The Clean and Green Club

I think I first came across the idea of fractional resources in 1975, when I discovered that a small intentional community in Yellow Springs, Ohio (where I went to college) had chipped in on a communal tractor instead of every household buying a separate lawnmower. And when I moved to an intentional community in Philadelphia five years later, the community had two cars available as needed for a per-mile fee (decades before Zipcar, Uber, or Lyft). Their motivation was as much reducing their environmental impact as saving some bucks, and I was struck by the way a co-op in any sector could achieve both goals.

Within the corporate world, the idea of fractional shared resources has been around at least since all those timeshare condos started springing up in the 1980s. Now, you can buy fractional interests in private jets, industrial equipment, and other things. I used this model (but not this language) in 1987 to organize a co-op of four business owners that purchased a laser printer together, back when they retailed for $7000. I found a remaindered one for $4500 and since I did the research and organized the fractional purchase, the printer lived in my office.

I had already been renting time on someone else’s laser printer, at a dollar a page. Having the machine on-site was a game-changer for my business because I could now offer while-you-wait resume services, and that gave me enormous competitive advantage in that portion of my business. I was eventually able to stop typing term papers and move on to far more interesting and better paying work as a marketing copywriter for individuals and small businesses/community organizations. This in turn gave me the space to develop much deeper levels of marketing consulting and eventually focus on green and social change businesses. So, in a sense, the business I operate today was made possible, or at least vastly easier, because of that decision to buy that printer fractionally.

How might your organization use a shared-resource model to lower costs and environmental footprint?

This is the first time I’m reviewing a presentation rather than a book–but I have reviewed the occasional movie or other non-book resource in this space.

Visit https://vimeo.com/328548993 and you’ll find a presentation called “Carbon Drawdown Now,” by Chris Magwood, Ace McArleton, and Jacob Racusin, given at a Northeast Solar Energy Association conference in July of this year. Magwood is the author of Making Better Buildings (2014) and Opportunities for Carbon Dioxide Removal and Storage in Building Materials (2019).

This hour-and-a-quarter video looks at the relationships of soil productivity, buildings that sequester carbon, and economic justice/social equality. More importantly, it shows us how we can take carbon out of the atmosphere and into the materials we build with, step by step–using a whole-lifecycle approach. Although the presenters have extensive technical knowledge, they kept this presentation very accessible, with lots of helpful graphics and understandable language.

Using their methods, it’s possible to build structures that have lower carbon emissions over their entire lifetimes than conventional buildings of similar size and purpose emit just from their construction, even before counting the carbon impact of the operations (heating, cooling, lighting, etc.) over the building’s useful life. This often involves using materials such as hempcrete that store more carbon than was emitted during the hemp’s agricultural “career.”

The other reason I’m recommending this talk right now is to give more context to the fascinating book on environmentally friendly packaging issues that I’ll be reviewing next month. In some ways, these two resources are very complementary. Stay tuned for the December issue to find out more. Meanwhile, get your builder and architect friends to watch this.

How can you profit by putting the VALUE in your VALUES? Shel Horowitz shows how to MONETIZE your organization’s commitment to fixing problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. Shel consults individually and in groups, gives presentations, and writes books and articles including Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (endorsed by Jack Canfield, Seth Godin and others).