In Liz Tinlin’s article about pursuing brand awareness, she outlines four criteria to determine whether something is really a purpose. Life, Action, Simplicity, and Relevance.

A few days ago, I watched this video:

It essentially introduces a couple’s idea of making roads and other surfaces out of solar panels with a protective outer glass casing, made of recycled glass, to protect it from any damage. In addition to this, the creators also plan to program LED lights on the surface of these panels that can be programmed to change into any kind of formation desired.

Looking a little more into the product and the creators, I found their purpose,  to save and preserve the world, not for their own grandchildren, but for everyone’s grandchildren, fits all of Tinlin’s criteria.

It can be applied to a diverse range of categories, as all categories should be seeking sustainability and a better future, if not for themselves then for their future generations, demonstrating the Life criteria.

Save and preserve, strike me as verbs that inspire action, and call on people to specifically join together to inspire one objective, to rescue, satisfying the Action criteria.

As corny as it may seem, the purpose is easy to understand. Although many people have different perspectives of how to leave a better life for the generations to come, it’s something that everyone hopes to achieve, communicating Simplicity.

Lastly, Solar Roadways does indeed live up to its purpose by actively providing solutions to preserving the planet, linking it’s product to its purpose well, establishing Relevance.

As with all products, there are also many nay-sayers who are convinced that these panels will not work. Some criticisms include the dangers of the displays being hacked, the high costs, and the limited durability of the glass casing, as well as it’s design. With these people’s expertise, I almost feel as if they should take these criticisms and work with the panels to look for solutions to create a feasible product rather than simple doubt its functionality.

However, Solar Roadways has still received massive support from the public after launching their original idea on crowdfunding website Indiegogo in June last year, raising 220% of what they originally asked for. Furthermore, the campaign was also recently reopened due to popular demand. It’s truly great to see the number of people who believe in innovation to create a better planet, and ends this post on a positive note by giving us hope in the world to come.

I recently discovered a new function of Snapchat. In addition to sending silly snaps to distract your friends, you can now further procrastinate on this application by browsing the content of several multimedia channels and peek into publications such as National Geographic.

While I was doing just this the other day, I watched a short video about something called ‘Passive Housing’.

Many compare the concept of Passive Housing to a thermos, due to the high quality insulation is provides. As buildings account for a significant amount of energy usage around the world ( 40% in the United States), these ‘passive’ standards are driven by efforts to reduce energy usage in order to fight climate change.

Passive houses are known to focus on an single metric, energy use. Thus, in this article specifically, National Geographic talks about how Habitat for Humanity is looking to build these Passive Houses for low income families so they can spend less on energy costs after moving in.

Now, skeptics say all this sounds dandy, right up until Summer rolls in and this insulation starts working against energy efficiency by requiring inhabitants to turn up their cooling systems. Thus, perhaps the locations these passive houses are built need to be revised to make them as energy efficient as possible. Furthermore, the costs of building a passive house can really add up. Certification alone can cost a few thousand dollars. Add that to the cost of high quality materials, such as triple layered windows, and these houses become hard to afford. However, I think this draws back to our lecture on consumer costs. Although the price of initial product is high, the usage costs, and even post usage costs should be relatively low. Some experts even expect passive housing to reduce current energy costs by 90%. Consumers just need to be convinced of this delayed gratification of savings.

As a girl, I feel like I’m almost always in the market for some good facial wipes. Recently, I read an article about Neutrogena ditching their traditional TV advertising for social media heavy exposure. How does this relate to the environment you ask? Well, the campaign they have decided to run solely based on social media is none other than their annual Earth Month campaign, which involves the hashtag ‘WipeForWater’ this year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4ScVY-hZJ4

Neutrogena has made the lovable Kristen Bell their spokeswoman for this campaign and in addition to this have also employed several influential Youtube stars to endorse the product. According to Neutrogena, the average person wastes up to 5 gallons of water a day just by washing his/her face. In efforts to conserve the water on our planet, Neutrogena has encouraged users to not wash their faces for seven days, and instead to just use their ‘Naturals Purifying Makeup Remover Cleansing Towels‘ for that time period. If users complete this challenge for the full seven days, they are encouraged to share a post on their social media platforms stating that they saved 35 gallons of water, and to tag it with ‘#WipeForWater’. Furthermore, Neutrogena has vowed to donate $1 for every pledge made by its users to The Nature Conservancy to support water conservation (up to ($50,000).

Having gotten slightly addicted to using the Good Guide after our last lecture, I decided to take a look at Neutrogena’s overall score. It seems that the company overall is quite socially and environmentally responsible. It has a number of certifications under its belt and seems to offer lots of transparency in its operations. Furthermore, a quick look into their partner for this campaign, The Nature Conservancy, does accredit it as an organization that is quite well run and tackles a large number of important environmental issues. Although seeing Neutrogena’s past records does slightly quell my suspicions of it just promoting this initiative as a pure marketing gimmick, I still wonder why a big corporation like Neutrogena is capping their donations at $50,000.

Regardless of the reasons, I feel that this initiative is an engaging way to educate the general public about how much water they consumer on a daily basis and points their attention towards the conservation of resources.

Their campaign has definitely worked on me to some extent. I just so happen to be in the market for some moisturizers and wipes, so when I go for my weekly groceries run in a few hours I’ll most likely be keeping an eye out for these ‘Neutrogena Naturals’ products.

Read (a little) more about their Wipe For Water campaign HERE.

In a video by Architect Bjarke Ingels, he denounces the thought that in order to achieve sustainability, there must be sacrifice. He believes that sustainability is essentially a design challenge, in which sustainable buildings and products should not only save the planet, but also increase quality of life.

As he said this I had some serious doubts. Naturally, sustainability should indeed be a design challenge in which people are continuously innovating new ways to do things that have less of an impact on the earth. However, it is hard to imagine a way to do this without sacrificing at least some hedonistic needs. Regardless, he brings up some interesting designs and examples of how be believes his structures to simultaneously increase quality of life and sustainability.

During his speech he mentions being commissioned to design a sort of ‘loop city’ by Copenhagen, and announces his proposal to integrate business, industrial and residential buildings and use the excess power from the industry to subsidize ‘human programs’ such as thermal baths. Furthermore, he outlines that his inspiration came from the fact that 54% of the waste produced in Copenhagen are actually used to create energy for heating and electricity. Thus a loop is created in that people trade their trash for energy.

Now to create this loop you would need a large power plant, and as an architect advocating for hedonistic sustainability, he also shared a few ideas of how to make the power plant look wonderful. The most interesting idea I found was the design to make the chimney emit smoke as giant smoke rings. Originally I thought this was a pretty useless feature of the building, but then he shared his idea that he believes knowledge to be a main driver of change. Thus his ideal is for 10 smoke rings to demonstrate one tonne of carbon emissions.

All in all, his designs are interesting, and creating energy from waste sounds great. But there still seems to be some big issues we need to tackle, such as producing less waste to begin with, going against the idea of sustainability without sacrifice.