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Water bottles of the future?

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Forget Richard Pim’s garden wall made of wine bottles. Here’s a much more serious idea for the drinks companies like Cadbury Schweppes, Pepsi and Coca Cola – pick up on the spirit of the beautiful ideas by Dutch designer Nienke Vording and stop shipping vast quantities of bottled water around the country, which then all get chucked into landfill.

Instead, sell gorgeous reusable water bottles – indeed promote designers to create all kinds of personal reusable bottles. Then install ‘water stations’ into local shops and other locations. Offer either tapwater (still or gassed-up, either of which you pay for) or mineral water from tanks (which you pay extra for). But charge a bit less than you would for bottled water.

And don’t cheat and only distribute water from the tanks. That’s as absurd as the huge logistics operation that underpins the water cooler industry, which busily expends energy shipping water barrels into every office building in the land.

Of course, in the Greenmonk spirit of innovation from the roots up, this could be done without the support of the major drinks distributors…

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Whole Foods: Stock, Spam, Suck

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Here is why.

My problem with Whole Foods as a customer is more prosaic- the food miles involved in getting their produce to market. But CEOs that have enough time on their hands to try and hurt other company’s share prices using forum posts, rather than focusing on customers and business problems, should reassess their priorities.

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Drink your way green

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How cool is this? In perhaps the ultimate example of ‘upcycling’ Richard Pim of Herefordshire has built a 19ft wide, 11ft high Garden ‘folly’ – or perhaps more modestly described, a shed – out of 3000 old wine bottles.

Pim got the idea after drinking wine in his garden, and holding the bottle up to the light and watching it sparkle:

“I thought ‘that’s it, I will make it out of wine bottles’. I had no problems getting hold of bottles. Most of Herefordshire knew what I was doing so I have had lots of donations. I have also drunk a good few myself.”

Ultimately, what matters about this is not that it is just a great example of recycling, but that it looks truly fantastic – imagine what the light will be like inside on a sunny day! If we get more green ideas like this, and perhaps fewer of the “we’re green” type ads we’re currently being bombarded with by huge corporates in the UK, the world will be a better place. More info at spluch.

Drinking yourself green? Cheers to that.

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Avoiding The Sere

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I didn’t know this word until it came across from Doctor Dictionary today- “sere”. Its what we really want to avoid.

Word of the Day for Friday, July 6, 2007

sere \SEER\, adjective:

Dry; withered.

. . .a country that has been transformed from a place of lush abundance to a sere, mutilated, inhospitable land.
— Zofia Smardz, “A Nice Place for Extinction”, New York Times, June 15, 1997

Recent rains have done little to relieve the sere conditions.
— Thomas Omestad, “The struggle over water”, U.S. News and World Report, April 10, 2000

Mr. Campbell, a biologist, spent three seasons in the Antarctic and returned with eerily clear perceptions of that sere and uninhabitable place.
— review of The Crystal Desert

, by David G. Campbell, New York Times, December 5, 1993

There was a lavatory at the end of the garden beyond a scraggy clump of Michaelmas daisies that never looked well in themselves, always sere, never blooming, the perennial ghosts of themselves, as if ill-nourished by an exhausted soil.
— Angela Carter, Shaking a Leg

Deserts can be beautiful, but they are inhospitable, and we really don’t need any more of them. Goats in the middle east, sheep in Australia, over-grazing, over-farming. Photo courtesy of CairoCarole.

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Towards Sustainability: We Are The Watchdogs

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SAP’s Amit Chatterjee points out that corporations are spending real money on this new-fangled sustainability thing. Dollars spent is always an interesting metric. You don’t pay McKinsey money to help you write a corporate social responsibility report. You bring them in to redesign parts of your business. This is a new kind of business process re-engineering (BPR), with a new focus, and new concepts of efficiency. Why is Greenmonk interested? Because the focus is on behavioural change.

“During the presentation, it was clear that there was a significant need for changing behavior.  I was trying to determine how long it would take to make this trend a reality vs. short-term FAD status.  Then I was hit with the most interesting stat of the whole presentation.  Another director of the Firm announced that McKinsey was currently serving 20 of the Fortune 100 around establishing or building out their corporate sustainability program.

Ladies and gentlemen, CSM has arrived.  Basically, when a large corporation is willing to hire McKinsey brainpower (which does not come cheap) to establish a strategy, it is no longer a fad, but a true initiative for change within an organization.  Thus marks the arrival of CSM into our lexicon as a legitimate method for competitive advantage or lever for shareholder value.  This is truly exciting news.”

I wrote about Amit and SAP’s Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) strategy a while ago over at Monkchips. I called GRC the new ERP. Well folks, what did ERP support? First wave BPR. What are we now facing? Sustainable BPR… Another wave of change.

Although this discussion may seem to be top down, and therefore not “green from the roots up”, and therefore outside Greenmonk’s remit, any successful organisational behaviour change is going to need bottom up commitments and ideas. BT, for example, uses blogging and local team leads to encourage bottom up eco-innovation. Social software is going to play a crucial role in any successful sustainability strategy.

Thomas also picked up the theme (he has been dragging me into the corporate social responsibility space, helping me to understand its more than platitudes):

“I don’t want auditors crawling all over sustainability, but I do want to know that the stuff in the annual report and elsewhere is relevant and material. I want to know who is serious and who is bs’ing me. I worry about greenwash.”

Anyone that cares worries about greenwash, which is why we all need to engage with this stuff. The more engaged we are the harder it is for big companies to fool us. As investors, citizens, employees, customers we have to be the watchdogs. We can’t assume someone else will do that job for us. The responsibility is ours. That’s green from the roots up.

picture courtesy of Frankie Roberto.

disclosure: SAP is a client of RedMonk, the industry analyst company I co-founded.

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Hybrid means Prius: Making like an SUV

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SUVs have never been so much vehicles as statements on wheels. Statements about affluence, “family values”, rugged individualism (ironic given the herd buying) and so on.  Research, amplified by Malcolm Gladwell in his article Big is Bad, shows SUVs aren’t even safer than smaller cars, questioning their family friendly status. But today the New York Times has a story about the new desirability of the Toyota Prius. The Prius, it argues, is gaining sales because, not in spite of the fact, it looks a bit different. Its the “new SUV”. People want to make a statement about green values, less reliance on fossil fuels and so on. Its easy to dismiss such behaviour as faddism, or just another ticklist item for the painless green lifestyle. But Greenmonk would like to be a lot more generous. Whatever works, basically. If we’re thinking green, even if its for appearance sake, that’s a good thing. Will car companies compete on the basis of looking more green? If it leads to smaller, lighter, more fuel efficient vehicles then I certainly hope so. I can only hope the Highlander is a massive flop though. What do you think?

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Carbon calculators – Top down or bottom up?

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Right now, personal ‘carbon calculators’ seem to be all the rage. Encouraged as a primary method of getting individuals to start to address their personal carbon footprint, and make lifestyle changes to lower personal CO2 emissions, most of the calculators have up until now come from large corporate companies. A couple of weeks ago, however, and responding to a general feeling of confusion amongst the public, the UK Govenment launched its own definitive carbon calculator website – billed as the most comprehensive, accurate tool of its kind. True? Well certainly the amount of time it takes to work things out at the end of each section gives the impression it’s doing some major number crunching. But as with all of its ilk, it has flaws. For instance, why are only my personal flights (a measly three in the last year) included, yet the ones I’ve taken on business (a more eco-conscience bothering 17) not? That skews my score entirely. Now a new site in the US – ‘Make me sustainable’ – promises to monitor carbon emissions on a daily basis – the thinking here is that carbon monitoring becomes an everyday part of your routine – like cleaning your teeth or updating your facebook status, so you start to think about the impact of your actions more. Sadly, you need to be in the US to use it, as it calculates various factors depending on where you live. Anyone in the US who’s trying it out, we’d love to know what you think of it.

The fundamental issue with all of these systems is that they rely on some level of estimation and guess-work, it’s inevitable. So perhaps, if we’re really serious about monitoring our emissions, we need real-life personal monitoring systems, that are discrete and ‘fit’ with our lives. That’s where Andreas Zachariah – a graduating MA student in Industrial Design Engineering at the Royal College of Art comes in. His “Carbon Hero” calculates a user’s carbon footprint from transportation by identifying the different froms of transport being used as they moves through space. The idea is that you carry the key-fob sized unit with you, and then download the data to your PC later. Then the data is collected by the computer’s software, which tells you the exact amount of carbon dioxide emitted from your movements, and how many credits are needed to offset it. Could this be the future? Well, the product has alread won a British Sustainability Index award, so watch this space.

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Eco leadership from China: Charging On

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New ecobusiness tracker Greenbang has a classic post today. Apparently the Chinese government is mandating that all cell phone and device chargers are USB-based, to “cut waste and lower user costs”. I like this idea a lot. I am currently moving office, and the charger detritus is truly ridiculous. I know some people think all top down regulation is a bad idea, but this one makes a great deal of sense, especially from an environmental perspective. This is not green from the roots up, so much as from the top down, but its still a potentially useful step towards better resource utilisation.

cross-posting on MonkChips.

photo courtesy of arquera, under a CreativeCommons attribution license.

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The end of America’s CO2 affair?

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Getting any kind of G8 deal on climate change has been quite an achievement, based on conversations with people on the ground in Germany. And having the United States make the right noises is a true development. Fiona Harvey, in her new FT blog that will examine energy and environmental issues, sensed a shift yesterday.

“We have to wait and see what happens in Bali in December before we can make a final judgement. But progress it certainly is. George W Bush has repeatedly scorned the UN and its climate change talks in the past. This time, he says he wants the US to be “actively involved, if not taking the lead, in a post-Kyoto framework, post-Kyoto agreement”.

Of course, that could also mean the US wants to participate in order to stall agreement on a binding commitment to cut emissions, as some green groups suspect.

But even if that is the case, it still means the talks can start this year. In 2009, there will be a different president who may take the US participation in a different direction. At least the process will have begun, rather than having to be started from scratch by a new president in 2009.”

We spend a lot of time trying to sense whether America really is changing its attitudes towards climate change and the ways action can be taken. And while Bush’s policy making is one thing, it’s what the doers on the ground are up to that counts for the long term.

Dante’s Peak: Would Pierce have got everyone out in a Prius?
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America’s renewed lust for the environment goes much wider than the Silicon Valley clean boom. For example, an amazing number of people you talk to in the US are now very interested in finding ways to reduce their dependency on oil, for starters. And they won’t sacrifice mobility to do it. I call the latter the ‘Dante’s Peak’ trait – a hard-wired desire to have the immediate ability at any time to put your entire family into a truck that can speed you away from exploding volcanos, or whatever else might come along. Such traits just aren’t part of the European psyche, and this difference needs to be understood. Conversely, European angst over aviation emissions, a constant and major factor here, is just not on the US radar. Americans in the street can’t believe Europeans worry about aircraft emissions being a bad thing. In a vast country with completely different patterns of population density and transport infrastructure to Europe it seems hard to imagine Americans starting to wonder whether they ought to fly. Hell, they didn’t transform the world with 707s and DC-8s, only to give up the mass-scale, iconic marvel and convenience of jet travel.

The contradiction is that while we are all shocked that Bush is now facing into the environmental wind – and that the detail on what this means for citizens is bound to differ between continents – today in the United States there are examples of extraordinary state or city-level leadership on the environment, with things moving very fast. City mayors and governors far away from the Arnie-induced Californian green-boom are developing exciting policies. Take Austin in, of all places Texas. It’s becoming one of the US’s top hotspots for environmental startups. Americans understand that new markets create new energy, if you excuse the irony – energetic campuses, energetic startup firms, flows of venture funds and more.

Read more at Re*Move…

Mark Charmer is director of The Movement Design Bureau, a global think tank.