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.

While browsing my Facebook feed I stumbled upon Plastimake. Originating from Australia, Plastimake is essentially a commercial moldable plastic that softens in hot water and hardens in cold water.

The website features hundreds of sculptures and projects made from these small plastic pellets, but what caught my attention about this product in particular was its implications on sustainability. As seen in the introductory Youtube video, many people have started fixing certain broken household objects with this product rather than throwing them away. This loosely links back to our conversation in class about reusing and making the most of product on hand rather than buying our way to sustainability through eco-friendly products.

Plastimake is essentially a cradle to cradle product, boasting unlimited usage as all consumers need to do when they want to change the product is to heat it up and mould it again. But in the event that consumer do choose to throw it away, it biodegrades into water and carbon dioxide.

Although the facts remain questionable as the website relays very limited information, this still seems like an interesting step towards sustainability.

During reading break I stumbled upon a brand of bags that I found particularly interesting. In class we talked about creating consumer solutions and brainstorming ‘cradle-to-grave’ products. Freitag is a company that attempts to do this. Founded in 1993 by the Freitag brothers, the company manufactures messenger bags and other accessories from old truck tarpaulin, worn out bicycle inner tubes, discarded seatbelts, and airbags. They like to call their process ‘recontextualizing’, comparing it to the reincarnation of products at the end of their lifecycle.  The company was established as a result of the Freitag brothers noticing the lack of sturdy and water-repellent messenger bags and setting out to find a solution to this problem. (consumer solutions!)

In addition to creating bags from up-cycled materials, Freitag has also looked into creating clothing that is completely biodegradable. They call this F-abric. Instead of going through the normal product life cycle of a piece of clothing, garments made from F-abric can be tossed into the compost bin and biodegrade within a couple months. A full cradle-to-grave product.

I think Freitag is the perfect example of how companies can tie sustainability into their core business functions. Their business model not only saves products heading to the landfill and gives them new purpose, but also innovates from the basics to improve existing materials to ensure that they are both sexy and susty. Additionally, Freitag also happens to be extremely aware of its social impacts, basing its factories and sourcing its product parts from within Europe and maintain close relations and enforcing regulations with its local suppliers.

The entire processes they use to create bags appear to be quite eco-friendly. Even the process used to wash the tarps after their arrival at the factory is operated using 3963 gallons of rainwater. However, I cannot help but wonder whether the benefits of recontextualizing these materials outweigh the costs it inflicts on the environment.

Last week we learned that a company is able to achieve green growth through three different strategies. Accentuating its current green practices, acquiring other green brands, or architecting new green practices within the company.

Although these strategies seem straight forward, they have proved to be difficult to implement for many big names companies such as Coca-Cola. The company has put significant effort in building its social and environmental responsibility initiatives.  To some extent I believe this can be seen as the ‘architect’ strategy where Coca-Cola is incorporating green growth into its operations, such as its initiative to implement sustainable methods of packaging and taking ownership of collecting its used bottles.

Furthermore, Coca-Cola has tried the strategy involving acquisition several times, but perhaps received more negative feedback than positive through this strategy. One recent example includes their acquisition of UK owned company Innocent drinks, which has garnered significant backlash and has consumers questioning whether the ethical ethos that set these drinks apart in the first place, will be lost.

The obvious problem of architecting and acquiring with companies like Coca-Cola, who have established themselves for being ‘big and bad’ is that the general public no longer believes that they introduce initiatives for altruistic reasons. Many of their efforts are simply dismissed as stemming from greed and being another means to generate profit.

I recently had a thought that perhaps the acquisition strategy would work more effectively if Coca-Cola looked to purchase smaller green focused companies that have less media attention and to work with them to make the brand successful. Although there would be significantly more risk with this strategy, it may just be able to silence some critics.

What do you think?

Last week we touched upon the importance of the need for congruence between the public’s perception of a company’s intrinsic goals and their social/environmental initiatives, specifically decreased product usage. Patagonia’s ‘worn wear’ campaign was brought up as a prime example of this. It was mentioned that a ‘don’t buy this jacket’ campaign was launched on Black Friday, where an advertisement urging consumers to NOT buy a jacket was displayed on screens in Times Square.

It is a popular stereotype that all companies exist to make a profit, regardless of the cost; especially companies that can afford a billboard at Times Square. Personally, as a consumer unfamiliar with Patagonia’s company goals, my initial reaction to this campaign was indeed slightly negative as an incongruence between the message and my perception of the company’s profit goals came to mind. I felt a sort of subtle reverse psychological manipulation was being played. Something about the idea of a for-profit business genuinely trying to do good didn’t add up for me. Perhaps we are all defaulted to assume the worst and have too little faith in businesses. Extending this idea of congruence further than in the case of decreased product usage, we can also observe reactions to congruence in companies that have undertaken other sustainable practices.

Taking a look some of the companies that have received recognition for their work towards sustainability, we can touch upon General Mills’ pledge to sustainable agriculture. They work in collaboration with suppliers of 10 of their main ingredients, representing 50% of their total raw material purchases,  to place less of a negative impact on social and environmental surroundings. This enables them to sustain the resources needed for the business to continue its operations. Another company we can observe is Walmart and their commitment to increase efficiency in their truck fleets, in turn decreasing their operation costs as well as benefiting the environment.

Both of these initiatives demonstrate an obvious congruence between their commitments and company goals, and perhaps as a result these companies received more recognition from the public and mass media. But should companies really have to demonstrate congruence to garner public support? And does the motivation behind this matter so long as they are improving conditions in the name of sustainability?

References

Confino, Jo. (2014). Best practices in sustainability: Ford, Starbucks, and more. The Guardian. retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/blog/best-practices-sustainability-us-corporations-ceres

Following our in class conversation on the topic of McDonald’s search to find sustainable beef, I thought it would be interesting to widen the scope of this topic to other livestock. This brought my attention to the idea of the sustainable egg. Last year, California approved a regulation that required egg-laying hens to “only be confined in ways that allow them to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely” (Westervelt, 2014). Although this appears to mark success for animal rights activists, researchers have pointed out several problems related to this new regulation.

Researchers attribute the industry’s decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, despite its massive growth since the 1960s, to effective manure management and feed efficiency; something attainable through the use of caged egg production systems. (Westervelt, 2014) Other researchers identify this new regulation as an inhibitor towards food safety, arguing that through the caged egg system, farmers were not only able to sustain sanitation through the efficient removal of manure, they were also able to keep contact between eggs and manure to a minimum. (Rothman, 2015) Furthermore, specialists deny the claim that these larger cages improve the welfare of hens. They state that these hens will establish a pecking order which translates to more stress and cannibalism, as well as higher chances of bone breakage for the inhabitants of these larger cages. (Westervelt, 2014) More details regarding this topic can be found here, and here.

This significant change in the industry will affect all the farmers who reside in, and import their eggs into the state of California. However, as we have discussed in class, corporations who monitor environmental trends and seek to change their practices before regulations are approved sustain an advantage. A prime example of this in the egg farming case can be found in San Diego where they have anticipated and prepared for this regulation for as long as five years. (Jones, 2015)

Although the idea of chicken exercising their right to roam free is pleasant and exciting, one cannot help but wonder if this very idea was planted in our heads through marketing means to justify higher priced eggs. If not, are hens really better off roaming free while being endangered by predators and other hens? What about the easier transmission of pathogens through unkempt spaces? Ultimately, these questions lead us back to the conversation of, what is ‘sustainable food’?

References

Jones, J. Harry. (2015). New Rules Create ‘Chicken Disneyland’. U-T San Diego. Retrieved from http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2015/jan/01/chicken-eggs-hilliker-farm-ranch/?#article-copy

Rothman, Lauren. (2015). Do Bigger Chicken Cages Do More Harm Than Good. Munchies. Retrieved from http://munchies.vice.com/articles/do-bigger-chicken-cages-do-more-harm-than-good

Westervelt, Amy. (2014). Ethical Farming Dilemma: should we be helping the chicken or fixing the egg?. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/eggs-environment-farming-health-cage-free