The ten reasons Tom Cruise is the greenest person in America

I apologize, but this article is not about Tom Cruise...it's about Tim the bottle man. Some of you may have clicked simply because of the title...baiting people into clicking on a story has a lot to do with giving them an incentive. Sometimes it's using a celebrity, sometimes the incentive is money or self-growth, and sometimes it plays to even more base desires such as sex or revenge. In any case, the incentive is what drives us.

Which brings me to Tim.

When I was growing up, Tim was a fixture in the neighborhood. We would see him roaming the alleys with his cart, collecting glass bottles from the garbage cans. At that time in Illinois, a person could turn back a bottle for a refundable deposit. Many people would go through the hassle of lugging bottles back to the store for the deposit, but many others would just throw them in the garbage. Tim took advantage of that opportunity and gathered what he could and brought them back en masse. It got to the point where some people would leave the bottles out or meet Tim in the alley to give him the bottles for that week.

Tim was an entrepreneur...because there was a market and inefficiency that needed addressing.

Flash forward to today, and a smaller number of states have refundable deposit policies in place. According to a post by Phil Sego from Sierra Club, beverage companies are going after the refundable deposit laws, ostensibly because the perceive them as a tax that inflates the cost of their product. From the point of view of supply and demand, the beverage companies have a good point: Just a small shift in price can decrease demand and hurt revenue. Even though the program has no net impact on the consumer if they return the bottle, the sticker price could prevent the customer from purchasing in the first place.

With proper recognition of the position of the beverage companies delivered, I must also note that at the same time they raise a reasonable economic concern, they completely ignore their ethical obligation...to include all the cost of the product in their expenses. The bottled beverage industry specifically - but most industries in general - push off as many expenses as possible on others in order to boost profitability. This makes sense - not from an ethical point of view, but from a profit point of view - because companies cannot charge more for a product just because it costs them more, so anything they can do to minimize costs increases profitability. In this specific instance, the companies produce the drink and the packaging, but take no responsibility for the packaging once the consumer has used it. They leave it up to the consumer and then eventually the local governments to handle the cost of the waste. Even in recycling, in areas without refundable deposit policies, the burden goes on the consumer and government.

Refundable deposit policies are effective at returning raw materials to the industrial system precisely because there is an incentive. Return the bottle and you get a reward...a tangible, financial reward. If that reward is not enough for you, then someone else will take advantage of it and find the most economically efficient way to do it. It is free-market economics at its finest. All it takes is putting the onus on the consumer to pay up front for the cost of recycling, and then getting their money back when they do. Since the bottler will not take responsibility for their product, this makes sure the consumer does something about it, or if they will not, someone steps in to do it. It also places an incentive on the manufacturer. If they want to avoid having to include the deposit in the sticker price, they can come up with a way to make the packaging so that it biodegrades naturally, or they can take over the collection of the used packaging themselves, or any number of other ways that they can use their leverage and knowledge to solve the problem.

In the end, it is the manufacturer's problem. Only they know what the value of the material is, and how best to recycle it. Consumers want their beverage product, but have little to no knowledge or incentive to make the decision to properly recycle it. As for governments, to talk out of one side of their mouth and say government intervention in business is inefficient and bad for the market, but then require government to clean up the mess is hypocritical. It is time for business to take personal responsibility for their actions.

We have already seen this in several states who have electronics recycling laws that require the manufacturer to reclaim the product and eliminate landfilling to the greatest extent possible. We have even seen beverage companies implement their own incentive programs where people get "points" for returning empties to specific stations. And we have decades of proof from the Tims of the world that even small financial incentives will work. For the last decade, we have pounded on all 316,000,000 Americans to each step up and take personal responsibility for your waste and recycle bottles and cans. It's time to take the much more efficient step of putting the responsibility where it belongs, with the manufacturers. We need a nationwide deposit system, or we need bottlers to directly manage reclamation and recycling of materials.

It would make Tom Cruise...and Tim...proud.

A perverse incentive? The economics of repair or replace.

UPDATE 4:05 p.m. 8/25/2014: In a Tweet publicizing this article, I included Whirlpool in hopes of drawing their attention to the opportunity in the "service economy" as opposed to the "extractive economy" - something with which I am sure they are aware, but it always helps to prod. I should have expected what I received, which was an excellent customer service response looking to help with my issue. It prompted me to note that the issues I am having are not with the quality of this specific product, the customer service of Whirlpool, or even the desire of Whirlpool to deliver a high quality product to customers so that they will get good, repeat business. Whirlpool, like other manufacturers, has to do what they can to survive in the current economic climate. I wish I knew the immediate answer to how they can make the shift...if I did, I would certainly be selling it to them and their competitors. I just want to make clear that the following is a call to question the value of our economy, not at all questioning the value of this manufacturer or their product.


We have reached a bit of a crossroads with our washing machine. It is about 6 years old...well within what I would consider to be a "normal" life, and it needs what Whirlpool considers to be a major repair. The control board that turns all the myriad user entries into the customized washer cycles, well, it has crapped out on us (to use the technical term). Not as catastrophic, the drain pump has developed a leak. The factory-authorized repair service will replace both for the tidy sum of $850.  The interesting thing is...

A new comparable washer would cost about $800 from a Whirlpool authorized dealer.

This puts me in a quandary as a person who wants to make the most environmentally conscious decision. The labor aside (approximately $200 of the $850), there is no way that two parts of a device that retails at $1,000 or less cost anywhere near $650 to make. This means that Whirlpool has one of two reasons to do this:

1.  They make the bulk of their money on new product sales and make it financially unbearable to make the decision to repair, or
2.  They want their name associated only with high-quality products. Since this model does not provide the best service, they want to get it back, repurpose the parts, and get a new model in the hands of an existing customer.

I would love to believe that the latter were the answer, but given that the service technician who came out did not push that on us, nor did they make an offer that would dissuade me from considering another brand, I am guessing that the manufacturer only makes money when they can sell a new product from extracted resources...not by providing a service.

That is at the heart of what is wrong with the current economy.

We have so many ways to extract materials, turn them into something of value and then put them to use over long periods of time....but instead, we find the fastest way to put them in the ground and sell another bulk of materials to perform the same service. This "extractive economy" as we know it exists on the shaky foundation that a planet of 7 to 9 billion people, all demanding a high quality of life with the capital we currently use to provide it, will have enough resources to deliver all these goods. We know that for a large portion of our economy, this cannot happen.

The smarter move would be for manufacturers to move from the extractive economy to the service economy. Whirlpool would sell me the service of clothes cleaning - including water and any necessary detergents - for a monthly price (in this case, for something that should last 10 years that they would prefer to sell to me today at $800...let's say $144 per year or $12 per month). In this great internet of things, they could use communication technology to see the washer performance over time, and would see the need for repair to keep it performing as they have contracted to do. Additionally, if they maximized profit based upon how little it cost to maintain, they would likely build a more lasting product in the first place. If the device did need replacement, they would do it within the same fee. When given the responsibility to determine whether to repair or replace to deliver the same service, they would definitely use the method that used the fewest resources and least amount of labor. They would also have full responsibility for the used equipment, and would maximize the reuse of materials and minimize those materials that get wasted.

This "cradle-to-cradle" concept of manufacturing comes from the work of William McDonough, Michael Braungar, and others. It already works in the software market where we have seen the shift from the purchasing of a pack of CDs with pre-loaded software to web-based platforms where we purchase the service the software provides for a regular fee. AT&T recently moved to this format for cell phones where one can upgrade at any time as long as they keep making monthly payments. 

In the ideal market, these manufacturers would enter into the agreements with local energy and water utilities, who would collect the total fees for the services of all appliances from the customers, including the cost of consumables such as energy and water. This would give the customer one place to pay, and would add the further incentive to the utility to minimize the energy use for the level of service provided. In this case, utilities would still get revenue to help maintain infrastructure, and they could make the appliance repair marketplace more efficient by sharing resources across brands and services.

However we tackle this, we need to move away from these incentives to extract as quickly as possible...and I would love it if you could make this happen by Wednesday before I have to make my decision.

Going back to schools that teach

Today is back to school day in our house, and among all the normal activities...finishing summer reading, making sure uniforms fit, figuring out which lunch table to sit at...it's a good time to consider the importance of school buildings to our community, and ways that we can make them even more important.

In many communities, schools already hum from early in the morning until late in the evening. Students go to class, of course, but community groups use facilities for meetings, local youth groups maximize the use of athletic and fine arts facilities when the school does not need them, and in extreme circumstances, schools provide shelter to those displaced from their homes. Schools provide an excellent foundation for sustainable communities, and we have many ways to make them even more so.

• Preserve schools located in community centers. For the past couple of decades, many communities have pushed their schools to the edge of their community because of a combination of the low cost for the land and the larger footprint that modern schools take up. This removes the ability for students to walk or bike to school, as well as losing the embodied energy of the existing school buildings.
• Use the buying power of the school to encourage the purchasing of local, healthy food options. This supports local food systems that provide community resilience, and directly benefits the health and learning opportunities of the students.
• Leverage the long-term position of the school to enter into long-term agreements for energy efficiency and renewable energy. Utility-scale renewable energy provides environmental benefits, but local, community-based systems provide the added benefit of a self-sufficiency that helps in emergency situations. As an added benefit, schools tend to be out of session during the times of highest system performance, meaning that they can export the additional energy to local homes.
• Manage materials in such a way as to minimize how much we dispose of in landfill. Schools use many consumable materials, and have a large, often passionate workforce to help collect and manage materials.
• Create a generation of sustainability natives. Just as children born over the last 20 years are digital natives that have never known a world without computers, students today will never live in a world without the impacts of climate change. These students can then bring what they learn into the community to make life better for all.

One in five people spend some part of their day in a school. The lessons we learn there permeate to all aspects of our life. In order to make these school buildings as useful to our communities as possible, we all need to advocate and support efforts to reduce or eliminate their negative impact on the environment and make them even more self-sufficient.