In line with the prior post, here’s a short rhetorical piece I put together for an earlier Climate Progress competition, from January 2009.
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(Originally written Sept 29 - posted Oct 13)
Joe Romm ran a competition at Climate Progress, to write what Canada would be like in 2050 if the pollution lobby held sway. This is what I came up with, summoning everything I could from my rhetorical repertoire to write a melancholy dirge.
I’ll introduce a periodic kaizen suggestions category to the blog here, to capture, well, suggestions I send to companies and organizations when I see “low-hanging fruit” for improvement. This somewhat plays to ideas found in book club selection The Toyota Way.
The first in the series is an email I sent in May 2010 to IKEA, relating to their particle-board furniture — which is not accepted at recycling depots in the Metro Vancouver area.
The email I sent IKEA is below the fold.
The use of the herbicide Roundup… has resulted in weeds being genetically selected… for tolerance to Roundup. A definite case of “cripping strength”, or biological blowback.
As they say in environmental circles, “mother nature always bats last”.
This doesn’t negate the fact that pesticides and herbicides can provide positive value in agriculture — but it may illustrate that for crop yield improvements to be long-term, they need to work with the realities of biology, instead of trying to fight it. Sort of like how aikido is purported to use the attacker’s momentum against them — whereas in a tug-of-war, you need to create the most momentum.
Not originally intended as a book club selection, the insights of John Michael Greer’s The Ecotechnic Future on biological succession in the natural environment, seemed to effortlessly explain trends in the energy sector. On these grounds, its arguments and speculations were deemed highly relevant to company employees, given the firm’s involvement in high-tech energy systems.
In brief, Greer argues that deforested areas are likely to be dominated at first by weeds, which reproduce rapidly. Over time, however, efficiency counts more than growth rates, and so such areas tend to return to forest, which cycle nutrients more effectively. In the short run, speed wins; in the long run, efficiency counts.
The energy technology parallel could be that fossil fuels have held a key advantage for centuries, on account of their being ease of exploitation. (As with weeds, their inefficiency with respect to GHG emissions could have been a small weakness relative to their scalability.) Energy technologies currently being pursued offer better efficiency (lower “carbon intensity”) but are generally unable to scale rapidly. Solar panels, wind turbines, fuel cells and even nuclear power plants generally require a much larger up-front investment of energy and money, than their fossil-fuel counterparts.
As always, if you enjoy the book review, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book. 
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(Originally written August 4; posted Sept 5)
While shopping on the weekend, I noticed some funny packaging on the Hellman’s mayonnaise containers. So, like a piqued bee browsing the flowers, I wandered over for a closer look.
Turns out that in North America, all Hellman’s “half the fat” mayonnaise now uses free-range eggs — thirty million jars’ worth in fact. They’d attached some promotional stuff to their mayonnaise jars; clearly, in my case it worked. 
While light mayonnaise is their only product using free-range eggs in North America, all Hellman’s mayonnaises in Europe switched over last year. The reason we’re behind the times… is because they weren’t sure if there was enough North American supply for their full product line (!).
This is an excellent example of how activists can co-opt private enterprise into behaving better. Free-range eggs are more expensive because the hens have access to the outdoors, instead of being cooped up under terrible conditions; they’re also more humane, for the same reason. By getting enough “early adopters” to to pay a premium for the free-range product, activists created a big enough market signal for behemoth corps to take notice.
In this case, Unilever has decided to get an edge on Kraft (”Miracle Whip”) by making this change. Hopefully, Kraft will respond by trying to one-up Unilever in the “ethical sourcing” sweepstakes. The incremental cost of free-range eggs is largely irrelevant to the products’ profitability, as both Hellman’s Mayonnaise and Miracle Whip are brands, and are priced as such. They don’t compete with no-name spreads, just as Coke doesn’t worry about “PC cola” and BMW doesn’t care that Kia’s are cheaper.
Other food examples include fair trade coffees and Cadbury’s fair trade sourcing of chocolate for all its British “Dairymilk” bars. On the consumer side, after a Greenpeace campaign Apple recently beat its PC competition to removing arsenic, mercury, PVC and brominated fire-retardants from various components. And the success of the first-generation Toyota Prius (despite its Aztek-esque aesthetics) prompted automakers to start looking into hybrid technology.
While cynics point out that hybrid lifecycle costs are probably higher in North America, we’re a bit of an anomaly. Since Texas used to be the Saudi Arabia of crude, and Alberta promises to be the next Saudi Arabia of oil, it seems unlikely we’ll see the kinds of gas taxes found elsewhere in the world.
My attendance at a (pricey) lecture Peter Senge gave on The Necessary Revolution in 2009 was the germinal cause which led to a spate of business reading, and eventually the idea of creating a business book club at work. As such, it was natural to eventually return to that text, in the course of book club readings.
Like other tomes in the “business adventures in sustainability” genre, Senge discusses DuPont’s 70% reduction in GHG emissions from 1990 to 2005, and Xerox’s redesign of a new copier design for 93% refurbishability, and 97% recyclability. He supplements these with suggestions on how coalitions can be built from the bottom up, to drive organizational behaviour and develop system-wide solutions.
The book mentions Darcy Winslow, a past Director of Sustainability at Nike, who led the charge to eliminate SF6 (the most potent greenhouse gas known to man!) from the air pockets of “Nike Air” footwear. In private correspondence, she explained the importance of reframing designers’ perceptions of the need to remove SF6: they initially perceived it as a legislative burden they didn’t want to work on, but she was able to get buy-in for the project by pushing it as a proof point of Nike’s design genius — devising a harmless alternative would prove yet again that they were the world’s best shoe designers.
As always, if you enjoy the summary, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book.
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Workplaces, like consumer products, involve the interplay of multiple systems: everything from accounting to manufacturing to research to… uh… the zeitgeist-tracking of a marketing department needs to work together reasonably smoothly.
The book was found on a pilgrimage to Powell’s Books in late 2009 and immediately targeted as a future book club read. While most companies work together reasonably smoothly, those companies whose departments function with seamless ease, are likelier to enjoy greater success. (Such is the Darwininan nature of business.) As such, learning more about how complex systems function, was thought to be of high value.
As always, if you find the summary useful, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book.
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William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s Cradle to Cradle was the eighth book club selection. A landmark text on sustainability as it relates to business, it’s a repudiation of traditional ”cradle to grave” thinking for product design.
The title itself is a reference to the manner in which natural systems cycle nutrients, instead of accumulating wastes. Put pithily, in nature, waste equals food: deer droppings (or dead deer, for that matter) ultimately provide the nutrients for plants which provide food for more deer. The authors propose redesigning products such that, at end-of-life, the “technical nutrients” can be easily recovered and reused in other products.
As always, if you find the review useful, please consider supporting the authors by purchasing the book.
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