Category: Innovation

By Posted on Posted in Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Innovation Tagged with , , , ,

Don’t call me a potty-mouth, but today, I’m going to talk about porta-potties.

You see, I spoke at SolarFest again this past weekend, and once again, I noticed some major innovation. A few years ago at SolarFest, I first encountered vented porta-potties: a major new innovation.

This year, another one: Porta-potties earmarked “pee only,” with a catch basket to make sure the rule was followed.

These toilets are collecting urine to use as fertilizer on hay fields, under the auspices of the Rich Earth Institute. It’s a pilot project sanctioned by the US Department of Agriculture.

And I have to tell you, it smelled great even near the end of a big festival day. I’ve been in home bathrooms that didn’t smell as good.

We can and should incorporate these kinds of innovations into every aspect of society. Always, we need to ask ourselves how we can live better, use fewer resources, and generate less waste or turn the waste we do create into something useful.

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By Posted on Posted in Business-general, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Publishing, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , ,

This year, at Book Expo America, I interviewed Enrique Parrilla, co-founder of pentian.com, with offices in Sevilla (Seville), Madrid, and Los Angeles. Pentian marries publishing services with crowdfunding—something I don’t think the publishing world has seen before, and something that to me at least seems more attractive than the typical subsidy publishing model of most publishing services companies (which is not, typically, a good deal for the author). How it works out remains to be seen—and meanwhile, here’s what Parilla had to say about it:

The main difference between Kickstarter etc. and us is that the backers provide the funds. [Kickstarter donors[ may get a signed copy, a named character, but that’s it. We wanted to create a connection between the author and the community. A financial connection. The backers receive a percentage of sales.

Benefits to author:
Every backer becomes invested in success of the book. You get a much more viral connection with the market, you have 20, 40, 50 backers.
You make every backer a publisher, and they obtain profit from the success of the book.

You present the book proposal to us. We own the entire production chain, layout, design, marketing, production, distribution. We’re able to assess the costs of publication, and publish at a substantially lower cost. We are not getting a fee on the production. Once the sales start, we work with the net profit. But the cost of production will change from one continent to another, so it is difficult to come up with percentages on the retail price. So we take all the net profits and put them in a big bag. 50% goes to the backers, proportional to their investment. 40% goes to the author. 10% goes to the publisher.

The model is disruptive in several ways:
The percentage to the publisher is much lower because so much goes to the backers and the authors. This is sufficient, because the cost of production is covered by the fundraising campaign, and we print on demand.

Initially, when we receive a manuscript or proposal, there is an evaluation. If the thing stinks, we will offer to fundraise for professional editing services. We will come up with a budget, custom made for each proposal. If they need an illustrator, we’ll budget for that.

We will accept anything not indecent or violent. We have done fundraising books for charities, novels, children’s books. 70% fiction, 20% nonfiction, and the rest is a hodgepodge.

Unlike Kickstarter, we put a cap on the funds to be raised. We are really striving to be fair and to provide a sense of urgency. If you see a book is doing well, if you do not jump in, you may be left out. We can do additional campaigns for marketing, etc., but once we set the budget, when it’s gone, it’s gone. So you see the funding accelerating rapidly when a book hits 60-70% of its funding goal. The viral concept works really well. People start swarming out, and we don’t always understand why—but when it happens, it happens very quickly. Some books sit at 5% and don’t get funded. The investors get the full amount returned. If the author raises half, we’ll look at options like digital-only format. We’ll look at options to make it work.

Backers do not have the certainty that a book will get funded. As a publishing company, we make sure the publishing happens and the book sees the light of day.

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By Posted on Posted in Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environmenl, Environment, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Green Business, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Innovation, Peace and War, People Helping People, poverty, Technology Tagged with , , , , ,

Watch this video about the Copenhagen Wheel, a device that captures and stores energy from cyclists pedaling and coasting, and supplements pedal power on the uphills or over long distances. And then read a few of the comments.

To me, this is brilliant technology! First, it makes biking—and particularly bicycle commuting over distances of 20 to 50 miles—an attractive option for tens of thousands of people who’ve felt unwilling to try it before. That, in turn, reduces the number of cars on the road, which has dozens of advantages to the planet and to our pocketbooks. Second, it makes it possible for the moderate cyclist (like me) to go much farther by bike.

A lot of the comments are angry that this will disrupt their exercise. I think they’re not thinking about it the right way. Instead of blaming a machine for interfering with their workout, think about the ability to bike instead of drive to good riding places some distance away, or to bike much farther distances to explore an area farther out.

I do ride for exercise. And I do face a BIG hill when I go out my door. I’ve learned to manage it, but when I first moved to that area, it was very tough. Something like this would have been a nice transition as I learned to conquer that tough hill.

And for the exercise-only bikers, I have one more suggestion: write to the company and tell them you want a manual override option: an off switch, in other words. Then you have the boost when you need it.

Let’s apply this kind of creativity to every aspect of our lives! We could not only solve climate change but war, poverty, and other global issues. I wish this company much success!

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Innovation Tagged with , , ,

This morning, I chanced across Green Inventions: 10 Hot Eco-Innovations That Could Change The Planet on Huffington Post Green. It’s a good list, including such modern wonders as LED lighting, industrial-scale composting, and LEED green building certification. However, it’s far from complete.

At the end of the article, readers were offered a chance to add to the list. Here’s what I wrote:

There are so many wonderful innovations: Zero Waste, passive solar design, urban rooftop farming (something I’ve been advocating since about 1980), small-space vertical gardens for apartment dwellers, lower-impact adaptive technology like using a tiny wheelchair hatchback instead of a big galumphing gas-guzzling wheelchair van (the hatchback door becomes a ramp–no hydraulics needed), solar chargers, the Stretch building code…the list goes on and on.

It’s an exciting time, and I am optimistic. Yes, it would have been easier to make all the sweeping changes 30 years ago–and we already knew how. I know of a house deep in the Colorado Rockies near Aspen (think snow, cold winters) that was designed so well–in 1983–that not only doesn’t it need a furnace, it has banana trees in the sunroom. But we can still get it together and reverse the damage to the planet while creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. All we need is the will.

I realize I didn’t even mention the money we save when we do these things, though I did get one of the economic arguments in (jobs).

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Green Business, Innovation, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , ,

Note to manufacturers: your green products (including recycled products) have to compete on quality. If someone buys a recycled product and discovers it’s crappy, not only are they a one-time customer who won’t repeat, but they’re also a negative talking machine, trashing not just your product but in many cases, green products or recycled products in general.

In other words, any time you put out crap in the name of selling recycled products, you hurt the prospects of every green business. Don’t rush to market; take the time to get the quality right first!

This rant was inspired by the cleanup after my daughter’s Passover Seder.  She had recycled aluminum foil. I was excited to see it, as I hadn’t known such a thing was  available in the consumer market. But my excitement quickly turned to frustration when I tried to use it, and discovered it was so brittle that I had to use about three times as much; it ripped wherever I touched it. It was as bad as the first generation of biodegradable diapers that we tried to use when she was a toddler, circa 1990. As bad as the solar cell-phone charger I bought a year or two ago that was so ineffectual I returned it for a refund.

Now, I’m a committed green, and I will give recycled aluminum foil another try in five years or so. But if this had been my first experience of a recycled product, it probably would have been my last.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Activism, Energy & Sustainability, Innovation, People Helping People, Technology Tagged with , , , ,

I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy. Especially when I see evidence all around me of brilliant minds hard at work solving “intractable” problems, I freely admit that I’m an optimist. The human capacity to destroy ourselves is eclipsed by the human capacity to creatively collaborate, and to dig ourselves out of the mess.

And since writing is what  do, I’ve wanted to do a big-picture book on this, for many years. Last month, I started writing an essay on this, and I think it will evolve into the proposal for my ninth book.

To give you a bit of inspiration on this snowy afternoon (here in Massachusetts, anyway), I want to share two sentences from a section of the essay entitled “Throw Away Assumptions”:

Assumption, 18th century: humans can travel no faster than the fastest horse. Reality: humans aboard the International Space Station have traveled at 17,247 miles per hour; future technologies such as warp-space drives and tesseracts, imagined by speculative fiction writers, could potentially take us orders of magnitude faster.

Shifting our attitudes from the impossibility of going more than 15 or 20 miles an hour to hurtling through space at more than 17,000 mph took a couple of centuries. With today’s future-think mindset, solving the problems of the world ought to be a whole lot quicker. Especially considering the consequences of failure.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Innovation, privacy, Technology, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

In all the buzz about Google Glass, some people are raising deep concerns about privacy. Mostly about the privacy the wearer of Google Glass will sacrifice.

But the issues go well beyond that. Mark Hurst’s very thoughtful article, “The Google Glass feature no one is talking about,” for instance, brings up the disturbing spectre of Google creating a world where everyone is watching YOU. In other words, non-users could be deeply impacted, and human behavior may actually shift in response to the Big Brother phenomenon of being under constant surveillance, person-to-person as opposed to camera-to-location.

Yet I think privacy concerns may be far less significant than something I don’t hear anyone discussing AT ALL: the question of whether literally seeing the world through Google Glass’s technology is essentially a radical shift in the human experience: an engineered electromechanical “mutation” that could have results as far-reaching and unforeseen as genetic engineering.

Already, we live in a world where centuries-old patterns of communication have been blown apart by computers, mobile phones, and other disruptive technologies. And for the most part, this is positive–despite idiocies like the pedestrian I saw the other day who couldn’t stop texting long enough to see if it was safe before he crossed the street. But when a device becomes an extension of our bodies to such an extent, I have to wonder: What are the consequences of seeing the world through the Internet and Google Glass, rather than through our own eyes, as we walk down the street? What happens when governments or corporations start filtering and controlling our very sensory input, even when we’re in the “natural” world away from our computers?

I’m not a Luddite. But I do believe in the Precautionary Principle, which states that we should not engage in actions that have potentially harmful consequences if we don’t know what those consequences are. Violating the Precautionary Principle has led to many calamities, from catastrophic climate change to ecosystems being thrown out of balance to the 250,000-year threat of global contamination by nuclear waste leaks. In other words, we should keep our assorted genies in the bottle until we know what we’re about to unleash. And I think Google Glass could be one such genie. Particularly if future iterations in totalitarian states make Google Glass or similar technology less optional, and less easy to remove.

Love to get your comments on this.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Green Business, Innovation, People Helping People Tagged with , , , , ,

For more than three decades, I’ve been suggesting that we need to see flat roofs as resources: they can provide space not just for solar energy, but also for gardens.

And growing up in New York City, where far too many people think that food comes out of cans or mysteriously arrives in the supermarket, this is especially true. New York has an enormous supply of flat roofs, many of which have terrific sun exposure.

So it gladdens my heart to see a project like this: utilizing flat roof space for year-round greenhouses in a long-depressed South Bronx neighborhood. On the roof of a public housing project designed to be green, in fact. My Western Massachusetts neighbor Joe Swartz (@SwartzFarm on Twitter), who is involved with this project, shared the first picture on a list we both participate on.

(The first link has an excellent picture. The second link has a crummy picture but a short informative article about the whole project.)

This is by no means the only example. It’s simpler to build without greenhouses, of course, if you don’t mind closing down for the winter. Here’s a 6,000 square-foot no-greenhouse rooftop commercial organic farm in northern Brooklyn, on a warehouse right across the river from Manhattan.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Green Marketing, Innovation, Politics Tagged with , , , ,

In the 1990s, the US had a 40 percent share of the world-wide solar market. According to widely respected sustainability consultant Gil Friend of Natural Logic (@gfriend), the current US share of the global solar market is a pathetic 5 percent, while China now has more than half the global market: 54 percent. And that’s 10 times as much solar as the US is producing.

Friend’s article doesn’t discuss such solar leaders as Germany, Brazil, and Israel, but I’d expect all of those are currently making more solar than the US is.

It’s really hard to take US government claims that they care about creating jobs and greening the economy very seriously when they let a plum like this slip away. Solarizing the US housing and commercial stock would create tens of thousands of jobs, lower carbon footprint immensely, and also reduce dependence on imported oil (while lowering oil bills too, of course) A trifecta win, and we let it get away! Earth to Congress: Get with the program, for goodness sakes! Erth to Obama: Press your agenda on this!

 

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Green Business, Innovation, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , ,

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 from the premise 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, he 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 society’s thinking about this: that we design machines that don’t require more and more pure, virgin raw materials, but instead can 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, 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 reycle 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 contrast, 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.

 

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