capitalism4good

News Tidbits

Just a few interesting and somewhat random things I've been reading:

• In a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal (titled "Common Sense Ecology for Homes"), someone pointed out a fundamental inconsistency in the green building craze.  Basically, the two goals of environmental footprint and healthy lifestyles have been conflated, and while they usually go together (making furniture with fewer toxins is good for the earth and good for your family), they are not always in alignment. In particular, tightly-sealed homes are good for energy efficiency but bad for indoor air quality.  So we can't always have our cake and eat it too, though that always seemed like a silly expression to me, since we generally do eat our servings of cake... but I digress...
• There's a new book out that I've very much like to read, called The Marketing of Thirst,* by Elizabeth Royte.  Issues of water scarcity and the bottled-water industry are coming to the forefront, and I think they will (justifiably) be getting more and more attention over the coming years.  Another book review that caught my eye: Labor Pains by Steven Greenhouse, which chronicles the decline of unions and the corresponding systemic problems in how American workers are treated today.
• There was an article on Recycline, a company I've been following for some time because I admire its goal of creating a use for recycled plastic by making products that are also themselves recyclable.  However, I recently tried to walk my talk about them, and failed.  For one, their "disposable" plates and cutlery are so durable they are actually dishwasher-safe, which makes me feel that they must have more material in them than I really need - perhaps they are more like a substitute for regular plates than for disposable ones.  Second, they cost at least 5 times as much as the alternatives.  I don't mind a 20% markup, but 500% is tough.  I'll be looking for FSC certified paper plates instead.

*Note: Apologies, I inadvertently mixed up the book title and the book-review title. As you can see from the author's comment below, the real title is Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It.  Great, that's a much better title!

Green Weddings and the Absurdity of Gift Wrap

I'm getting married in less than a month, and have been watching in delight as some early gifts come in - and in horror as I unwrap a 2ft x 2ft box to find that it contains 25 pieces of indestructible silverware, along with enough packaging to double our normal weekly landfill contribution.

Seriously, I don't expect everyone to be "green" and I'm certainly not the perfect environmentalist myself, but it's absurd.  The silverware, for example, came in 5 different boxes which were surrounded by yards of bubblewrap inside a big cardboard box, which in turn had several yards of cloth trademarked ribbon around it, and then a huge volume of paper to fill up the space between it and the shipping box.  You could have fit a small child in this thing.

I've spoken to that particular vendor (Crate & Barrel), and while the staff is sympathetic, there is simply no way in the current system to request less packaging - fairly hypocritical given the new in-store "green packaging" program.  The other places we're registered aren't much better.  Overall, I think REI has used the most minimal packaging - but they've also tended to ship small items separately when combining them would have been better.

Given the recent popularity of "green weddings," along with the cost of packaging and shipping, this seems like a huge oversight - and also a giant opportunity.  I'm sure some couples would choose to register at one store over another if the environmental benefits were significant, and there is certainly room for significant improvement.