Comments on: Corporate responsibility – it’s a matter of desire

By: Joe Nutt

Joe Nutt — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 07:42:37 +0000

I was invited to attend a lecture last week given by Prof Michael Braungart whose Cradle to Cradle sustainability initiative has attracted some major international companies and I could see exactly why. He is an international research chemist who has developed a really seductive narrative for any business genuinely wishing to behave in a more eco-friendly way. He exposes the negative, punitive, typically puritanical and guilt-ridden thinking underlying the Al Gore approach and replaces it with a counter intuitive, but fascinatingly positive narrative.

His approach is genuinely holistic and he was able to trot out one example after another of where the accepted thinking or approach to what is considered green behaviour, is woefully misguided or just plain wrong. For example, you can feel as smug as you like for buying a new, greener car, but if it really is “green” and not black, then you can wipe that smile straight off your face because the copper in the pigment will have far more deleterious effects on the environment than anything to do with the engine or emissions.

He talks not about recycling buy…up-cycling, i.e. products can be disassembled into constituent parts, and re-assembled either as the same or as something else. He passed round some material used to cover airline seats which looked and felt, very high quality, but is…edible!. Like the rest of the audience, I was impressed not just by the real science he is so obviously in command of, but by the ingenuity with which he examines a manufacturing process and its chemistry.

His entire approach to green business and efficiency, struck me as extremely clever and makes current practice and language about eco-friendly business sound both false and redundant. His organisation is called EPEA.

By: Simon

Simon — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 09:42:54 +0000

It is surely right to minimise carbon emissions – but my understanding is that smart phone chargers would not be a very high priority if we were serious about cutting energy use.

Professor David MacKay (Physics Professor at Cambridge) has been crunching the numbers on energy savings. I’ll quote him

“My measurements indicate that my phone chargers consume less than 0.5W when left plugged in. The total power consumption of the average Brit is 5000W. (Including car driving, home heating, and so forth, not just electricity.) So obeying the BBC’s advice, always unplug the phone charger, could potentially reduce British energy consumption by one hundredth of one percent (if only people would do it). Is there any chance that this emphasis on phone chargers is like bailing the Titanic with a tea-strainer?”

He featured in a great ‘More or Less’: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/more_or_less/8016366.stm

By: Jamie

Jamie — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:52:14 +0000

Tim Jackson’s report for the Sustainable Development Comission is very much about this – he argues for Prosperity without Growth – and writes that we need to recognise that “the requirements of prosperity go way beyond material sustenance” and that prosperity has “vital social and psychological dimensions”.

I share your hatred of electronic photo frames. In my rather Puritan way, I’d much prefer it if the corporate sector (including designers and advertisers) focused on how they can help meet my needs rather than try to create new material ones.

I like this quote from Victor Papanek: “There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only very few of them. and possibly only one profession is phonier. Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others who don’t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today”.

With apolgies to any advertisers.