capitalism4good

The war against the plastic bag

Several months ago, I became appalled at the amount of trash coming out of my apartment. It just suddenly struck me that my weekly bags of garbage, multiplied by all the other people doing the same thing, year after year, added up to a completely and utterly unsustainable system.  Every time I took out the trash, I was reminded of how ridiculous my former assumption had been: that this is OK simply because everyone else has been doing it my whole life. In actuality, it isn't OK, for precisely the same reason.

Everything at its proper scale

Over lunch I was reading from my copy of The Omnivore's Dilemma, and found a great quote in the section that describes Polyface Farm, a "beyond organic" enterprise that strives to use sustainable closed-loop cycles as much as possible (e.g., grass feeds cows, which leave cowpies, which grow grubs, which feed chickens, which fertilize grass...).  Here's the quote that caught my eye:

"It's all connected. This farm is more like an organism than a machine, and like any organism it has its proper scale. A mouse is the size of a mouse for a good reason, and a mouse that was the size of an elephant wouldn't do very well."

Public bicyle rentals in Paris

Now this is something I wish every city had: an affordable publicly-managed bicycle rental program. Paris is launching the program on July 15th, in celebration of Bastille Day - rather than setting some prisoners loose which was the old tradition... but I digress. 

The new service, called Velib, will start out with 750 stations and 10,000 bicycles, which will be open 24x7 and will be spaced only about 300 meters apart. Cost of a one-year unlimited use membership: 29 euros.  Even tourists can use this new form of public transport for just one euro per day.

Michael Moore’s “Sicko”

Last week I saw Michael Moore’s new cinematic tirade: Sicko. Although Moore is generally too sensationalist for my taste, a sweeping endorsement from Oprah had me wondering if this film might be different – and indeed it was.

Moore is still opinionated and not entirely balanced, but Sicko compellingly paints a picture of an unacceptably broken healthcare system in the US. He follows the stories of people from different walks of life, including 9/11 ‘heroes,’ who have been unable to get adequate healthcare for their respiratory ailments because they were not City employees. Another memorable example is an uninsured man who sawed off two fingers and had to choose between them a the hospital – because he couldn’t afford to re-attach both. There are also countless examples of people who had insurance but were denied coverage for much needed care, based on the most ridiculous of reasons.

Taking a LEED on home building

Apparently, the green building craze sweeping the nation has expanded from commercial projects to private homes. The Economist recently reported on new LEED standards, now in a public-comment phase, for certifications of single-family dwellings.

No one knows yet if the cost of formal certification will pay off in higher home values, but so far that doesn't seem to be as relevant as one might think. Some homeowners are willing to pay the $3000 price tag regardless, as a personal statement - while others consider it a moral duty to use that chunk of change for more green design features rather than a showy label.

I'm just happy to see real evidence that people care about making their dwellings and workplaces more environmentally friendly, as one of many facets to the growing sustainability movement.