Sustainablog

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May 1: May Day.

For the average American working for a paycheck, May Day — a pagan spring ritual where you dance around a Maypole — marks yet another, less festive occasion.

From the first of January until around the first of May, all the money many of us will earn goes to pay our share of income tax to the US government.

Kiss those months — that money — goodbye (the present tax stimulus package is really just a refund).

We followed the advice of our parents, as most children do: get a good education, go to college and get a job — a nice, secure, well-paying one, with great fringe benefits, stock options or profit-sharing. But the bimonthly paychecks — after the government gets its share for income, Social Security and Medicare taxes — aren’t enough to keep up with the bills. Even with raises and promotions, many of us feel that we keep getting further in the hole, since the more we earn in earned income, the more it’s taxed. The reality is that the system is largely devised this way, not to tax the very rich but to exact a fee on the middle class and poor to keep these wage earners on the treadmaster of a job — or “promising career.”

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I got the wonderful opportunity to interview Brad Gilchrist one of the creators (along with Peter Menice) of the cartoon The Green House. We will be highlighting their weekly strip “Shades of Green” on the EcoScraps blog every Monday. As an aspiring cartoonist it was very informative and interesting to hear about the directions their work has taken them and how they ended up together creating The Green House. Brad and Peter have both enjoyed successful careers as cartoonists, but I feel the true success is on its way. By “true success” I mean making a comfortable living doing what you love while making a difference in the world. As Brad puts it in the interview after the break:

“Which means more people seeing that living a simple, conscious life is more cool and rewarding than having a McMansion and a Hummer or II.”

You can play a part in their success by calling or e-mailing your favorite papers and tell them about the strip and the web site.

For my interview with Brad Gilchrist…
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Editor’s note: The recent report Environmental Trends and Climate Impacts: Findings from the U.S. Book Industry tried to answer that question; Eco-Libris blogger Raz Godelnik took a look at its findings in an earlier post. Today, he interviews one of the main contributors to the report’s preparation: Tyson Miller, founder and director of the Green Press Initiative. This post was originally published on Saturday, April 12, 2008.

After I wrote here about the publication of the of Environmental Trends and Climate Impacts: Findings from the U.S. Book Industry, and reviewed some of the most important findings, it’s time of the third (and last) part of our coverage of the report.

Today I am very excited to bring you an interview I conducted with Tyson Miller, the Founder and Director of the Green Press Initiative (GPI). The Green Press Initiative, together with the The Book Industry Study Group (BISG), initiated and prepared this impressive report that presents and analyzes the book industry’s ecological footprint.

Not only that Tyson Miller is one of the people who led the work on the report, but he is also one of the most knowledgeable people about the issues brought up in the report. In the last seven years he directs the Green Press Initiative (which he also founded) – a program which is catalyzing environmentally responsible book publishing in the U.S. He initiated the Book Industry Treatise on Responsible Paper Use, which more than 150 publishers have signed so far, and is also involved in the efforts of big publishers, such as Simon & Schuster and Scholastic, to develop green policies.

Therefore, I was very happy for the opportunity to have this interview with Mr. Miller, shedding more light on the report and its implications. I hope you’ll enjoy it as well!

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Can a company that manufactures copy machines, and sells more paper than any other single brand, really walk the talk on sustainable business practices?

That question framed my response to an offer to talk with Patty Calkins, Vice President of Environment, Health and Safety at Xerox Corp. After all, don’t copy machines “[consume] vast amounts of water, paper, and energy…?” I’ve seen numerous press releases on environmental issues from the company whose name is now synonymous with “photocopying,” but I was still skeptical: isn’t this still a business model built on heavy inputs of energy and paper?

Patty and I talked on the phone last Wednesday (April 9), and, as in other situations, my reservations were addressed directly and concretely. I had forwarded a version of the above question prior to our talk, so she was ready for me. Among the company initiatives she detailed for me:
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Editor’s note: Most weeks, we feature product reviews from our friends at Life Goggles. In this week’s post, though, Joel takes a look at British retailer Marks & Spencer’s innovative approach to dealing with products at the end of their useful lives: clothing recycling. This post was originally published on Tuesday, April 8, 2008.

For 6 months (that started at the end of January), Marks & Spencer (M&S) have joined forces with Oxfam to set up a clothing exchange. Designed with the dual purpose of encouraging people to recycle clothes and raise money for Oxfam’s work, customers who donate M&S clothes to Oxfam will receive a voucher £5/€7, valid for one month, to use with their next purchase of £35/€50 or more. Although buying new clothes paid for with old clothes isn’t the best way of doing things in my opinion, it’s certainly not a bad way of encouraging people to recycle clothes if they are planning on buying more anyway. And perhaps they’ll find something they like in Oxfam!

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Years before the green movement took root, I had the pleasure of seeing Janine Benyus speak about Biomimicry. I was just as inspired by her work then as I am now.

A biologist by training, Janine is a passionate proponent of using nature’s wisdom, based on billions of years of refinement, to discover “nonpolluting, energy-efficient manufacturing technologies” that can be applied to provide elegant design solutions for commercial enterprises.

In a recent article, Business Week noted that Janine was named Environmental Hero of 2007 by Time. Through a research nonprofit called Biomimicry Institute and a for-profit consulting firm called the Biomimicry Guild, Janine brings interdisciplinary groups of biologists, engineers, and designers together to uncover natural phenomenon that can be replicated in corporate and commercial applications.

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Although the airline industry finally recovered from 9/11, new factors are threatening the industry as we’ve seen this week with the closure of Aloha Airlines and ATA Airlines.

With the price of fuel increasing, fuel has become the largest expense for airlines. Airlines can only increase their fares so far without turning their customers away completely. One of the ramifications for this development is that airlines are actively researching and testing methods to increase fuel efficiency and, in the process, reduce greenhouse gases.

In a recent article, Sustainable Industries highlights new green innovations in the air transportation industry.
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In my quest to live a greener life, my Achilles’ heel is my obsession with print media. We subscribe to our city’s daily newspaper, we get the Sunday Times delivered, and I get approximately eight monthly or bimonthly magazines right in my mailbox. There are also three or four magazines I buy off the newsstand on a fairly regular basis. I love the varying lengths of stories, which perfectly cater to my dynamic attention span. I love letters to the editor and dog-earing pages with things I want to explore further. I love finding a new issue in my mailbox after a particularly long day. I even love the ads.

While cleaning my home recently, I realized just how much paper this leads to each month, and my green guilt set in. Unfortunately, I really, really love both magazines and the daily newspaper. It’s something I am reluctant to give up. Fortunately, there may be a solution that seems almost plausible to a printaholic like me. ReadyMade, a design/home solutions magazine for the DIY set with a sustainable sensibility, is now providing readers with a digital version of its print form. You can see every page, just as it appears in print, in its entirety, starting with the current issue #34, their green design issue.

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COWS – Center on Wisconsin Strategy – Based at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, this national policy center and laboratory works with business, government, labor and communities to develop and test new ideas.

Motivated by the statistic that 43% of all carbon dioxide is emitted from buildings (21% residential, 17% commercial, 5% industrial), COWS is working on the Milwaukee Energy Efficiency Initiative (pdf presentation) that builds a unique alliance to reduce this source of greenhouse gases.

Their mission looks promising. In terms of investments, retrofitting buildings is a low risk investment that has a high annual return of 22%. The other benefits include improving the environment, better worker/residents/student health and productivity, financial savings for property owners and tenants, and higher property values. An additional benefit is that these jobs cannot be outsourced. Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s note: Getting to spend more time with the Eco-Libris blog has turned into a real pleasure, as they’ve got a keen sense of the “big picture” when it comes to book publishing. In today’s post, Raz discusses a “carbon financing” project by Merrill Lynch that involves investment in healthy forests… a critical element of sustainability for the publishing industry. This post was originally published on Thursday, March 20, 2008.

With all the gloomy news coming these days from Wall Street, it’s great to see that when it comes to the environment, Wall-Street is still bullish. I’m talking about the news on Merrill Lynch new investment of $9 million to finance a project to protect 750,000 hectares of forest in Indonesia.

Dana Mattioli reported last week on the Environmental Capital blog of the Wall Street Journal about the new green deal. Firstly, let’s make one thing clear - this is not a donation or anything like that. It is an investment that according to the article is supposed to generate Merrill annual proceeds of $432 million over the next 30 years.

The expected income will come from in carbon financing, which means that someone will pay Merrill to offset polluting activities elsewhere with the amount of carbon dioxide that won’t be emitted (3.4 million tons of carbon dioxide every year) because of the fact that the trees will be kept alive and won’t be cut down.

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