Link grab bag: Cars, Impacts, Marketers, Heated Swimming Pools and Employees better than CEOs

 

This is kind of pathetic. One luxury car company sues another. Who cares? This news has nothing to do with sustainability. My partners at Re*Move might disagree – they have been big Tesla fans. But from a Greenmonk perspective arguments about IP like this are so last 20th century. Compete on the basis of implementation people. Lower barriers to participation. And besides if you want a muscle car maybe you should buy an Alfa or buy a Pontiac and forget about the planet for a bit. If you want sustainability just drive slower.

Are you familiar with No Impact Man? Its a cool experiment.

In specific terms, the challenge is to take a year to develop and live a no impact lifestyle. Our approach will be to research our ecological options and run down our damage in one area at a time—solid waste, transportation, energy, for example. Our aim, over the course of the year, is to do no net harm to the environment. We’ll wind down in stages.

But to cause no net impact is impossible to do merely by restricting consumption and waste output. Just participating in society makes us responsible for the negative environmental impacts of society’s functioning, even if our personal lifestyle does no harm. To offset our societal ecological debt, we also plan to take actions that will have positive environmental impact. For example, we’ll volunteer with the Nature Conservancy to clean up garbage off the beach. To help sop up our share of the year’s CO₂, we will take part in a reforestation project to help plant trees.

Then there is The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption.

The problem with being off consumption is that you can no longer buy a ‘treat’ for yourself in order to snap out of a bad mood. Being off consumption means no comfort food, no self-gifting, no temporary postponement of pain by the rush of adrenalin triggered off by that perfect purchase.

But I knew that when I went off consumption. I knew that, to resist the temptation to buy, I’ll basically need to be happy all the time. I also knew that I’ll face my first big test as soon as I hit a bad day

I have written before about the Intel-powered central heating. But how about a POWER-heated pool? From Techworld comes a cool story Datacentre used to heat swimming pool. IBM did the design work in conjunction with a company called GIB-Services. Who says you can’t have luxury and sustainability?

The pool is being closed temporarily for repairs this summer, at which time the heat transfer system will be put in place, says GIB-Services CEO Hans-Rudolf Scharer.

“It isn’t so complicated,” Scharer says, explaining that water is used to transfer the heat. “We pump hot water to the swimming pool.”

Excess heat generated by datacentre computers is collected in a storage area, where it heats up water that is piped to a heat exchanger at the pool facility. There, the heated water raises the temperature of the pool water. The process repeats itself as often as necessary with the heat exchanger, true to its name, exchanging heat from one part of the water to another.

Finally – another Techworld story. This time based on a survey from Bell Micro. I am not so into the UK companies aren’t ready to green yet angle (tell me something I don’t know), but one finding quoted in the story really jumped out at me because of its grassroots up implications.

While 84 percent of businesses took green issues seriously, half said employees rather than chief executives were driving the change. 

If employees are driving the agenda, its far less likely to be simple green-washing or tick list filling. Go concerned employee people!