You write, “focus on the main issue, health-focused cleaning; directing energy to one and not two main goals: health or sustainability, not both, or you compromise the program.”
We need a reframing here.
The question is not whether to choose health over green practices (of course we do!). The better question is how to achieve the health outcomes while also creating positive environmental impacts.
As one very easy example, how much packaging do we really need? Does it really increase safety to wrap every component of a kit individually, place the wrapped components on a foam tray, wrap the entire inner contents, box the wrapped set, and then add another layer of shrinkwrap around the box, stick the box in a case with 11 others, shrinkwrap the case, stack cases on a pallet, and then wrap the pallet?
For that matter, could some of the components in that kit be used again? Why do we design so many products to be used once and then thrown away?
My comment ended there–but that’s only the beginning of a much larger discussion. Some other questions to raise would include:
When can we use nontoxic natural cleansers and disinfectants such as baking soda and peroxide—and when do we actually need something stronger?
Can we get our cleaning agents in eco-friendly formats such as pellets to be dissolved in water, rather than harmful ones such as aerosol cans?
What are the most ergonomic ways to clean that protect our hands, shoulders, and backs from injury?
How do we most effectively train cleaning personnel to understand health, environmental, and safety issues?
Please feel welcome to add your own questions in the comments.
Re: The Problem with Green Standard Offerings: You write, “focus on the main issue, health-focused cleaning; directing energy to one and not two main goals: health or sustainability, not both, or you compromise the program.” We need a reframing here.
The question is not whether to choose health over green practices (of course we do!). The better question is how to achieve the health outcomes while also minimizing negative and maximizing positive environmental impacts. As one very easy example, how much packaging do we really need? Does it really increase safety to wrap every component of a kit individually, place the wrapped components on a foam tray, wrap the entire inner contents, box the wrapped set, and then add another layer of shrinkwrap around the box, stick the box in a case with 11 others, shrinkwrap the case, stack cases on a pallet, and then wrap the pallet?
For that matter, could some of the components in that kit be used again? Why do we design so many products to be used once and then thrown away?
My comment ended there–but that’s only the beginning of a much larger discussion. Some other questions to raise would include:
When can we use nontoxic natural cleansers and disinfectants such as baking soda and peroxide–and when do we actually need something stronger?
Can we get our cleaning agents in eco-friendly formats such as pellets to be dissolved in water, rather than harmful ones such as aerosol cans?
What are the most ergonomic ways to clean that protect our hands, shoulders, and backs from injury?
How do we most effectively train cleaning personnel to understand health, environmental, and safety issues?
A whole bag of usable produce thrown away. Photo credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dumpster-a-plenty.jpg
I have a moral problem with food waste when others are going hungry. In the developed world, our hunger crisis has nothing to do with insufficient supply–and everything to do with throwing out vast quantities of usable food, and the people who need it being unable to get it. 30 to 40 percent of all food grown in the US is tossed. Some gets thrown away because it spoils–but 1) a whole lot of perfectly good food goes to the landfill, and 2) if one area has gone bad (like mold one side of a block of cheese), in many cases, the item can be trimmed and most of it saved. Smell, taste, and appearance can help you decide what can be salvaged and what should go in the compost.
Where it does food waste come from? To name a few: Restaurants cooking more than they sell. Uninformed consumers who think food has to be dumped once it passes its sell-by date. Produce wholesalers who reject fruits and vegetables because of non-uniform appearance. Commercial processors who are not set up to capture and process every bit.
Grocery stores need similar programs. One step in the right direction is services like Imperfect Foods and Misfits Market, both of which sell reject produce direct-to-consumers.
On the consumer side, the biggest results will come from education. We need trainings that demonstrate:
What foods really aren’t safe past their expiration dates, and which are perfectly fine (in general, meat products should be used or frozen before their expiry dates, opened refrigerated dairy is typically good for at least three days beyond, and unopened often for a week or two, while many processed foods are shelf-stable for years)
How to preserve various foods
Where to donate if you have too much food that’s still good
How buying locally grown organic foods minimizes waste (including the huge environmental burden of transporting foods across oceans and continents
What makes sense for your size household to buy in bulk, and what’s much better to just buy as much as you need inn the near future
How to use smell, appearance, and small tastes to determine whether food is still ok
When it makes sense to trim bad parts off, and when to discard the whole thing
How to use leftovers without getting bored with them
Environmentally friendly options for disposing of spoiled food (compost, slops for animals, etc.)
Someone asked on a discussion group if members in the non-profit world ever experience “feelings of inferiority or imposter syndrome when surrounded by friends and family in the private sector who earn more income”–and this is my response (perhaps in time to encourage you to consider a New Year’s resolution not to obsess about money):
This is not just an issue in the non-profit sector. I have many friends in the marketing world who are multi-millionaires. Although I’m a business-sector marketing and sustainability consultant, I have far more modest income than they do, and every once in a while, the idea creeps in that maybe I have no right to call myself a marketer because I have not reached anywhere near their financial success. But then I remind myself that:
1) Money is not an end, but a means to various ends–and I’ve been extremely skilled at using other means to those ends. I even wrote a book on how to have fun cheaply, back in 1995 (The Penny-Pinching Hedonist). I have a great deal of abundance in my life; it just happens not to be based in the size of my bank account.
2) If my goal had been to be materially wealthy, I would have accomplished that. But my goal was to improve the world, and I have some legacy underneath that tent (and hope to have more).
3) I have a terrific life that many of those marketing geniuses probably envy: I am actively involved in making the world a better place, I travel, enjoy live music and theater, and fine food, and I get to make my career doing the writing, thinking, and speaking that I love.
There’s plenty in those three articles that absolutely makes sense in today’s world–but there’s also quite a bit that’s at least temporarily obsolete.
With tips about how to bring reusable containers into the stores and organizing used clothing sharing events, it made me nostalgic for that very recent time before everything changed. And with a strong focus on combining climate, waste, and social justice, it was a refreshing reminder at how much more aware even we green folks are than most of us were 20 or 30 years ago.
True, it’s a bit more challenging to maintain a green lifestyle these days. But for the planet, it’s been a chance to recharge. The enormous reduction in motor vehicles on the road, planes in the sky, and factories running at full capacity allows our air and water to clean and regenerate themselves. And not to be Malthusian (and certainly not that I think this is a good thing), but the massive wave of deaths does reduce strain on the earth’s resources.
These positive changes have been somewhat offset by a dramatic uptick of certain other resources. Medical equipment, sanitation products, and even toilet paper are in short supply–and even more concerning, so are the medical personnel and hospital beds. And I’m guessing that as a world population, we’re generating a lot more waste and reusing a lot less.
In our own two-person, one-cat house, we’ve shifted some things as well. Our new routines might provide useful examples of how to be protected while staying as green as practical, so I’ll share a few of the details.
Water Use
What with not only washing our hands constantly for a full 20 seconds but taking a new glass or spoon every time and throwing our clothes in the washing machine every time we go to the store, our water use is probably triple what it was. We used to run the dishwasher about two, maybe three times in a typical week; now it’s more like five or six.
But even when we’re washing our hands so many times per day, we don’t turn the water on full force, and we turn it off when we’re not actually rubbing our hands under the faucet. We use just enough water to do a good job.
Fortunately, our heat and hot water are both on a green system powered by residual heat from cow poop and food waste running through our farmer neighbors’ methane digesters, and we live in an area where water is not scarce.
Cleaning Supplies
We’re also using somewhat more disposable paper products–but not all that much. For years, we’ve tended to use rags rather than paper towels to clean surfaces or mop up spills. But we are using paper towels or wipes to do things like keep our hands from touching door handles going into or out of a public place, wiping down shopping carts, etc. And of course, disinfecting the packaging we buy is something we never did before, and that uses a few paper towels.
My wife made us each a reusable mask. Since we’re usually shopping no more than once a week, it’s easy to wash them between uses.
We are not stockpiling, and we think the idea is silly. We’ve always bought toilet paper in 12-roll packs, and when we’re about half through, we get another 12-pack. When our bottle of dish soap gets down to half, we buy one more bottle. These patterns have not changed.
We are using more laundry detergent. Normally, we use a reusable laundry ball in the washing machine. We still do for regular wash, but for those post-shopping loads, we use hot or warm water, which the laundry ball isn’t designed for. We are almost through the box of earth-friendly detergent we bought about four years ago, but when that’s done, we inherited a huge tub of Arm & Hammer natural laundry powder when my stepfather died in 2018. I expect that it will last us the rest of our lives, considering we mostly use the laundry ball.
Packaging
As green consumers, we don’t bring a huge amount of packaged food into the house to begin with, and we save reusable glass and plastic containers when we do. We actually choose our brands of yogurt and hummus in part by whether we can put the containers and lids through the dishwasher and reuse them–and we use them until they break, usually at least 20 times. (We also factor in taste, quality, and price, of course.) Since forever, we use those jars to store bulk beans and grains, spices, and flours. Now, if we buy boxed cereal, for example, we wipe down the box and then either take the inner liner out and put it in a box we just finished, or put the cereal in jars.
When we buy bread or loose produce, we remove it from the plastic bag it came from and put it in one we’ve had pre-crisis; we have an entire hamper full of them. Cans get washed down with disinfectant, but other than cat food (which we buy in cases so the cans are protected), a small amount of canned beans, and coconut milk, we used almost no canned products anyway.
Since we’re not driving much, we have the luxury of leaving non-perishables in the car for a few days to decontaminate on their own–and while we still disinfect when we bring them in, we’re not quite as hyper-vigilant
Most of our produce is harvested at or near our home by the CSA farm we belong to, farmers at the local farmers markets and farm stands, or in our own garden. We’re washing everything more carefully. We’re washing citrus with soap. We’re peeling items like salad carrots instead of just grating the peels in with the rest of the carrot–but leaving peels on for cooked foods when appropriate, since heat kills the virus.
For years, we’ve kept reusable totebags in the car and brought them with us into stores. Now, we leave them in the car, load everything back into the shopping cart, unbagged, after it’s scanned, and then load them into our own bags at the car. So we’re still not getting bags, for the most part. This does mean we avoid shopping on bad-weather days.
Transportation and Shopping Choices
We live out in the country, seven miles from town. We’ve always ganged our errands into as few trips as practical, but now we’ve become almost religious about it. Going through the decontamination process every time we go shopping is annoying enough that we’re trying to shop no more than weekly, and preferably every two weeks. When we go, we think about everything we might need for 14 days, where we can get it with the fewest stops (rather than the lowest prices), and what route minimizes the miles to visit those stores.
One of the greenest things to do at this time is to actively support local independent businesses. We’ve shifted a much bigger percentage of our shopping dollars to the businesses we want to make sure survive, the ones that make our community a desirable place to live. We’re also ordering more online from these local businesses, and either picking up curbside or getting things shipped.
And sadly, we can’t car pool anymore. When we meet our friend who lives a mile from us to hike together (10 feet apart), she and we arrive in separate cars.
I haven’t needed any clothing except a package of socks I ordered online and picked up curbside. I would probably not go to a used clothing store right now, because it could be a germ factory. But I did arrange no-contact pickups for some books someone was giving away on our local Buy Nothing community, and for some items I had to offer. I let the books sit in the car and I will wipe them down before I shelve them.
We always hear from conservatives that they don’t see how we can possibly afford universal health care, let alone the Green New Deal. Thus, as a public service, I’m listing five ways (among dozens if not hundreds) we can locate the funds. This is not even pretending to be comprehensive (or in any sort of order), and I’d love you to add your favorite in the comments.
Eliminate the private for-profit insurance system, which jacks up the price. According to The New Republic (2015), this is costing us between $375 billion and $471 billion per year. The savings in getting rid of the middlemen would more than cover the increase in taxes.
Cap doctors’ salaries at something reasonable and generous. I’ll pull a figure out of the air: 200K per year for generalists, 300K for specialists—but it could be higher or lower.
Eliminate the crazy subsidies and price protections in so many industries, and particularly fossil and nuclear fuel, Big Pharma, highways and bridges to nowhere, and chemiculture-based Big Ag. We are subsidizing all sorts of things that should not be subsidized! Our policies should support the changes we want society to make (but right now, our policies interfere with those changes.
Cut the military budget down to the expenditure of China (the country second on the list). Right now, the US is spending an obscene $649 billion per year (2016) to “defend” 329,345,285 people (more than the next seven countries combined). Yet China manages to protect 1,420,615,635 people, more than 4.3 times the US figure, with military spending of just $146 billion (2016), or less than a quarter overall, less than a sixteenth per capita. So if the US slashed military spending by 75 percent to match China’s, it would still be spending more than four times per person than China does. Surely that would be enough to protect ourselves!
So next time you meet someone who wonders how to pay for the world we want, this article gives part of the recipe. Readers, please add your own favorite ways to find the money for these improvements, and please include a source for your data.
Guest Post by Wayne Stevenson Thomas, in San Antonio, Texas
[Editor’s note: We stayed with Wayne on our first trip to San Antonio many years ago, and have stayed in contact. I am always looking for examples of for-profit businesses that serve a greater good. If you’ve got an example and would like to guest-blog, please write to me through this site.]
Thrift Shop Interior
Cliff Morgan was an executive at the local St. Vincent de Paul. They had a big operation of recycling the items they couldn’t sell or give to the poor. But he and the St. Vincent board found that the not-for-profit model didn’t allow him the flexibility he needed to operate. (Something about how all contracts or agreements had to go to the board as well as any expenditures above a fairly low number.)
So St. Vincent decided to spin off the operation into a for-profit, which Cliff owns. SA3 Community Recycling serves three communities of interest: Nonprofits who receive donations they cannot use, nonprofits who need items, and citizens (as represented by our governmental organizations).
He collects unneeded items from providing nonprofits. He pays them for clothing, shoes and bundled cardboard, generating a small revenue stream for them while allowing them to concentrate on their mission, rather than on disposing or selling unwanted material.
He contacts receiver nonprofits to provide them exactly the items they need from the stream of items he receives from the provider nonprofits. He provides exactly what they need. For instance, Dress for Success might need 5 size 16 Women’s business suits. SA3 would pull exactly that out of their stream and no more.
For the citizens as a whole, he contracts with governmental organizations to keep items out of the landfill. For instance he accepts cathode ray tube TVs from the providing nonprofits and disassembles them. He does the same with other electronics (if he doesn’t have another nonprofit that can use them.)
He generates income (as I understand it) by selling the clothing and cardboard for a bit more than he pays for it, and by selling the metal and other material captured from the electronics. He pays his staff, who do the pick-ups and supervise the volunteers who help sort the items that come through the door.
Among the nonprofits he provides with items from his stream are: Habitat for Humanity (building material), the Diaper Bank (loose and packaged diapers), Dress for Success, Spare Parts (an arts nonprofit that provides used and repurposed items to local art educators) and Samministries (household items for families leaving shelters). He also provides items as needed to several St. Vincent operations in South Texas. I believe he sincerely wants to recycle as much as he can within the community (and have connected him with several other receiver organizations).
Wayne Stevenson Thomas is a former volunteer and assistant manager at Jefferson Thrift Store in San Antonio.
I read Seth Godin’s daily blog almost daily but I missed this one from a couple of days ago. I think he’s absolutely right. Kids need time in nature, to daydream, to make friends, and do things that don’t involve a screen.
And they need to develop independence. It’s a myth that you can protect your kid from all bad or even uncomfortable things. And some discomfort is necessary to growth. Otherwise, when they do hit a challenge, they are completely unable to cope. I believe in parenting that presents gradual increases in challenges. That doesn’t mean forcing kids to do things where they have zero interest or skill, but helping them find the places where growth is exciting, and helping them get through the uncomfortable incidents in their lives–but not by attempting to seal them off in a vacuum tube somewhere.
Then there’s the effect on our biology. I know from paying careful attention to my own body that I’m most comfortable if my on-screen shifts are an hour or less. Research confirms that prolonged computer use creates health problems (one of 369,000,000 results for “health effects of computer use”, BTW).
Electronic babysitters are not really new, just intensified. In my day, many of my peers were shuttled off to the family television, nicknamed, for good reason, the “boob tube.” Mainstream TV in the 1960s, and especially kid programming in the pre-Sesame Street, pre-Mr. Rogers days, sabotaged intelligence and reinforced a culture of violence. Even the years-later and scrupulously politically correct Barney worked really hard to dumb things down, and that was public TV–while Sesame Street, although a terrific show, changed our thought patterns and shortened our attention spans by chopping up several stories into little pieces and scattering them throughout the show.
Luckily, my mom believed in limiting TV. We were allowed two hours a day, after completing our homework, and nothing too violent. I am very grateful to her for this rule, and to my first grade teacher who recognized that Sally, Dick, and Jane bored me–I was reading at age three–and sat me down in the back of the room with a 4th-grade geography book. Under these two influences, I became an avid reader. From then on, any time I felt bored, I could escape into a book. I discovered a world of ideas (and their potential to create a more just, eco-friendly world) in biography, science, and “think” books…alternate worlds in science fiction…wonderful characters in literary fiction…deductive reasoning combining with intuitive leaps in detective novels. I always say I became a writer because I’m interested in everything–but being a reader created that interest. Oh, and I still find geography fascinating.
My interest in reading predates school. I still remember being frustrated because the New York Public Library wouldn’t let me get a library card until I could write my name, which only happened two or three years after I was reading. My mom had to use some of her precious allotment to keep me in reading material. Years later, when NYPL lifted the 6-books-at-a-time limit, my mom would take a shopping cart over to her branch, fill it up, read the books on her 3 hours of bus commuting per day, and trade them in two weeks later for another batch. I started tracking the number of books I’m reading a few years ago, and it’s ranged from 83 to 88 per year. This year, it will probably be more like 75, because an all-consuming family situation cut deeply into my reading time this fall. It’s at 71 as of today. And reading is eco-friendly and frugal (thank you, public libraries and friends with interesting books), too.
We read Charlotte’s Web to our daughter when she was four. At seven, it was the first full-length chapter book she read on her own. A few years later, she got to play Charlotte in a local theater production. In college, she did a long academic paper on the deeper philosophical implications of
Thomas Edison took 10,000 steps to invent a lightbulb. Could your child be so patiently focused on a task?
Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Now she’s about to get a master’s degree in teaching adult literacy.
Today, at least, screen time is much more interactive. Instead of sitting passively, kids create scenarios and alternative endings, share their discoveries on social media, etc. But they do it in nanobits.
But in today’s electronic world, I worry about attention span, focus, creativity–and empathy; I see a rapidly growing culture of intolerance (125,000,000 results on Google for “social media bullying”). In a world with no attention span, how can we make the next lightbulb discovery? Edison himself described inventing the lightbulb as a 10,000-step process. Nanobits don’t lead down that torturous path. Reading, meanwhile, reinforces attention span, focus, and creativity. Whether it narrows or widens your horizons depends on what you choose to read.
And reading can also be interactive, because you create your own storylines and then read further to see if you’re right.
What if your kid has learning disabilities or other issues that make reading difficult? Try audiobooks, or make the time to read aloud, or bring the books down a couple of grade levels until your child is ready for more. Or substitute other equally creative activities, from one-sentence-per-person storytelling to counting how many ideas you can get on a stroll through a forest. Even kids who love to read can benefit by broadening their creative repertoire.
Stumbling across this article on bicycle-powered-everythings (bicimaquinas) in Guatemala—grain mills, water pumps, nut-shellers, blenders, and more—I’m reminded once again of the key question to ask if you want to spark innovation while keeping an eco-friendly focus on using fewer resources.
Too often, we focus on the tool: asking questions like “how do I get a new tractor?” But what is a tool? It’s a means of accomplishing a task! So the real focus should be on the task: “How can I get this done?” Asking “how can I get harvestable plants” might lead to plowing with draft animals—or to no-till farming techniques.
Green entrepreneurs (or frugal ones) refine that question. It morphs into “How can I accomplish this with the fewest resources?” Money and time are resources. So are raw materials, energy, water, plant seeds, animals, and so forth.
The people at Maya Pedal, the organization profiled in the bicimaquinaarticle, understood this. They looked around and realized there were a lot of junk bikes out there that could still do plenty of useful work, just not as transportation. They’ve come up with 19 different models so far.
Bicycle technology is cheap, accessible, understandable, and versatile. In fact, my latest book Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World mentions a number of creative bike technology uses, even including a bike-powered trash hauling company. I also know of a fitness center that harnesses the energy of their bike-pumping clients to light the room.
We can ask this question in many situations—and it creates abundance. Asking “how can I power my electronic devices easily and cheaply without negative environmental consequences” might lead to developing something like the amazing Blue Freedom frisbee-sized hydroelectric plant (no dam required).
This blender is one of 19 different types of bicimaquinas—bike-powered equipment—developed by Maya Pedal in San Andrés Itzapa, Guatemala
Back when laser printers were retailing for $7000 and I had only a dot matrix, I asked myself how I could offer laser quality to my clients without spending that kind of money. That led me first to rent time on a nearby laser printer for a dollar a page, and later—when I spotted a remaindered model for $2500—to organize a co-op of four local business owners who chipped in $700 each to buy the printer and a sturdy stand for that very heavy machine. Since I organized the co-op, the printer lived in my office.
Amory Lovins, founder of Rocky Mountain Institute, asked himself how to build a really energy-efficient house that could fund the energy improvements out of capital savings. All the way back in 1983, he built a near-net-zero-energy luxury home that didn’t need a furnace or an air conditioner (in the snowbelt outside Aspen, Colorado, where the biggest industry is skiing). I have a detailed study of Lovins’ work in Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, by the way—including the energy retrofit of the Empire State Building that saves $4.4 million per year in that building’s energy bills.
What’s the second question you might ask? How has nature already accomplished this task? But that’s an exploration for another time.
Thanks Heath Dannis, @dannis_heath for sharing the great story about bicimaquinas.
The Washington Post reports that the never-finished, never-operated Bellefonte Nuclear Power Plant, in Hollywood, Alabama is for sale at the bargain-basement price of $36.4 million. It has cost more than $5 billion to build as much of it as Tennessee Valley Authority managed to complete, so this isn’t just pennies on the dollar. Each penny of the purchase price leverages $137.36 of construction investment—which, if my math is right, works out to a pretty incredible 1,373,626.37 percent return on investment (ROI), if the plant could be amortized that way. Kind of like getting a Ferrari for the price of a Matchbox car (little toys about two inches long).
The unfinished Bellefonte nuke in Alabama is for sale. Let’s have some fun figuring out what to do with it.
Of course, the plant can’t be amortized that way. It was built to turn atoms into smaller atoms and electricity (and, by the way, tremendous waste heat and a whole soup of poisonous and radioactive waste). In all likelihood, the plant will never fulfill its intended purpose. And that’s a good thing!
I want your outlandish AND your practical ideas. Please submit one of each as a comment on this page, in this format: Outlandish: (describe your idea in one to three sentences). Practical: (describe your idea in one to three sentences). Also please tell me how you learned about the contest so I know whom to thank. If you wish, you may link to a page giving more details. Each entry must include both categories (and the link to your posting address or Facebook screen name must function, so I can contact you if you win).
Oh, and comments are moderated, so don’t even bother posting racist, sexist crap or unrelated commercial spam. It won’t get posted and it WILL get you reported and blacklisted.
All entries must be received by 11:59 PM Eastern Time, Thursday, October 20, a bit over a month from the day I post this.
Want to be a winner? Make your Outlandish entry very humorous but not offensive. And make your Practical entry eco-friendly and specific. For instance, it’s not enough to say “a renewable energy project.” I want to know the type and why it’ll work there.
The winner in each category will get a 30-minute consultation with me to discuss any aspect of marketing, green/social entrepreneurship business profitability, book publishing, or green living–and a copy of my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (acclaimed by Jack Canfield, Seth Godin, and others) as well as my ebook, Painless Green: 111 Tips to Help the Environment, Lower Your Carbon Footprint, Cut Your Budget, and Improve Your Quality of Life—With No Negative Impact on Your Lifestyle. Total value of the prize is $135, which is as close as I can come to the amount of construction cost each penny covers. And you’ll be in a press release I’ll send out announcing the winners.
I am the judge, and I’m not responsible for lost or misdirected entries, I assume no liability, blah blah blah (standard contest disclaimers).
