Cap and trade
It’s great to see that Annie Leonard has come up with another simple direct facts filmed animation that presents a complex political issue in an easy to understand and comprehensive way. Solutions by committee are always fraught with disaster. They are made to appease the biggest stakeholders i.e. the loudest voices – just like group work in uni. They are made to appear unbiased and egalitarian and representative of all. What happens is they ignore the reality and truth of the situation and instead impose consensus and balance – why do we need to here 50% falsehood and nonsense. There is no need for Miranda Divine to exist, and in every sense of justice and the public interest she shouldn’t have a forum let alone and information platform. In a post modernist world I would still rather truth than balance, and fact over fabrication.
I don’t have a huge problem with emissions trading as we call it in Australia. But it is only a very basic step and shouldn’t be the first step. It is to a solution to the problems we face. My problem with emissions trading is that we live in a closed system not an open market. This means we have a pollution problem now and the things that exist now have contributed to causing it.
In Australia we still have a lot of politicians trotting out their party dogma which dictates that they have to promote the idea that climate change and CO2 pollution don’t exist. I have a real and angry problem with that. Tony abbot is again shifting the entire political machine to hatred and vilification to obfuscate the true issues in Australian daily life. While I hate Pauline Hansen with a vengeance for the harm she did to our country and her attempt to destroy one of its greatest strengths, maybe even its iconic essence – e.g. tolerance or ‘the fair go’ she did articulate a problem in contemporary politics which is that we have the wrong people in politics and they aren’t articulating our needs or our ‘place’. Let alone addressing the problems that truly need to be faced and solved.
I have long been suspicious of emissions trading because fundamentally its aim is to reduce the carbon load. It is to offset its reporting. It is an accountants’ way of dealing with a system in crisis. He looks at the ledger that writes down the effect and then changes the columns that the effect is under. He is robbing the planet to rip off the piper. He is enabling business to keep on polluting the way they have been by using up the perceived credit of those who are polluting less. It is ludicrous when you think about it.
Luckily in Australia businesses are run by smart people who understand that business exists in society and not the other way around and therefore if you do business smarter based on facts and information then everyone benefits in the long term. Not entirely true but closer than tony abbots view of the world from his Speedos.
My true annoyance with carbon trading is that it becomes a bargaining tool which is how foreign affairs and trading work at present. It is not a sustainable system in itself. By its very nature it doesn’t reduce carbon emissions it just passes it around. It encourages dodgy schemes and dodgy people to make money off it. It is almost un-monitorable. At its heart it is contradictory to the goal of reducing carbon.
If those involved were genuine about reducing carbon they would set ‘now’ as point zero. Where any existing practice or reduction doesn’t count towards offsets. This would mean that genuine initiatives or new ways of doing things would get the recognition and implementation that they deserve.
This would again put the emphasis on the current polluters to cut down because no new schemes are big enough, creative enough or effective enough, to compensate for the rampant pollution that we create now. We need to completely redesign our systems and our practices so that we are more accountable for the true cost of things environmental, social justice, common sense, pollution, waste, sustainable use of resources, and get back to a way of thinking where we may be different – but we are all the same tribe and need to treat each other and ‘our place’ with respect. In terms of rampant waste and pollution the only way is down.
Blowing in the wind
Design For Life – Philippe Starck
I always have a problem with any production that takes real life young people in their real lives and exploits them for entertainment, often setting up one as the bay guy. One person’s bad guy is another person’s quite attractive, yet incredibly over confident arabic guy. It’s unethical. It’s mob mentality public broadcasting. So we have a pretty typical group of people who are pretty hopeless designers, and young and probably away from home for the first time. The sad thing about the program is that they agree to be involved and have everything about them broadcast for ever more and multiply on the web unfettered, to have some of Philippe’s creativity and talent rub off on them and maybe they can learn something from him. Oh you poor deluded fools - like the viewers really.
It was set up as a competition so he issues orders at them they go off and try to meet these incredibly vague incredibly stupid briefs with no information or tangible research or examples of what he wants, and predictably they come back with very uninteresting ideas, spend too much time on research and we watch them fail spectacularly one by one. The research they do is of course all off the net. At lease Ilsa eventually talks to some old people. As usual there is a complete lack of useful or constructive feedback and communication – except for “bullsheet”. We learn nothing about how Philippe or his agency designs or how he works. We learn nothing about how to design other than the bare mechanics of research, observe human behaviour, use resources and that “design = sex, flesh, sweat”, - maybe one out of three in my experience.
Product designers affect every moment of our lives and the main point, they say but do not show, of the first episode is to put sustainability at the heart of your work, and to try to help society to have a better life. I couldn’t agree more. So they are sent to buy things at the supermarket and to buy an item that typifies good or bad design and they buy stupid uninteresting things, and Philippe tells them to look for the story behind the object for instance if you buy a bike for $50 it is made using slave labour. If you by a plain old glass bowl – which he said was good - he breaks it, wait what was his performance message there.
Episode two talks about designing for a specific individual e.g. people who need help or the elderly, or for a specific context then go to a generic product. Ilsa designs a knee leverage stick for the elderly whose knees don’t work – but hey it almost looks like a flamingo – famous for their help to the elderly - and it almost looks interesting and the model makers are French experts and the top of their game. Good strategic move Ilsa.
Episode 3 the students struggle to know what the teacher wants form them and Philippe tells them how important theatre and performance is in design, which just confuses them more and I think they do some street theatre. He puts on a red nose and sings good morning good morning. Starke comes across as a total idiot - the 1st prize is to work with him! Nabile probably speaks a few languages and is completely over confident and very like Starck (watch out Nabile) and is the only one capable of translating what Starck is asking for so Starke tells him he is ‘too clever” and a lazy thinker and a businessman and not a designer and fires his ass. Mike was popular and cute and wears nice t shirts so the girls step in and save him.
Philippe comes up with a brief that is so vague it is a non brief and tells the students to write your own brief, the look of dumb-founded confusion is priceless and the best moment of the series. The brief is an ethical environmental product that is not electronic but is for the everyday and is accessible to all. I have a feeling that at his heart he is genuine, but he comes off so badly. Is this the producers again? It made me wonder about him so I did quite a bit of research into him and his products as I had always liked them, and I found this article in the Times online
“When I ask what it’s like to be a global brand, Starck becomes impassioned. “You see, I don’t care. I am so out of everything. I have no mirror to see myself. To my neighbour, when I am at my oyster farm in Bordeaux, I am blowing in the wind. I am strictly nothing. I am less smart than my neighbours. I am a brand because I have worked well in 25 years. Like it or not, it is a success.”
Starck can’t really express where all his ideas come from. “Even for me, it is a mystery. In daily life, I am completely dumb. I am not fun or interesting. I would even go so far as to say that my consciousness is vulgar. But I am driven by a powerful, sophisticated subconscious. And in my subconscious I am everything. It is my magma. I am a magma-former.”
Timesonline
Is Philippe Starck a raving ...genius?
After lemon squeezers comes the final frontier. In a rare interview, we venture into the eccentric mind of Philippe Starck Michael Glover May 16 2007.
The most useful point in the series comes up next which is “that lacking confidence and belief is the hardest thing for designers”. The advice is to anchor the brief to one specific area you are interested in. Philippe now says not to research and to lock yourself in a room for three days and bite your fingernails and concentrate. That I can relate to. He is beginning to warm on me.
Episode 4 talks about the importance of inspiration and too look at things everywhere you go and get inspiration from any source and skill possible. Design is making things which is what I like most about it, but is what we rarely do. Also we never make anything to fruition so we never look at construction joinery or basic physics – that Lance has implored us to learn. I love working on problem solving and doing things and achieving a finished product, but we has only done this once in the whole course and it was in this studio. Marc Newson uses deep sea fish for inspiration; Eames used a leaf for a chair. The spitfire designer used the soaring bird. Be observant.
Episode 5 is about going to prototype stage and the importance of branding. “Get the branding right and the design will take care of itself.” Only a marketer could say something so naive. “Brand is - promise, experience, memory. Try to have an element of playfulness in the name and target your audience and use words for them. Go to the essence of the thing. Look at what’s behind this product and how can I tell this story to capture people’s subconscious. Use personality and idea conviction and research. Don’t go off on a tangent and don’t try and combine too much. Try to use simple instant straightforward communication. A great prototype will trump everything.”
I found all of this useful and direct and to the point. But unfortunately branding is only a phantom you stick on the side of something and it is all about pretty colours and smoke and mirrors masking the manipulation and psychological slavery. It is style strangling substance and is really a cancer in society. Look at how the American Bush administration branded the invasion of Iraq, spun a complete fabrication about weapons of mass destruction ( which they branded as The smoking gun) deseminated that information to the intelligence agencies and governments around the world and were happy to risk a world war for revenge for the trade centre crime Just think have you ever heard it called the trade centre crime, or a relatively small act of internal terrorism, or a homicide investigation? Did the branding and he language and the internet and syndicated news service and the streaming of video information and the fact it happened in America affect how we see those events?
Philippe finally gets to the point in episode 6 and states “These are bullsheet products”. Ilsa wins by coming up with a freakish product that I doubt works for elderly people at all, but looks like an almost nice aerodynamic shape that the model makers and Cad Monkeys have worked an absolute miracle on.
Surprisingly I have come away with some good points and a starting point to relook at the way I design and especially about visual communication and branding. This whole competition format has been largely a waste of time. It didn’t get the best out of people. The competition wasn’t really that interesting to watch, we didn’t get any insight in to Philippe Starck or how he actually works, or see him working on anything specific. The students never worked together sharing ideas or thoughts and the competition would largely have a negative impact on everyone except Ilsa – I would like to know how she went working with Starck and if the experience was very different to the show. The guest interviewees were the best part of the series, which could have been so much better and was somewhat disappointing thanks to the producers. Once again it was popular style over any entertainment value. It was an interesting insight into the way other people freak out too. I enjoyed watching it and i did learn quite a bit from it. It certainly had a lot of good guest interviewees and i think i got most from them.
Bottled water creates huge amounts of waste
Annie Leonard’s video 'the story of water" is a breath of fresh air. It explains the facts about bottled water consumption mainly in the US in a useful and straightforward way.
Big numbers are always frightening but the facts of bottled water consumption in the US are absolutely gobsmacking.
Ever second in the US 1,000 used bottled water bottles are thrown away. That is 85 million bottles a day, that’s more than thirty billion bottles a year. This costs the consumers 10’s of millions of dollars a year
PET takes years to break down
Unfortunately PET bottles take between 450 and 1000 years to break down which means we should be viewing them more like objects made out of precious gold rather than the way most young people see convenience and disposability and its someone else’s responsibility.
It is much like the way we use the notorious coles and Woolworths green shopping bags. Every home now has at least 10 of them which are 150 million but I’d say that would be a yearly use. Now people don’t use disposable plastic bags the sale of garbage bags has skyrocketed. So we have two problems for the environment. They cost 1 cent to produce and cost 99 cents. This makes me so angry. I did a lot of research into the disposable bags and as transport solution they are fantastic. When I worked on Leichhardt council 200 pantechnicons of food come into Woolworths everyday and mainly women carry that and transport it way and feed it to their families. It really is a staggering amount when you look at that little microcosm of women’s work and labour and how only 2% of women are CEO’s or on the board of companies. I was staggered to see the male domination at university too and how that is not addressed at all especially in the courses and how feminism is seen as a dirty word by males and females when all it is, is a hope for equal work for equal pay – not equal conditions because that is never going to happen. The division of labour in the third world doesn’t look too bad to me now. So sad.
Bottled water is not safer or fresher
Unfortunately bottled water is not safer and in Canada recently 12 popular brands were tested and only 4 didn’t have high levels of bacteria.
In Australia we have one of the safest drinking water supplies in the world. The Sydney water company does regular testing maintaining and fluoridation of the water supply. We have problems with rainfall which will get critical with global warming. All water supplies are finite we don’t actually produce new water on earth – it just goes round in a cycle. I have always wondered why it isn’t costed accordingly. Look how expensive dinosaur bones or uranium are. They provide excellent information on their website see attached.
In Bundanoon a town on the south coast they have completely banned bottled water and they supply their own reusable bottles for purchase that they have branded with the towns identity. They have done an incredible local community thing that empowers all of them. It began because a company wanted to mine their local aquifer for water and they rightly decided that wasn’t a good thing. I have doubts that having the Singapore government own our Western Australia gas supply is a good thing too. I think it should be a public utility.
Bottled water is incredibly expensive
Bottled water is also incredibly expensive I am not sure of the exact cost that we are charged for our water in Sydney but it is incredibly cheap. I have seen estimates of between that the water we buy in a bottle is between 600 and 1300 times more expensive than the same amount form the tap please see bibliography.
Because water is so cheap at present the consumer doesn’t begrudge paying $3.00 for a bottle of water because it is better than a can of coke or uranium for that matter. But we don’t pay the true cost of the water or the bottle or the pollution or have any imput in to the social justice aspects or the human rights of getting appropriate drinking water. We don’t pay the true cost of the mountains of water bottles in India which I have started to dream about in the few hours of sleep I get at present. How lucky that Indian peoples feet are so small from lifetime malnutrition that they can where these bottles on their feet. It is breathtakingly horrible and yet even in these incredibly harsh situations they are so much more inventive and resourceful than us
When we buy bottled water it has to be transported to the factory distilled in plastic bottles and bottle caps. The plastic bottles are produced and assembled by machine using injection moulding that we learned all about in Lance’s class. This heavy cargo is then transported and sold in shops which are available and convenient and most people don’t have any alternative. None of this excess use of fossil fuel is taken into account. This complete waste of a valuable resource is completely unjustified.
The local council and governments lack of access to our own water supply is totally unacceptable and I think I will try and do something about it.
Manufacturing
Pet bottles should be used as a valuable resource there are alternatives that could be used at present but it would be good to plug then into greenfly online to see the real life benefits and disadvantages. The manufacturing we are suggesting is injection blow moulding using polyethylene. This is 8 times lighter and cheap and uses the least resources and least weight. Flexible PVC is used a lot in the medical industry and has good properties such as strength flexibility, which is what we have made our model out of.
Reusable bottles
Reusable bottles are a much better and simple alternative to buying bottled water, but the problem arises that there aren’t many places to refill them unless you have access to a kitchen. No one wants to have to fill up a bottle form a bathroom even though I do it all the time and tap water is clean everywhere and unlikely to be contaminated unless by direct contact. In our solution to this assignment I did a lot of research into reusable bottles. A lot of the recommendation is for aluminium or stainless steel bottles that you would keep as long as possible. Unfortunate these have been branded and sold to Gym junkies who are notorious at disposing of things and only have them as a status symbol. I think a see thru bottle is going to reassure people that if they wash it out it will be clean. More research is needed here.
We decided to offer a more long lasting bottle as a reward for this sustainable behaviour of refilling as much as possible. Next I looked at flat bottles as I wanted something for people like my uni colleagues to keep and reuse in there uni bags. I wanted something with Japanese style and sophistication – simple portable foldable and a nice fit in your hands.
Bottled water is a lie
Marketing has perpetuated the use of bottled water particularly in western societies but the western dream is a very pervasive myth and it is a worldwide phenomenon. Unfortunately not many people can afford it and many do not have adequate drinking supplies. Yes you can see I hate marketing.
By having profits from our pss solution going to remote aboriginal and regional communities at least this is an attempt to address this a bit as it is not being done at present. It would be great to use our kiosk to send these messages out to people – facts to combat the misinformation that is like an ether that surrounds us all the time.
Social Justice
It’s not ok that some people have access to fresh drinking water and some don’t. Access to drinking water is a basic human right and we should be using our opportunities in the west to assist those who need it. Annie addresses this so well in her video which is remarkably short or the amount of gentle convincing arguments she makes.
Story of water
What you can do
Support the Human Right to Water and Reclaim the Commons
In the U.S. and Canada, for the most part, we have strong, safe public water systems. But in much of the world, this is not the case. This doesn’t mean that in these countries bottled water is the solution, because it’s not. It means we need ever-increasing efforts to understand the root causes of the world’s drinking water crisis, and efforts to beat the crisis that are based in human rights, care for the environment, and the common good.
Worldwide, lack of access to water for drinking, bathing, and washing, along with lack of sanitation, continues to be the single most important cause of disease worldwide. Lack of clean drinking water leads to nearly 250 million cases of water-related disease each year. Estimates of water-related deaths vary from the World Health Organization’s estimate of 2.2 million deaths per year to the UN Development Programme’s 2002 estimate of five million, though some estimate as many as 12 million deaths per year.
Some of the causes of this crisis are natural, in that some places simply have conditions that make it very difficult to access the water. But almost across the board, difficult natural conditions are accompanied by conditions of poverty or lack of political will. And, as Annie mentions in the film, pollution and toxic waste is a significant contributor to unsafe water. Industrial and agricultural development that threatens and degrades water resources and watersheds also degrades people’s access to safe water. Turning public waterways into industrial cesspools and threatening underground aquifers with toxic and bacteriological contamination leads directly to considerable health risks, and forces communities to suffer with the health effects or pay the clean up costs. In many cases, the world’s poor are forced to choose between using unsafe water and purchasing water from safe sources – an impossible choice for those living on less than $2.00 a day.
There are many groups working on addressing this crisis; we believe that underlying any appropriate response is the need to assert the human right to water. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the founding document of the United Nations, does not affirm “right to water” as such – a fact that has generated heated debate about the existence of such a right. But the fact is that when the Universal Declaration was drafted in 1946, we could scarcely have imagined a world where water might be considered a marketable product.
Seeing the need to clarify this right, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights published General Comment 15 in 2002, stating “the human right to water entitles everyone to sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible and affordable water for personal and domestic uses.” General Comment 15 notes that the right to water has been recognized in a wide range of international documents and reaffirms the fundamental importance of the right, stating that: “the human right to water is indispensable for leading a life in human dignity. It is a prerequisite for the realization of other human rights.”
What You Can Do:
» Kick the Bottled Water Habit
» Join a Campaign
» Strengthen Public Investment in Water
» Make Producers Take Responsibility
» Demand Fair Recycling
» Support the Human Right to Water and Reclaim the Commons
Kick the Bottled Water Habit
In the film, we learned that bottled water is not safer, or better tasting, or even more convenient, than tap water; it’s certainly not cheaper, and it generates massive amounts of needless waste. The piping, the bottling, the transportation, the greenhouse gases…it’s all unnecessary. So, on a daily basis, we don’t need bottled water, period.
As individuals, we can each stop buying it and start using reusable bottles. If you plan to purchase a bottle, we recommend stainless steel or lined aluminum. Both Food & Water Watch and Corporate Accountability International offer reusable bottles to their members. We also recommend reusing most any convenient bottle you have at hand.
If you have concerns about the quality of your tap water, or the chemicals it may contain due to treatment or to contaminants, contact your local water utility to ask for a report.
To address your concerns, there are many brands of safe, convenient home water filters you can install in your kitchen.
Make Producers Take Responsibility
There are two parts to the problem of bottled water: the water, and the bottle. In the intro to Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water (2010), Peter Gleick writes, “every second of every day in the United States, a thousand people buy and open up a plastic bottle of commercially produced water, and every second of every day in the United States, a thousand plastic bottles are thrown away. Eighty-five million bottles a day. More than thirty billion bottles a year at a cost to consumers of tens of billions of dollars.”
Most plastic water bottles are made of PET plastic, or polyethylene terephthalate, which is made from crude oil. Around 90 percent of PET bottles end up in landfills, where they take between 450 and 1000 years to break down.
Recycling helps, and as Annie says in The Story of Stuff, yes, recycle. But most plastic “recycling” is actually “downcycling:” plastic discards are mixed with virgin plastic to produce a hybrid of lower quality, which is then molded into something amorphous and cheap, such as a park bench or a speed bump. Downcycling can actually increase pollution because the process releases toxins, and because more chemicals are often added to make the materials useful again.
That’s where Extended Producer Responsibility comes in. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), also known as Product Stewardship, shifts responsibility for recycling or other safe disposal of products and packaging to those who design, market and profit from them: the producers. EPR is based on a commonsense principle: when producers are required to take back their products and recycle them, they will design them with recycling in mind.
The “bottle bills” of the 1970s and 1980s were modeled after a practice used by soft drink and beer companies before they switched from refillable bottles to throw-away bottles and cans. Bottle bills require beverage companies to take back their empty containers and recycle them. In US states and Canadian provinces with beverage container deposit return programs, recycling rates are higher than where there is no such system. These programs bring social and economic benefits such as litter reduction and recycling, with no public cost.
During the 1990s, there was renewed interest in this policy approach. Laws were passed in Canada and European countries requiring producers to take back hazardous leftovers such as paint, pesticides, motor oil, and medications. Since 2000 new laws in North America require producers to set up programs to recycle computers, televisions and other electronic equipment. Extended Producer Responsibility is catching on.
The Product Policy Institute has a lot of useful information on EPR: www.productpolicy.org
Demand Fair Recycling
Finally, the piece of the waste puzzle we most often forget is the people. It is no exaggeration to say that, throughout the world, the poorest people are forced to live in, on, and from the waste produced by the rest of us. Especially in the developing world (where, as Annie explains, much of our “recycling” goes), informal collecting and sorting of waste provides a livelihood for large numbers of the urban poor, especially women and children. The World Bank estimates that 1 percent of the urban population in developing countries earns a living through this work.
People working in the informal recycling sector suffer from harsh working conditions, are exposed to many health hazards, often live in poor conditions, and have low social status and low earnings. Yet, everywhere, they provide critical recycling services.
However, there is evidence that where waste collectors are organized, and operate within a more favorable policy climate, they are able to achieve a decent standard of living and improve their health and social standing. GAIA is a worldwide alliance of more than 600 grassroots groups, non-governmental organizations, and individuals in over 82 countries whose ultimate vision is a just, toxic-free world that takes into account the needs and abilities of the poorest among us by standing in solidarity with waste pickers to demand safe working conditions, fair wages, and inclusion in the policy decisions that shape their lives.
Taken from the Annie Leonard Website the story of bottled water
