Think local…

But surely it is a global issue – there are a set of actions to be taken and rules to apply which will make us all more green. Insulate, use low energy bulbs, drive less, cycle more, turn your heating down, build with renewable resources, fly less, reuse and recycle… the list goes on. Green issues are all over the national press in the UK – in most every section of the Sunday papers. The media are to be congratulated on influencing public thought and making such issues mainsteam. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that the ‘nationality’ of it all makes it feel impersonal. Some of the advice just doesn’t seem to apply to me – in my location… and I’m even more aware of what little difference I can make when I look at the steps I can take, in the context of the national picture.

How about this? Treat all that as useful background information – just research fodder. Turn it on its head and think about it as a far more local issue. You’ll be a significant presence in a local community group – the changes you make will really make a difference and be visible. You’ll really feel the motivation and satisfaction. Of course that effect multiplies up so that the community is a far more significant part of the national movement… and so on. Thereby a sense of pride is created around contributions. Not only that – but you’ll also be able to develop and influence local policies and advice around sustainability which is relevant to you and your neighbours.

What does it mean to think locally?

If you live in the country you are likely to need to drive further – but you could plant trees, focus on buying local produce and operate school buses. If you live in the city you can’t plant many trees – but you can use public transport and recycle most things. I live on an island with a ready supply of stone – but no forests – is wood really the most sustainable building material to use? We can’t recycle any plastics except PET bottles here – is it worth sending other plastics away or are they better going to landfill? We do however have plenty of wind of the meteorological variety. But is it the right sort of wind? – is it too strong or too gusty…? We have many aged farmhouses and cottages and even more 50’s and 60’s bungalows – many of which are not cavity built. How do we improve our insulation with locally available materials. Who locally can advise? You see what I mean… I believe local authorities have a responsibility to inform and encourage their populations with realistic and optimal steps towards sustainability.

You might believe that the local media could influence local activities. Sadly – my experience is that the local press generally repeat the national advice and do not strive to increase the relevance to their readership.

What can be done?

Gather expert knowledge: Gather national advice and work out which elements are relevant at all and to what degree they can be effective in the locality.

Gather local knowledge: Supplement this with local knowledge of businesses, materials, lifestyles, economy, geography etc. Refer this back to sustainbility experts where necessary for clarification.

Local communications: Create accessible, usable and attractive communication materials to inform the public and empower them. These could be wall charts, booklets, containers (on recycled and recyclable materials!).

Create targets: People are most motivated when they have a target. I suspect in all this there an opportunity for a competitive streak (against past performance or neighbours / friends). Perhaps games / competitions could be enabled through provision of monitoring systems. If these were standardized across the country this could become a new national sport using handicaps for different areas!

Feed back into policy: All this expert and local knowledge and the newly empowered and effective community should all ultimately drive local government strategic policy changes and improve the opportunities locally.

Anyone want to help in Guernsey? Anyone want to try to start this anywhere else?

The other thing I can't recycle in my rubbish

tetra pak
Originally uploaded by Lenny & Meriel.

Thanks to Herefordshire Nature trust webite...

"Frustrated that your recycling efforts are undermined by not being able to recycle Tetra Packs and other fruit juice, soup and milk cartons?

Drinks Cartons are made up of around 80% paper with polyethylene waterproofing and, sometimes, an aluminium lining to give extra product life. Most recycling schemes will not deal with them.

There is a solution! A recycling mill in Scotland is dealing with drinks cartons until local authority schemes are set up. They provide labels so that cartons can be sent to them for recycling (senders must pay postage).
Make sure cartons of milk, juice, soup and sauce are rinsed out, drained and flattened by pulling the ‘ears’ before being packed in a suitable cardboard box, which should be labelled with the mill’s label. The logo on the label acts as an identifier for the paper mill to ensure that the collected cartons go into the right pulper without opening the box! The cartons are pulped and reprocessed into other paper products.

For labels, telephone 020 8977 6116."

For more information see the consortium who actually do it - Drinkscartons.com
Not exactly easy - but nevertheless better than sticking in landfill (or is it?)

Household biodegradable plastics

plastics
Originally uploaded by Lenny & Meriel.

Whether or not it's hard work we have an avenue for disposing of most regular household waste without resorting to landfill...

• Glass - recycle
• Tins - recycle
• Cans - recycle
• PET 1,2 plastics - recycle
• Paper - recycle
• Card - recycle
• Vegetable matter - compost
• Waste food (apart from vegetable matter) - wormery or bokashi

Most of what's left in my bin (and most others I believe) is other sorts of plastics including a lot of polythene and plastic food trays. One solution is that we all avoid buying food and other goods packaged in this way - that would be quite a challenge! Manufacturers use it for good reason - it's strong, lightweight, cheap to produce, waterproof, mouldable and printable and it lasts forever. The latter is of course a large part of the problem: 90% of all the plastics ever produced still exist - they simply won't go away - and yet we keep making more and more which draws upon the diminishing supplies of petrochemicals.

We could start recycling it - but that's not generally accepted as being a worthwhile exercise once you factor in the envionmental costs associated with transportation and processing.

Technology does exist to replace all of this with degradable or biodegradable equivalents which would allow us to place the waste straight on the compost heap. All the different technologies seem to have ways to speed up or slow down the decaying process dependent on the context of use making it ideal for food packaging. It would in theory release nothing but water, CO2 and biomass. Trawling through the web (I'm no scientist) it appears there are 4 ways to make biodegradable and degradable plastics:

1. Biodegradable: Starches from cereal and tuber crops are harvested then broken down by microorganisms into monomers which are then chemically 'rebuilt' in a longer form of polymer which forms the basis forpolylactide (PLA). This is an expensive process for the production of a very low value material.
2. Biodegradable: Bacteria can also produce polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) and polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) directly by themselves in a culture which then simply needs to be harvested.
3. Biodegradable: Combining the last 2 principles, the same crops can be genetically modified by introducing the gene from bacteria into the plant to producePHA and PHB . Genetic modification does not have public support and there are doubts about the ability to stop modifications reaching crops grown for consumption.
4. Degradable: plastics such as d2w are made using a traditional plastics process with additives to break down the polymers over time - The manufacturing process is one which involves petrochemicals as now but the advantage of this technology is that the plastics do not require expoure to organisms to break down - they will break down in any environment including landfill and on the streets.

All are contraversial in their own ways involving one or more of the following issues:

• Continued reliance on petrochemicals for degradable plastics Nb. Even some biodegradable plastics have a petrochemical component to improve the quality of the plastics.
• Production process cost making them uncompetitive (2 to 10 times as much) when compared with traditional plastics. Nb. this is improving as petrochemical prices go up making traditional plastics cost more. This cost does not truly represent the lifetime costs because the end of life transportation and disposal is removed from the calculation. If business were exposed to this aspect, and did factor it back in, things might look more comparable.
• Genetic modification is not popular because of concerns regarding the effect on crops grown for consumption.
• Production lines are already set up to cope with current technologies and plastics. Any replacement must function on the same lines and therefore perform in a very similar way. nb. Some of the products available do claim to offer this.
• The current situation leads to excessive landfill which is not considered a high priority to resolve as attention is placed on items which release greenhouse gases when placed in landfill. If plastics become biodegradable a different consumer behaviour will be necessary to avoid making the problem even worse!

I believe that the technologists will find a way through this and arrive at a degradable plastic which has all the positive properties associated with traditional plastics at a competitive cost. Hopefully this will function as well on both the domestic compost heap as in landfill. This does offer up a whole world of potential for improving the consumer experience - here are a few thoughts.

CHALLENGES

• The plastics are often messy having been in direct contact with food - managing them and storing them is an unpleasant experience. The temptation is to 'get rid of them' by putting them into the bin.
• They are bulky by their nature - they are often moulded to retain structure. People need encouragement to store them alongside all the other recycling
• Domestic compost heaps function best when everything breaks down in approximately the same amount of time. The presence of larger items such as plastics might slow this down and make it harder to aerate / turn the heap.
• The change will not be sudden - as a consumer I'll need to be able to easily (yes I mean easily) identify which plastics can be composted.

SOLUTIONS (anything goes - this is brainstorming)

• Make them instantly recognisable and use this as a marketing benefit. E.g. The plastic is always green or always has a leaf (or seeds) embedded into it / printed onto it.
• Embed a tagging mechanism so that packaging can be electronically identified and processed accordingly (either within household through the use of intelligent bins or in a central facility). This could apply to all packaging (not just plastics).
• Use such a mechanism to monitor trends and to let people monitor their own habits - perhaps even incentivise them by giving credits against recycled goods to encourage that market place.
• Market cheap shredders which can handle paper and plastics (including messy polythene) for household use. This would enable householders to store it more effectively and then encourage faster and more 'turnable' composting.
• Provide similarly degradable bags which are airtight even when still being filled up to avoid odours from any food remains. These could be used for all compostable household waste.
• Integrate a datestamp mechanism into the plastic. As it will decay in a preset amount of time - perhaps this can also be a visual reference to the age of the goods and the stage of decomposition - e.g. a colour change, line clarity etc. This is a bit like colour indicator toothbrushes which let you know it's time to get a new one.
• Impregnate the container bag with Ems (Effective micro-organisms) to encourage faster decomposition once on a compost heap.
• Charge people for anything taken to landfill, make recycling free

Reuse - not recycle

recyclepvc
Originally uploaded by Lenny & Meriel.

Just came across this beautiful reused PVC pipe for sale on materious.com. No need to recycle in the traditional sense - no need for heating up and emitting nasty gases.

UCED

UCD process
Originally uploaded by Lenny & Meriel.

User Centered Environmental Design will henceforth be known as UCED until I think of a better name. My mission is to work out how the UCD process adapts to this purpose and what resources are required to make it work.

This image illustrates a standard UCD process. Research is at the heart of the design process. It inspires scope and concept, it informs prototype and specification and it keeps build on track. It is an iterative process where all design decisions are grounded in real user insight, and the insight is gathered through a multitude of research techniques honed to provide usable design information. This process is followed by a design team which includes commercial, content, branding, technology and design specialists. It enables the team to retain an common focus on the end users thereby minimising project risk.

How does this map to UCED?

I believe it does so absolutely directly - the only difference may be the nature of the team involved. It's clear that environmental issues are complex and therefore a team involved in this space needs a specialist representative in that space. The important thing is that everyone designs around the user - NOT primarily around the technology or the commercial objectives - those look after themselves as the process progresses.

If we are to design packaging for reuse or recycling mechanisms or alternatives to flying we need to understand the users goals in that space. E.g. What would they reuse the packaging for? How would they store it? Why would they bother? How often do people recycle? How do they organise their recycling? What do they dislike about it? What do they dislike about rubbish? Why do people take holidays? How do they choose a destination? How do they research the travelling alternatives... the list goes on... Bear in mind that much of this is found out through observation - not asking opinions. People often do something different than they believe they do.

So - If I'm right and we need a specialist representative on the team - who are those people? Do they exist? If not (in sufficient quantities) how can we substitute? Where can we gather the necessary information from?