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04 Apr 02 - paper; computers; McDonough; electronics; Earth Day ** WASTE PREVENTION FORUM ** -- A project of the National Waste Prevention Coalition -------- Forum archive: http://www.reuses.com/nwpcarchive -------------------- Excerpted from the Alliance for Environmental Innovation website: The Alliance for Environmental Innovation and the Citigroup corporation have launched a new joint project to reduce the environmental impacts of copy paper use. This project focuses on three areas: - Increasing postconsumer recycled content in copy paper to the maximum level achievable, consistent with functional, cost and quality requirements; - Reducing paper consumption by encouraging duplex printing and copying; - Developing criteria for evaluating paper suppliers on forest management and pulp and paper manufacturing. This project's success will be measured by the extent to which it: Delivers significant and measurable reductions in energy and resource use, solid waste, and pollution; Proves that environmental improvements to copy paper practices are economically and functionally viable; Drives positive change for other service firms. For more information on this project, see: http://www.environmentaldefense.org/Alliance The Alliance for Environmental Innovation, a project of Environmental Defense and The Pew Charitable Trusts, works cooperatively with companies on environmental projects. Citigroup is a major global financial services corporation that includes Citibank, Primerica, Smith Barney, Travelers and other companies. To conduct this copy paper project, the Alliance and Citigroup will form a working team staffed by members of both organizations. According to research by the Alliance, copy paper use alone has grown almost 30 percent since 1995. Businesses can reduce paper usage in creative ways. For example, just by reducing the basis weight of ATM (automated teller machine) receipt paper, Bank of America saved an estimated $500,000 a year, plus the added savings by cutting storage, handling, transportation and labor costs. -------------------- From Sharon Aller, King County Solid Waste Division, Seattle, WA, responding to the 4/2/02 posting about a New Yorker article describing how office workers use paper: If you read that 3/25/02 New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell, you will discover that he makes an excellent case for the cultural aspects of needing paper to help us keep track of projects and thoughts. Piles of paper on our desk connect to the tasks at hand. They are brain ticklers. This is the hard part. How do we work with a paperless office when paper is what keeps us aware of what we do next? When I clean off my desk and put everything in files and the desk is cleared off, AKK! what was I supposed to do? When my e-mails are organized as well as the piles on my desk, there may be hope for a paperless society. E-mail: sharon [DOT] aller [AT] metrokc [DOT] gov -------------------- Link to information on how schools and non-profits can apply to receive donations from Gateway of some of the estimated 4,500 computers used during the Winter Olympics (first seen on the Reuse Development Organization listserv): http://www.gateway.com/olympics/donations.shtml -------------------- Excerpted from an article by Michelle Conlin and Paul Raeburn in the 4/8/02 Business Week (forwarded by Barbara Zaccheo): INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION Fabrics you can eat. Buildings that generate more energy than they consume. A factory with wastewater clean enough to drink. Even toxic-free products that, instead of ending up as poison in a landfill, decompose as nutrients into the soil. No more waste. No more recycling. And no more regulation. Such a world is the vision of environmental designer William McDonough. You might think he's half a bubble off level - until you realize that he's working with powerhouses like Ford, BP, DuPont, Steelcase, Nike, and BASF, the world's largest producer of chemicals, to make it happen. And in the process, he's actually helping them produce substantial savings. Over the past 15 years, McDonough, former dean at the University of Virginia's architecture school, and his business partner Michael Braungart, a top European chemist and a founder of Germany's Green Party, have been busy launching what they call a new industrial revolution. The problem that has long obsessed them: How do you manufacture products safely that are of comparable quality as the original stuff without stifling productivity or cutting profits? Their solutions - which have already had some remarkable success - are fast turning front man McDonough, 51, into one of corporate America's leading gurus of green growth. His and Braungart's ideas are sure to spark even more debate with the publication this month of their new book, "Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things." Indeed, there's a growing awareness among CEOs of the unsustainability of manufacturing as it's done today, using so many potentially dangerous chemicals and producing so much toxic waste. Nearly every item you use - from the car you drive to your computer to your CD player - contains chemicals that often haven't been tested for human safety. When these substances first hit the manufacturing plant, they are labeled as hazardous. But once they turn into consumer products, the warnings disappear. The average mass-produced water bottle or polyester shirt, for example, contains small amounts of antimony - a toxic heavy metal known to cause cancer. A pair of shoes has rubber soles that are loaded with lead. You can throw the shoes away. But their environmental footprints can last decades. Sure, no one has been killed by a sneaker. But McDonough and Braungart have been devising manufacturing processes in which factories don't contribute to greenhouse gases and consumer products don't emit carcinogenic compounds. "Cradle to Cradle," the duo's manifesto on their eco-effective strategies, will hit the stores just as momentum grows behind critical new regulation in Europe. Two years ago, the European Union passed "end-of-life" legislation, which requires auto makers to recycle or reuse at least 80 percent of their old cars by 2006. But end-of-life rules won't stop with autos and are already aimed at computers and electrical gear. McDonough and Braungart have helped develop a material for Nike sneakers whose soles safely biodegrade into soil. Already on the market are Nikes that are virtually free of PVC and volatile organic chemicals. The pair have also helped BASF devise the concept for a new nylon that's infinitely recyclable. And for Steelcase Inc., they have created a fabric with the company's Designtex Inc. subsidiary that is so free of toxins that you can eat it. Lufthansa is now putting the fabric on the seats of its planes. Herman Miller Inc. is using McDonough's ideas this year by implementing a protocol whereby its engineers will be required to use materials in new furniture that have either very low or zero toxicity. Until recently, the reigning solution to environmental ills has been recycling, but McDonough believes doing less of a bad thing doesn't make it good. Recycled products are still full of toxic chemicals. And recycling still creates waste. Perhaps part of McDonough's success with CEOs is that he doesn't bash them. He has the more charitable view that most executives, like technophobes at the birth of the Internet, suffer from environmental illiteracy. McDonough has fused two seemingly opposing world views - environmentalism and capitalism. Certainly, the movement toward sustainable business practices is just beginning. And there are plenty of companies that genuinely work at changing but merely wind up replacing one harmful practice with another. The obstacles to moving toward McDonough's methods are monumental. Experts note it's often difficult to determine up front the business case for doing such things. Often, it requires companies to make a leap of faith that changing will not only be good for the environment but actually save them money. And of course, many attempts can and do fail. "It's absolutely legitimate skepticism," says Sloan School of Management professor Peter Senge. Still, given the world's depleting resources and the specter of regulation, Senge believes it's not a matter of if companies will turn more in this direction, but when. "There's a growing awareness that we are on a path that can't continue. Do we really think a billion and a half Chinese are going to generate a ton of waste every two weeks like Americans do? It will never happen. There's no place to put it." McDonough's system tackles these problems by creating two manufacturing loops. In the first, carcinogens are designed out of the process in favor of safe ingredients that can become biological nutrients. The second loop allows the use of potentially harmful substances - what McDonough calls "technical nutrients." But in contrast with current practices, McDonough designs systems that allow these technical nutrients to be disassembled or reused indefinitely -so they never enter the ecosystem. Taking nature as the inspiration for his operating system, waste becomes food - either literally for the soil in the first loop, or figuratively for new products in the second. As it functions today, says McDonough, industry is based on a linear, cradle-to-grave model that creates unnecessary waste. In fact, 90 percent of materials extracted for durable goods become garbage almost immediately. By completely remaking the industrial process - from the way factories are built to the choice of materials - McDonough is showing companies how to reinvent production from "cradle to cradle." -------------------- Link to information on the 10th International Symposium on Electronics and the Environment and the 3rd Electronics Recycling Summit, which will be held jointly May 6-9, 2002, in San Francisco: http://www.isee2002.org ------------------- Link to information on Earth Day 2002, from the Earth Day Network (forwarded by Gary Liss): http://www.earthday.net Earth Day is Monday, April 22, 2002. - end -