By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , ,

It seems we’ve escaped complete catastrophe at the six failed reactors in Japan damaged in the earthquake and tsunami—for the moment, But it was (and may still be) pretty dicey.

Two of the reactors had to be cooled with seawater, in a last-ditch effort to prevent catastrophic meltdown. Those reactors probably can’t be used to generate electricity ever again. And the chance that the other four will return to service is probably pretty low, considering the extensive damage, high levels of radiation, etc., not to mention the risk of further damage in future quakes.

Thank goodness this happened in Japan, the country with probably the best earthquake-related building codes in the world (imagine what would have happened if a nuke had been sitting on earthquake fault during last year’s quake in Haiti—shudder!)

But here’s my question: WHY in the name of creation are we still hopelessly, haplessly, playing with nuclear fire? Did we learn nothing from the Chernobyl disaster? Or the barely-contained accidents at Three Mile Island, Browns Ferry (Alabama), Enrco Fermi (Michigan) and other near-calamities at nuke plants not only in the US but around the world? The nuclear industry’s safety record is horrible, and as Chernobyl proved, we don’t always get lucky with containing the damage—and when we don’t, large areas are rendered uninhabitable for decades.

Back in 1979-80, I had a monthly column about the dangers of nuclear power. I devoted two of my columns to the possibility of accidents resulting from earthquakes, and that information was taken form commonly available sources (even in the pre-Google era). More than 30 years later, we appear to have learned nothing. And earthquakes are only one of a dozen or more very compelling reasons NOT to use nuclear power. Some of the others include terrorist threat, waste disposal issues that need to be addressed for a longer timespan than human history, the problem (with US nukes of sharply limited liability in the event of an accident), diversion for bomb-making…and perhaps most shocking, the lifecycle analysis that shows that by the time you count the energy and fossil footprint of mining, milling, processing, transporting, running the reactors, reprocessing, waste storage and transportation, etc., you don’t actually create very much energy. One study I saw even claimed it was a negative number! (And another study showed that renewable energy is two to seven times as effective in reducing greenhouse gases.)  For this very dubious benefit, we’re putting our own and every future generation at enormous risk???

Here’s my call to action:

  1. IMMEDIATE world-wide shutdown of any nuclear power plant within 100 miles of an active earthquake fault and entombment in the most solid possible barrier
  2. Phased shutdown of remaining N-plants over perhaps six months
  3. A world-wide Marshall Plan-style initiative toward the high-gain, relatively renewable low-cost energy solutions of the sort promoted by Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute in their “Winning the Oil End Game”: a plan to rapidly exit from fossil fuels without needing nuclear.
Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Green Business Tagged with , , ,

When is certification NOT a good idea? When the body doing the certifying owns the company being certified but doesn’t disclose this. Can you say “conflict of interest?”

“Tested Green” Environmental Certifications were neither tested, nor green.  The Washington, D.C. based company was apparently running a pay-for-certifications program and improperly stating that independent associations endorsed the certifications (the “independent associations” and Tested Green were all owned by the same person).

Ironically, the page where I first found this was trying to sell people on a high-priced and kind of dicey-looking conference about certification fraud. I had to dig around on Google until I found a link I felt comfortable sharing.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Green Business Tagged with , , ,

Packing waste is a scourge in our society. Filling landfills, choking birds, littering our streets, it definitely is a problem that needs to be addressed.

One way, of course, is by generating less packaging in the first place. Do companies really need the little plastic baggie inside the pouch inside the form-fitting foam insert inside the cardboard box inside the shrinkwrap inside a forest of packing peanuts inside a shipping box inside another layer of outer wrap? That kind of overpackaging is all-too-common among boxes I’ve opened. 100 years ago, many products were sold in bulk. We could certainly return to bulk packing for more things.

But another way is to deal with the packaging once it is created. As individuals, we can do a lot of this: reuse glass jars and plastic containers, recycle or compost cardboard and paper, bring our egg cartons back to the farmer, and so forth. But for a lot of the products sold through mainstream retail channels—and particularly for the less simple packing like aseptic boxes, snack chip bags, and drink pouches—we simply don’t know what do to with the packaging.

Enter TerraCycle(R). This company actually pays consumers to pack up their trash and send it off, where it gets transformed into a host of interesting products like fencing, picnic coolers, and—isn’t this cute—recycle bins. In all, the company creates 256 different products out of recycled packaging that would have (in many cases) been thrown in the landfill.

Cool, huh?

Also cool is the way the company involves schools in the collection effort.

BUT…with my particular consumption habits, the site doesn’t work for me. First of all, the company only collects 38 different types of waste, out of the thousands of possibilities. And of those 38, 13 require specific brands—not necessarily the brands I buy. I might dispose of one tube of Neosporin in a year, and that’s not worth collecting. But if I could bring all my empty tubes of toothpaste, skin cream, mentholated muscle-relief cream along with my single tube of Neosporin, that would be worth setting aside, if the drop off was convenient.

The company has made big strides since my last visit, in broadening many of the items from specific brands to generic categories taking any brand, but still…

Then there’s the matter of collection. Each of the 38 has a different set of collection sites. I can’t really see that I’m going to drive hither and yon, dropping off three wine corks here, two cereal wrappers there. And I don’t really understand the logic of having multiple collection streams for essentially the same kind of waste (e.g., a cardboard box for macaroni and cheese is handled differently form a cardboard box wrapped around a tube of Colgate toothpaste).

Using schools as an organizing force makes sense, but not all of us have school-age children. I’d love to see the company partner with landfill and transfer station sites around the country, so collection could be streamlined at the place we’re bringing our trash anyway.

And finally, while I recognize that e-mail can go astray and forms can break, it does bother me that I wrote the following and submitted it through the company’s website back on November 21. Six months later, I haven’t gotten an answer yet:

I was hoping to come to your website and determine whether there are collection points near me. I am surprised by how difficult that is–there’s no way to search by geography, only by product. And the products–so many of them tied to specific brands–don’t correspond well with my buying patterns.

Thus, even though I would be delighted to ship off my trash to you, I see no practical way to participate. I’d love for instance to be able to send you the plastic bags my home-delivery newspaper arrives in on wet days. Or sandwich baggies that are contaminated with food residue and no longer suited to direct re-use. Or the pet food bags which are paper lined with plastic.

Still, I wish them well. I’d love to come back in another six months and discover that it’s vastly easier to get rid of my junk and see it turned into great stuff.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,

“Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the world.” —Archimedes, 230 BC.

All of a sudden, it seems like the universe is dropping a lot of opportunities in my lap. The last few weeks have brought me these and other possibilities (all tentative):

  • A chance to speak in a country I’ve always wanted to visit
  • Working partnership with a startup that could very quickly scale up to be a major force in the environmental movement
  • Several big potential clients, including one who was recommended to me by someone who heard me speak and bought my book at the Sustainable Foods Summit in January, and whose CEO is an actual rock star
  • A remote, long-shot possibility to travel throughout Asia, Africa, and South America, making a movie and a book on sustainability (the longest of long shots, but I’m hoping!)
  • Agreement in principle from a new magazine in Asia to start running one of my new columns; that will make the third continent where a media outlet is running it.
  • An ongoing partnership with someone who has bought a quantity of one of my books in the past, and who wants not only to buy a few hundred of guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, but also to work with me on some ongoing speaking opportunities (for which he gets a nice commission, and therefore is likely to make it happen)

    • As you might gather, it’s been a pretty exciting few weeks.

    So…if you believe in Law of Attraction (LOA) stuff, you might be asking what I’ve done to create this torrent of abundance. I’m not sure, but I have some thoughts.

    I’ve made two big shifts in the last few months, and have another one pending.

    First, I’ve launched my two columns, Green And Profitable and Green And Practical—and set a specific monetary goal and a timetable to achieve it that would convert these columns to the primary revenue stream in my business. It has been a dream since my teen years to be a syndicated columnist, and I’ve made a couple of rounds over the years pitching the big syndicates. I decided that the most likely way it would finally happen would be if, rather than waiting for a big syndicate to pick me up, I did it myself. And I’m doing it!

    And second, I’ve set myself a time management regime and have been pretty good at sticking to it.

    Thirdly, I am moving forward on a new way of structuring my business that will free up significant time for me to focus on the parts of my business I most want to build (writing and speaking).

    And while I’m far from an LOA junkie, I do believe that the things we choose to focus on tend to dominate our lives. I’ve been focusing on these deep goals and I think the universe is responding by showing me enough opportunities to convince me I’m on the right track.

    And I also have a Great Big Goal: making a lasting and significant impact on the world and helping to shift planetary consciousness to create a healthy, just, and peaceful planet. Yes, I’ve learned to think big. I have seen big ripples from the little things I’ve done, and I want the columns to provide me a big enough platform that I could, like Archimedes with his giant lever, move the world.

    It’s going to be a wild ride…and I’m ready!

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Ethics in Government, Politics Tagged with , , ,

    What idiots in the GOP leadership decided to get their cafeteria out of the Greening the Capitol program, get rid of the biodegradables, stop composting, and switch to Styrofoam? Eeeeew!

    The “party of no” reaches a new low–whose ONLY justification is say “nyah, nyah, nyah to the Democrats. This is not just childish, it’s downright stupid. So much for budget constraints, too—their path, if I could call it that, is going to be a lot more expensive, long-term, than reusable dishes going through a Hobart, composting the wastes, etc.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Green Marketing, Uncategorized Tagged with ,

    Guest post by Cynthia Kocialski

    It seems as though green is here, there and everywhere these days. Everyday customers encounter companies that are green. Preschools are now advertising themselves as green schools. Dry cleaners are marketing themselves are being green. Landscape and maid services are green too.
    When every company, small or large, jumps on a trend, what happens? People ignore it. It becomes a common business practice. It is simply expected in the minds of the customers, and is no longer a competitive or marketing advantage.
    But wait … perhaps there is still a way to use your company’s green and clean efforts to your advantage – an indirect way. Marketing is about creating demand and every business person knows that it’s important to be different. Every business wants to be top of mind for their customer. It doesn’t matter how they remember your business just that they do remember it.
    Why not use your green efforts to promote your company? News and information organizations are all faced with the same problem each and every day. Their audience needs to read, hear, or view something tomorrow, but what? And along comes your company comes with a story about its green efforts – a hot topic these days.
    Green is touted everywhere. Companies label themselves as “Green”. But what does it really mean? What is a green preschool? What does a green dry cleaner mean? Even an Internet security software company claimed they would be a ‘green’ company in their start-up business plan.
    Public relations is most effective when it introduces audiences to your company and your product without trying to sell them. People want information. They like to be educated, rather than “sold.”
    Take the opportunity to educate and inform your customers about the specifics of your green-ness. Engage in a little shameless self-promotion.
    1) Contact the media about doing an article or an interview.
    2) Offer to speak at a meeting, conference or tradeshow.
    3) Write a guest post for a business or green or environmental blog.
    4) Offer a limited time promotion on Earth Day or environment celebrations.
    Many small businesses can benefit from the clean and green technology revolutions going on right now, even if your company does not directly use or offer products that are environmental-friendly.

    About the Author
    Cynthia Kocialski founded three tech companies and has been involved with dozens of other startups. She has written a book about her experiences in start-ups companies, “Startup from the Ground Up, Practical Insights for Transforming an Idea into a Business”. She also writes the popular Start-up Entrepreneurs’ Blog (www.cynthiakocialski.com) and has written many articles on emerging technologies. Cynthia can be reached at cynthia@cynthiakocialski.com

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life

    Back in January, when I started my new time management regime, I promised you an update at the end of February.

    The goals, you may recall:
    * Work for paying clients: 2 hours (120 minutes)
    * My own writing, research, and marketing: 1 hour (60 minutes)
    * Processing e-mail: 2 hours (120 minutes)
    * Participating in social media: 15-30 minutes
    * Dealing with finances, bills, recordkeeping, etc.: 30 minutes
    * Office and household organizing and cleaning: 30 minutes
    * Professional reading: 1 hour (60 minutes)
    * Physical exercise: 1 hour (60 minutes)

    I’ve fine-tuned it a bit since then. I started tracking a few new things: how much time I spend on reaching out to reporters who might interview me, and meeting planners who might hire me to speak. I’m also tracking how much time I actually spend being interviewed, and also a category of “mitigations”: reasons why on a particular day, my goals are unrealistic because I’m out of the office for several hours.

    For instance, if it’s a day I have to drive my mother to one of her medical appointments in New Haven, that’s three hours of driving and up to two hours of sitting there, and there’s no way I’m going to make all my goals for that day. But if I see that I was out of the office for four or five hours, I don’t expect the impossible from myself.

    On the days where I am around, I sometimes skew pretty far. But by keeping track, I can adjust on a different day. For instance, last week, I had two days in a row where I really focused on some urgent client projects. My goal is two hours per day. Last Wednesday, I did almost three–but then Thursday, when those deadlines had passed, I only did about half an hour for clients, and I did more on some other things.

    Where I have utterly failed to adjust is e-mail. Keeping e-mail down to two hours a day is an admirable goal, and has caused me to streamline my inbox a lot. I think I’ve unsubbed from at least 60 newsletters since the first of the year.I’ve had exactly two days where I spent less than the quota, and entirely too many where e-mail has consumed three or four hours.

    Yes, I could probably find another 20 publications to unsub from, but ultimately, in order to grow my business, I need to have someone else processing the routine e-mail. And because I’m tracking this, I’m able to quantify what had been a gut feeling (e-mail is taking too much time) and plan some ways of moving forward.

    At the same time, once I started tracking it, I was able to bring social media down to something much more reasonable, and still have a good presence. Desiring to keep it to no more than 30 minutes a day has made me much more efficient. Yet my Twitter stream is still very active, I’m participating actively on a few LinkedIn groups, and I show up on Facebook enough to matter (usually feeding in from Twitter).

    Yesterday was a day with no mitigations. Here’s what I did:
    Client work: 99 minutes (a little under)
    My personal work: 73 minutes
    E-mail: 178 minutes (a hair under 3 hours)
    Social media: 20 minutes (right on target)
    Paying bills: 90 minutes (our once or twice a month big effort, an hour over the preferred average, but making up for many days where there was little or nothing)
    Professional reading: 15 minutes (I’ll do some extra today, as there’s a book review I need to move forward)
    Exercise: 35 minutes (would have been longer, but it was too icy to take much of a dog walk, and at night I was literally falling asleep on the exercise bike and had to stop early; thanks to the dog, I’ve managed to stay on track most days)
    I spent only 20 minutes on tidying the office yesterday, but it is emerging from the chaos and feeling a bit less urgent, thanks to putting it on the daily schedule (though I have some goals for what happens when I’m all dug out—like going through my filing cabinets).
    I spent 25 minutes querying reporters and meeting planners yesterday, something for which I haven’t set a goal but have been tracking as of February 15 (it depends entirely on who is looking for what kinds of sources and speakers)—it’s ranged from 20 to 65 minutes per day: sorting and responding to reporters looking for sources on HARO and its competitors, checking out and responding to speaking leads from Google alerts.

    This whole thing is not an exact science. Sometimes I forget to start or stop a tracking category (or I think I’ve hit the button and it doesn’t register), sometimes I get interrupted by a phone call and let a few minutes chip into the category, and of course, sometimes one activity leads right into another, such as responding to e-mails that bring me to social media. But it’s a good approximation of how I’m spending my time. I don’t beat myself up when I’m off-goal, but I do try to compensate for it in other ways.

    It’s also not perfect in that just because I’m spending a block of time on something doesn’t mean I’m experiencing high productivity. Yesterday, for instance, a full hour of my client time was chewed up researching something that should have been very easy to find. Sometimes, I’m not hugely efficient with a task even if I’m clocking it. But other times, I can power up and do a 1000-word article in 30 or 40 minutes (this one. 957 words, took 43 minutes), write a client project, and go go go.

    On the whole, I’ve had a very productive and focused two months, and I’d call the experiment a big success. One that will continue until I have a reason to stop.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in privacy, Shel's Personal Life, Web 2.0/Social Media

    Adam Boettiger, someone I’ve known online and respected for more than a decade, just put up a very provocative post speculating why Facebook, which clearly spends a lot of energy interacting with its user data, won’t make any of that data available in a meaningful way to the user him/herself.

    He’s not asking for other people’s data, but to know things like who has spent how long on his page within a period of time. Why? So he can more effectively reach out to the people who are validating him with the gift their time.

    Cultivating these relationships is certainly a worthy goal. I have certainly built relationships with people who I know because they comment frequently on my blog or my Facebook profile, or because they retweet or engage with me on social media. On a recent trip to Chicago, I took a couple of hours to have coffee with someone I know only through his reaching out to me on Twitter. Now that person has gone from someone who thinks I’m important on Twitter to someone I’d call a friend, and I welcome that. (Shout out: @WayneBuckhanan)—and he’s someone who I probably wouldn’t have paid attention to just reading his profile.

    But on the other hand, both from Facebook’s vantage and from my own as a Facebook user, I’m not all that concerned (of course, I’m not a very heavy user of Facebook).

    Looking at it from FB’s perspective: I assumed going in that there is no true privacy on Facebook. In fact, there’s no true privacy online, including one-to-one private e-mail. All of us who use social media have made a choice, conscious or not, that the value we get out of participating is worth the sacrifice of privacy. Those of us who are smart never post anything online that we would be embarrassed to see in our hometown newspapers. My son actually changed his profile name to something completely made up, because he doesn’t want anything he posts (and his posts are clean) to haunt him later.

    And I recognize that Facebook’s business model and valuation are based heavily on being able to sift the galaxies (mountain seems far too puny a metaphor) of data for a wide range of purposes, from displaying ads based on very narrow interest slices to suggesting friends. They’ve got enormous computing power, and yes, they ought to share an individual’s data with that individual.

    But as a user…do I really care that I don’t have that data? Would I have the time to deal with it if I did have it? Both questions get a no vote from me. Heck, I don’t even have time to check out the profile pages of every new follower on all the social media; that would be many hours a week. I check out a random few, and I feel a bit guilty about the rest. But I also have to get my work done, andmenwhile there’s the little matter of 300 new e-mails every day.

    The way I use Facebook is to dip in to my profile occasionally and Like or comment on a few things that catch my eye, and follow a quick swath of what’s happening to people in my world. Yes, I’m aware that I could be much more strategic with Facebook; certainly, people like Mari Smith have been very successful using it for business. But I’ve chosen Twitter as my primary social media platform, followed by LinkedIn (where I participate in a lot of discussion groups, and where those discussion groups give me much more leverage than Facebook groups. The friends set on Facebook is too randomized. Even something as simple as sending a message to everyone I’ve identified as part of a particular interest group (and I do categorize my friends) is too much work for the return in most cases, because of FB’s ridiculous limit of 20 people getting the same message at once, and suspending accounts of people who send too many batches of messages (or even accept too many friend requests) too close together. And because there’s no e-mail channel, I rarely participate in discussions on someone’s fan page. On LinkedIn, when I post to a discussion list, everyone on that list gets an e-mail notification. Not true with FB pages I’ve liked. This allows me to be promiscuous with the Like button, which I could never do if every page sent me a stream of mail—but it also means the Like button is essentially meaningless to me.

    And as Adam himself notes, there are lots of other ways to interact on FB besides spending time on a profile.

     

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics-International Tagged with , , , ,

    Early this month, I got an e-mail from a Professor Robert Brain, inviting me to speak at my full fee plus expenses for a rapidly upcoming conference in England. The topic he proposed was a bit off my usual topic, but one that I could handle.

    Follow-up mails from a Professor Woodman Walker included a letter of agreement to sign and requested more information from me. I wanted to find out more about the parameters of the speech, so I asked for some phone time. Our interview was scheduled for 8 a.m. my time this morning.

    In the meantime, I had asked my good friend Google to tell me what it new about these two “gentlemen.”

    The results were not encouraging:

    One of the links on that page led me to a full account of how the scam works. I also checked the Middlesex University staff directory. Oddly enough, the phrase “Robert Brain” brought back a listing of the staff directory, as you can see in the screen shot–but when I clicked through the directory itself, neither Robert Brain nor Woodman Walker showed up.

    Now, I’ve had a few speaking requests that seemed pretty flaky at first, and turned out to be real. So I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Here’s an approximation of how the conversation went:

    Me: “Good morning, this is Shel. How may I make your day special?”

    Him: “This is professor Woodman Walker of Middlesex University, UK.”

    Me (big, hearty): “Good morning, Professor. The first thing I need from you is the names, off the top of your head and you can give me contact information later, of three people who’ve spoken for you in the last year. There are some rumors about you on Google.”

    Him: hangs up.

    Speakers—be suspicious of any e-mail that asks for banking information in order to get a work permit (I didn’t get that far with him)—and don’t be surprised if a similar scheme shows up allegedly from a different school and different professors.

    You’ve been warned!

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in censorship, Protests and Crackdowns, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , ,

    TorrentFreak reports that the US Department of Homeland Security did a little sting on child pornography websites–but in addition to the 10 actual perpetrators they shut down, they managed to shut down 84,000 sites that were completely innocent! They all happened to use the same free webhost.

    I have never been an advocate of free webhosts, and one of the many reasons I’ve often cited is that spammers, etc. can contaminate a server and bring you down on a blacklist. But even I never imagined that sites would greet visitors witha very official-looking graphic bearing this text:

    Advertisement, distribution, transportation, receipt, and possession of child pornography constitute federal crimes that carry penalties for first time offenders of up to 30 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution.

    I’m also a long-time advocate of open Internet. We’ve seen in countries from Egypt to Iran to China what happens when governments interfere with Internet access, and how shutting the Internet has been used to protect totalitarianism.

    Mind you, I’m not saying the US government is totalitarian, but it certainly overreached this time (and not the first time, by a long shot). If you haven’t yet signed Free Press’s petition against the “Internet kill switch,” I suggest you go there right now and add your name.

    (Thanks to Michelle Shaeffer for alerting me to this.)

    Shel Horowitz’s latest book is Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson)

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail