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Happy New Year! It’s an exciting time to be a green marketer. I hope you had a wonderful holiday.

Let’s Harness the Enormous Resources in Our Waste

In December, I wrote a blog post about harvesting trash heaps, and another one arguing that, number 1, the easiest way to true energy independence is to simply use less, and number 2, that using less is actually pretty easy.

I decided that these two posts were really different slices of the same circle: the idea that we have the resources we need, but we don’t tend to look for them in the right places. As the powers-that-be look at disastrous technologies such as fracking, nuclear power, and polluting/greenhouse gas-emitting coal, we, the people who will be affected by these bad decisions, need to stand up and be counted. Thus, my newsletter this month is modified from those two earlier pieces.

Achieving Sustainability Means Changing Our Thinking About Machines—And Landfills

Can we think about landfills as a solution to resource scarcity, instead of as a trash problem?

This article on GreenBiz by Mikhail Davis of InterfaceFLOR (pioneer in sustainable flooring under the late Ray Anderson) could change a lot of people’s thinking about how to design industrial processes and industrial machinery for sustainability.

Davis argues compellingly that a lot of our difficulties with reducing waste, reducing raw materials, and reducing carbon impact stem from the way we’ve historically designed our machinery. Too often, we’ve assumed (falsely) that raw materials will be not only abundant, but very pure. These 19th and 20th-century machines need a constant stream of very pure raw materials, and that is unsustainable. In fact, Davis cites a contract between a town and a trash-to-energy incinerator that inflicts monetary penalties on the town if it fails to supply enough trash. Can you say “goodbye, recycling!”?

He proposes that as a society, we change our thinking about this: that instead of designing machines that require more and more pure, virgin raw materials, we design to use mixed ingredients (such as those we might find in landfills or plastics recycling stations), even if the mix changes in composition and quantity. This works on several levels:

• To a large degree, we’ve already extracted the easy stuff. Mining and drilling will continue to produce lower-grade, lesser concentrations that need more work and energy, increase carbon footprint, and produce more waste in order to get usable raw materials—getting more and more expensive in both dollar and environmental measurements. Look at the horrible process of extracting oil from tar sands, if you want an example.
• Designing machines that can run on waste streams turns landfills into abundant sources of raw materials. When we start mining landfills, we have lots to feed the machine—as long as the machine can run on a mixed and inconsistent stream of materials. If we can mix together several kinds of plastics even as the specific mix constantly shifts, our landfills become resources, right along with our recycle bins. Our trash problem goes down; the environmental consequences of mining are also much-reduced.
• A logical corollary: instead of designing a machine to make one output from one consistent input, we can design machines that create multiple kinds of materials depending on what sources are being harvested at the moment.

In short, the machines of the next industrial revolution must be, above all, flexible: flexible enough to function with multiple inputs and flexible enough to generate multiple outputs. On the extraction side, our abundant “landfill ore” (or diverted post-consumer products) provides valuable, but mixed materials and cannot be mined efficiently with the old single-input, single-output mining technologies. The most modern recycling factories, like those of MBA Polymers and the best e-waste processors, take in a wide range of mixed waste materials and then produce a diverse range of usable raw materials as output.

InterfaceFLOR is now able to use 97 percent of the messy mix of materials in old vinyl carpet tiles to make new flooring tiles, and the remaining three percent goes into other products. I think that’s pretty cool

And this kind of holistic thinking is how we, as a society, change our demons into delights.

“Solar Isn’t Practical”? HAH!

Recently, I got into a heated discussion with a very conservative neighbor about the potential for clean energy in this country. He doesn’t think it’s practical to power the whole country through solar, wind, small hydro, etc.

I do—but only if we first reduce our energy loads, and I argued that we can easily cut energy use in half or more with today’s technology.

So I appreciated the timing of these two articles on Triple Pundit that crossed my desk the next day.

First, deep conservation can save us 50 percent on existing buildings, 90% if incorporated into the design of new buildings. I know of a solar house built in 1983, long before solar and conservation technology evolved to today’s sophistication, that was pretty darn close to net-zero energy. I also know that several very civilized European countries including England and Denmark use less than half the per-capita energy as the United States. If we’d mandated this in the early 1980s, we wouldn’t be facing the climate crisis we have today. And second, the price of solar continues to fall.

Once we cut our energy use in half (and really, we can do much more than that)—the remaining load really can be satisfied by the clean, renewable technologies. Consider just two among dozens of facts I could list:

1. According to the San Antonio, Texas chapter of the Sierra Club, every 40 minutes, enough solar energy falls on the earth to power the entire world for a year. And that’s without even factoring in wind, hydro, geothermal, magnetic, tidal, and all the rest.

2. Electric cars can actually supply power to the grid—this is already technologically possible.

I live in a house built in 1743, which we solarized. As far as I know, it’s the oldest solar house in the United States. It has both solar hot water and a small PV system—and we hope to tie in to the cow poop-powered methane generator that our farmer neighbors are building for their farm that was established in 1806. My neighbors across the street from the farm put geothermal in their 1747 home and use it for heating, cooling, and hot water.
 

My solarized 1743 Saltbox farmhouse. The three panels at the top are for hot water; the four at the bottom produce 1KW of electricity.

We do this, and we don’t live in Arizona or Hawaii or Louisiana; we live in Massachusetts, a much cloudier and colder place than many other parts of the US, and the world. Similarly, cloudy, cold Germany is a world leader in solar. If we can do it—so can you.

But I will be attending Wendy Lipton-Dibner’s Move People to Action! A four-day training for speakers who want to spread their message and monetize their work, January 24-27, in Stamford, CT. More info: Wendy AT movepeopletoaction.com

And I plan to exhibit at the 4th annual Amherst (MA) Sustainability Festival, Saturday, April 27, 2013, on the Amherst Common.

Of course, I expect to be at Book Expo America, June 4-6, 2013, NYC. I’ve gone every year since 1997.

Seeing Through Maps: Many Ways to See the World, Denis Wood, Ward L. Kaiser, and Bob Abramms (ODT, Inc., 2006)

When you represent a sphere (such as the Earth) in just two dimensions, something has to give. If you draw the shapes accurately using the very common Mercator projection, the sizes are deeply distorted. If you get the continents’ relative sizes right, as in the Peters or Hobo-Dyer projections, the shapes are all messed up. Buckminster Fuller, who I think of as a Da Vinci for the 20th century, managed to keep both sizes and shapes accurate, but threw geography out the window; in his beautiful and very unusual projection, Australia and Antarctica are on opposite ends of a series of polygons centered on the North Pole, and most of the world’s land masses form a long necklace: Africa, Europe, Asia, North America, South America.

Also, in a sphere, there’s no real up or down in directions—only in topography. Just because most maps we’re familiar with have north at the top, or have our own continent at the center, does not mean these are the only world views we can structure.

So what does this have to do with green marketing? Just this: when we look at the world differently, different thoughts have an easier time entering our brains. The familiar Mercator projection was very useful for sailors seeking the shortest passage across the Atlantic in the 16th century—but a Mercator map with Europe or North America at the center and north at the top also conveys a psychological message that can foster the kind of colonialism and imperialism so rampant in the 18th and 19th centuries: when the whole huge continent of Africa seems to be smaller than Greenland, is it easier to justify racism and exploitation? When Asia is split down the middle on North America-focused maps, doesn’t it lose political significance? How does your perspective shift when you look at a south-on-top map with Africa at the center? What can you learn by studying Charles Menard’s map of Napoleon’s invasion of Russian, correlating troop losses and temperatures, and only incidentally including a few geographic references? https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters. That web link is to the original French; in the book, it’s been translated. In short, once we can create a visual representation of something, that view of the world becomes more possible.

In fact, the book actually includes a graphic from my most successful green marketing campaign: a fight to save our local mountain range when it was threatened by a large housing development. We prepared a picture of the range as it stands today, and a projection of what it would look like with the roads and houses blighting the landscape, reprinted on page 100.

Our view of the world can change quite a bit if we look at a map with an unusual orientation. One of the maps (page 77) turns a portion of the sphere on an angle, with northwest at the top, to compactly show a pattern of slave trading routes between Africa and the Americas in centuries past—a view that would have been much more difficult to convey along a more conventional axis. Another south-facing map (page 47) shows a sweeping view from Hudson Bay to Mexico, with an emphasis on southern Canada while Mexico fades into a small strip of land between oceans. What kind of perspective do you get when Ontario is the center of your rectangular world? Or when Ontario’s largest city, Toronto, is at the center of a round map showing Hong Kong, Delhi, Nairobi, and Buenos Aires as tantalizingly close (p. 28)? Or when looking at a 2000-year-old city map of Rome (p. 44), pointing southeast? How do we absorb information differently when maps are transformed into modern infographics, allowing us to visualize—among many examples—how American political parties fall along urban/rural lines (p. 86) or how different parts of the world affect global climate change (p. 83).

One point the authors make over and over: there is not a “right” or “wrong” way to view the world, or any subset of it. Maps should be judged as to whether or not they achieve their purpose, and the purposes of different maps are different.

This book, with dozens of cool examples and well-written narrative, should open your mind to all sorts of creative brainstorms. I found it a really good book to keep in my bathroom, looking over just a couple of pages at a time, so that my brain could absorb these new ways of looking at a problem. I think I got a lot more out of it, savoring a bit at a time over several months. The good index helps, too, because it’s easy to find information again later.

Given its not-so-recent copyright date and badly designed front cover, you probably won’t find it at your local bookstore. But it’s easy enough to order directly from the publisher, at https://odtmaps.com/