already there. At the store, you parked your car which doesn't really affect anything, but someone built the parking lot or provided the space for that to happen. And when your car is not there, the space is a 5' x 10' plot of paved over real estate that no one's doing anything useful with.

Now, how about the ice cream? It came from somewhere, and in this case it happens to be Vermont. Since the chances are extremely good that you are not in Vermont, it had to be driven by a refrigerated truck from Vermont to the store. If the ice cream was being stored somewhere else in the meantime--not too likely with ice cream--the truck had to move it between multiple locations. This truck also creates three times its fuel's weight in emissions, may very well travel thousands of miles, and most likely gets worse mileage than you. If I was to price out the actual amount of fuel/emissions used to transport your container of ice cream, the proper way to do it would be to the total fuel/emissions by how many containers of ice cream, and everything else, there were in the truck--something people who tell you that your food travels half-way around the world does not bother to do. After dividing it up between all of the other ice cream/bananas/coffee, it's probably a 10,000th or 20,000th of that.

Anyway, the ice cream has traveled from Vermont in a refrigerated truck however many miles, using X pounds gasoline, emitting 3X pounds emissions.

Still with me? Hang on...

What about the ice cream itself? Ben & Jerry's has gone out of its way to use local items in its food. In this particular case, the coffee B&J use in my own addictive concoction comes from South America, but is Fair Trade coffee--a fancy name for paying someone what their coffee is actually worth. Crazy concept, huh? But how did you think that products made somewhere else cost less? Because the sellers aren't being paid what the product would be sold for if it was purchased in America!

Anyway, B&J does what it can to use fair trade products, local ingredients, recycleable containers, and milk from non-RBGH cows (which I won't go into here, but RBGH is nasty stuff), all of which you would call sustainable practices. This means simply that the practices can be continued indefinitely--which you would think was another obvious concept, but you'd be wrong. However, for B&J local can mean brownies from New York City, still quite a haul. So there is more travel involved there.

Now, what I do is look at all of these components and try to figure out how to reduce all of the expenditures that have taken place here: gas and oil usage, emissions production, time loss, road congestion, and so on. This is a complex mess. But, there are simple concepts that enable me to look at it differently and see how things could be improved.

For starters, if you remembered to get the ice cream when you got all of your other groceries, you have saved yourself the trip. This saves you gas and oil, emissions, time, and congestion, though we usually tend to notice time and road congestion the most, with fuel and oil rapidly creeping up. What else?

How about if you rode a bike or a bus instead? Sacrifice some time, but gain gas and oil, emissions, and maybe congestion if you have bike paths or take the sidewalk. The bus was already going there anyway. But think--if you don't take the car, you don't need a parking space--or as large of one. If twenty-five people did that, you'd only need half the parking lot, the space of another decent-sized building--or a small park.

You could, if you were in a position to do so, move close to the store. Then you could just walk or bike and not drive at all. Not that difficult for us city folk, but more of a long-term investment.

This is where it gets more interesting.

Suppose (and this is a big one for me as well) you instead chose the local ice cream, made twenty miles away at the local dairy plant. What have you saved? Its share of the gas, oil, emissions, and time that the truck spent on the bringing the ice cream from Vermont. You have also saved its share of the extra gas spent to refrigerate it, and the congestion on the road--but you can't really tell the difference on that one unless you cancel a whole truck. As far as all of the components in the ice cream are concerned, you'd have to check with the plant. But you can see that there are more impacts than someone would usually think about.

When people buy local organic food, there is often a premium. This premium represents a lot of things--it could be buying local ingredients at real, rather than discounted, prices. It could be paying adequate wages to the employees. And it could be because they are engaging in sustainable practices--making sure that the land and energy used is replenishing itself. This usually means less production, to keep up with natural processes.

Now, suppose a small store selling locally-made products moves in a few blocks from where you currently are. You could walk there, pay a slight premium, and go home. You only directly see the money, but you have in fact saved yourself gas, oil, time, congestion, product travel time, product refrigeration time, and you've boosted the economy of someone a few miles away, not a few states away. I don't know about you, but to me that's a tradeoff I am willing to make--though recently I've tried to just not buy the ice cream in the first place.

And that's just ice cream. I think about manufacturing plants at this point. Fortunately, so do the companies that own them, because it has become obvious that any waste produced at any point in the production process is wasted money--it represents materials, product, and labor that has been paid for but not used. So you see now that sustainable practices are merely more efficient practices. The trick is then to picture how an ideal process would work, instead of how to merely improve upon the current one. An ideal process produces no waste at all. Usually this is done by reducing all the waste that one can, then reusing, selling or recycling the rest. Nobody's perfect, but

absolutely relative

I just read Marc Gunther's Greenbiz blog entitled Wal-Mart's Big Problem: Climate Change.

The good: Wal-Mart is greatly reducing its carbon emissions relative to sales
The bad: Wal-Mart continues to grow, more than offsetting its emissions reductions

Wal-Mart contends that its absolute growth is probably better than alternative, because of the less-efficient sales of other vendors that it is replacing. I suppose they have a point. My initial reason for not liking them many years ago, now proven to hold true for various other industries that we now own as well, is that they were too big to begin with and caused a lot of societal damage as a result of their problems. Still, if Wal-Mart must grow then at least it is growing more efficiently.

Gunther also took the liberty of including a few graphs from Wal-Mart's website:


Holy chartjunk, Batman. Edward Tufte died inside when this was released. I know there are a bunch of cool options in Excel and most other analytical programs, but please stay away from them!

sustainability marketing green sustainability marketing...

I chalk this one up to the Rube Goldberg machine that was built where the limits of reasonable human understanding and retention meet marketing.

This morning I was perusing the news when I read the curious headline 'Sustainability is the new "Green"' in my Google search email. It was an article detailing Aberdeen Group's findings about marketing sustainability. In addition to the rather uninformed headline, they state that businesses around the world have decided that 'sustainability is not synonymous with "green" or environmental initiatives.'

Hmmm.

I love consulting, and consulting firms. Consultants hold the power to come into an organization and innocently state truths that people in the organization know but cannot say, have said and can't get any support on, or have completely missed. But they also have the characteristic of not knowing the inner workings of the organization, so they have to kind of pick it up as they go. They adopt some organizational buzzwords, which is often switching one out for another, like using "strategy" instead of "game plan" or "path forward". They identify how to structure their messages so the findings are relevant to the company strategy. They also identify potential mine fields to avoid when they go about reporting said truths. But there is only so much time that they can spend on this. The result is that they end up having a 'profound naivete' feel to their reports.

Consultants are extremely valuable, and this is backed by the fact that they continue to be paid well. Outside observations and research can be pure gold. But sometimes the way their communications come across is just weird. The fact that businesses have drawn a distinguishable line between 'sustainability' and 'green' may be a direct result of many, many occurrences of this phenomenon with marketing consultants.

Sustainability is striving to remove all generators of 'waste' in human society, to streamline, simplify or remove the Rube Goldberg machines we built on top of nature's perfect, if emotionless, zero-waste system. Waste is not only physical stuff that we no longer see value in, it is also wasted money, wasted time, wasted labor, wasted productivity, and so on. It is anything that cannot be used for anything else.

After Al Gore put out 'An Inconvenient Truth,' marketers finally decided to go along with this 'trend' en masse and tried to figure out how to market the infinitely complex product of sustainability using conventional methods. Simplification was necessary, so they approached it in chunks: organic, local, recycled, renewable, and eventually, green. Perhaps assisted by the association of the color of trees and plants which was entirely overused in umpteen thousand ads during this time, consumers gradually recognized the term 'green' as a label under which all other sustainability concepts could be filed. As far as they understood them however, 'sustainability' was largely limited to an environmental context.

By this time, organizations who had been using the 'green' marketing label for years in the renewable energy, permaculture, organic, sustainable building, and other leading industries had learned to avoid the term because it was too vague and had become a way for folks who didn't want to hear about sustainability to nail down and invalidate an idea using technicalities. Like 'sustainability' had worn out its welcome before it, 'green' was poisoned and had to be replaced with something more sophisticated in order to retain its potency. Bob Willard found it.

Bob Willard, a 20+ IBM career man who had an epiphany much like Ray Anderson's of Interface, made a new career out of explaining how to talk to the business world about sustainability after his initial experience using the term in a board room. Business is constantly striving to maximize the value of its business assets, and dislikes vague, unactionable concepts like sustainability. Willard figured out that sustainability should be referred to as 'asset management' because ultimately sustainability is about maximizing the value (monetary and otherwise) of every asset (money, capital, labor, time, and so on). For proof, he cited the company Arthur Andersen. As it turned out, 90% of the accounting firm's 'assets' were not their employee talent or services but their trustworthiness. It wasn't on any balance sheet, but it single-handedly sunk the company once Enron's malfeasance revealed Arthur Andersen's manipulation of accounting numbers. Willard's approach offered a way to quantify sustainability concepts and directly measure their impact on company value. In Willard's simplicity, he had defined the true essence of sustainability in digestible terms.

So, after the bleeding edge of sustainability marketing and communication had shed terms like 'green' and 'sustainability' in favor of sophisticated, business-class language like 'asset management,' regular consumers were finally getting a handle on the concept summed up with the term 'green.' As that was happening the bandwagon effect kicked in, and greenwashers of various degrees looking to capitalize on the success of the new branding jumped on board and corrupted it. Networks of (mostly) third-party auditors developed, reviewing products and claims. Now there are so many facets to sustainability that thousands of these auditing groups are out there, saying different things as we try to sort it all out. It's very tiring.

The days of the term 'green' as a viable, reliable concept are numbered, at least from the perspective of the business world. As the article notes, businesses have pressed forward with their asset-based value creation, which, as Bob Willard promised, has proven "dramatically" effective, and have decided that they're okay with the term sustainability after all. But to them sustainability has nothing to do with 'green.' 'Sustainability' is business-grade asset management while 'green' is consumer environmental stuff (that these same businesses are presumably selling to their customers) and there is a clear difference between the two.

Ain't marketing grand?

So now we get to watch marketers come up with another name for the same concept to keep it hip and new. Meanwhile, having the headline suggest that 'sustainability' has replaced 'green' as the hip new trend is just irresponsible. Or profoundly naive.

cooling computers and heating buildings to save energy

This morning I read about this CNET blog about a water-cooled IBM supercomputer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich being built to use its surplus heat to heat the university's buildings.

Essentially (and simply), this is reusing energy. This concept is generally known as cogeneration, or reusing energy to power something else--normally heating something from the waste heat from another process.

This project is expected to cut down additional energy to heat the building to the tune of 85 percent reduction of the computer's carbon footprint, about 30 tons annually at best. I suppose it depends on whether it is busy contemplating the cosmos or pulling down Sudoku games from the internet as to how much it will actually save.

When something as obvious as using waste heat to heat something else is big news (again), you know you're in a Rube Goldberg machine. As the comments dictate, many of us have experienced this phenomenon in our cramped bedrooms with our desktops of old. Heck, the single incandescent bulb in the kitchen of my last Ithaca apartment used to heat my bedroom directly above during the long, cold winters. The apartment had the insulation of an open window, and it's interesting to think of how much our energy bill was cut down during the three-hour dinner time window of my roommates and myself.

It could be pretty straightforward to implement this concept in building design... why are kitchens not placed under bathrooms to heat the floors? Why is the excess heat from refrigerator coils not used to heat water on the way to the sink? But more importantly, why are homes in heat-prone areas given black roofs that absorb heat, or those in colder areas given white or shiny ones that deflect it? And why are buildings not correctly directionally sited (small windows on the north, large windows on the south with deciduous trees to block heat and allow in winter sun) to save massive amounts of energy? Siting houses correctly is understood to result in around 40% energy reduction needed to heat and cool the building. Suburbs with sinewy streets make the prospect of efficiently citing homes nearly impossible.

Though some of these are obviously harder to pull off than others, it's pretty staggering to think about the energy savings that could be achieved. It seems like 50% or greater energy savings wouldn't be that difficult.

Something can always be done to mediate bad design, of course. Pipes can be weatherized and insulation can be beefed up. At winter time there's the towel along the base of the doors or an extra layer of plastic on the windows. But it's really about redesigning so those fixes are not even necessary. As McDonough and Braungart put it in Cradle to Cradle, we don't want less bad design, we want good design.

So why is this sort of collaborated building design not encouraged without legislative leverage? Lack of focus on this particular goal, teams working separately, cost constraints. And yet, with a little bit of extra cost and pooling of efforts, long-term energy costs could shrink considerably, often offsetting the additional upfront costs. But since the folks up front don't get to enjoy those savings there is little incentive to think that way. After all, it is more complicated to build the simpler, sleeker product through collaboration than is for each party in building construction to come in, propose a layout, and go home. This kind of integrated design is still extra credit in many projects, though it's great to see a gathering movement in recent years to pressure development to become more efficiently designed.

Reading about this Swiss supercomputer project gives another glimpse of hope to me that folks do see at least a part of the massive existing Rube Goldberg machine, and that they think it is silly as well.

the back seat is a lot less comfortable than it used to be

I just read an article from Environmental Leader with the rather distressing title of "Environment Takes Back Seat To Comfort, Convenience." It summarized a survey by The Shelton Group conducted to ask 1,006 American consumers if they would give up a variety of everyday products, many of which are nearly ubiquitous in American life, if they discovered that they were damaging to the environment. These are their summarized results:



Not surprisingly, the answer to most items, which included iPods, computers, cell phones, air conditioners and dishwashers, was less than half or worse. The article proceeded to cast the results in a rather negative light.

Sure, this may come across as bad news at first, but this is America, the most pro-consumption country in the world! It's not like Japan or China issuing country-wide mandates. That's the only way to get an overwhelming response.

But looking again at the statistics, things actually look very promising. 2 out of 5 people would give up their iPod or dishwasher. Almost 1 in 4 people would give up their cell phones. These are not trivial percentages! Sure, only 7% would give up their cars, but what percent of Americans are lucky enough to live both with an adequate alternate transportation system and communities with everything close enough to rely exclusively on it? For better or worse, a car is still nearly vital to over half of Americans, because nearly half still live in rural areas and many more live dozens of miles from their workplace. And mp3 players and cell phones are also largely far from optional anymore, largely because of the rise in alternative transportation that has been seen. It could be far worse. For example, imagine asking folks in Singapore or Korea about giving up their mp3 players and cell phones and see what kind of response you get.

It appears that the American environmental movement is getting a lot of mainstream traction, and aligns with LOHAS ratios pretty well.