Attempting to transform the place you work

This is just some ideas I emailed to my place of work, anyone of us can attempt to influence our place of work and at home towards sustainability.

- Become a leader in green job training to help students and this country stay competitive in the global marketplace.

- Bring out the expertise out of all individuals in this university and apply these ideas locally within the university instead of primarily exporting their ideas elsewhere. This will also help students absorb and practice what they learn better.

- Provide incentives to submit these cost saving suggestions by encouraging a spirit of competition. Giving out some sort of incentive for the top candidate of each really effective suggestion in an area (If an idea can save the company thousands of dollars, small price for a large return) and will get more people thinking.

Conservation ideas

Often departments act like separate silos and don’t think of the whole system, the students, or the taxpayer interest as their main priority. Department interest comes first, the good of the whole sometimes goes by the way side, and this can introduce lots of inefficiencies and bloat in an organization.

- For example, in our organization IT does not pay the electric bill, so the cost of energy is not figured into IT planning. By consolidating or centralizing and virtualizing Sharepoint/web servers/research servers you maximize efficiencies and utilize load balancing and virtualization to distribute the load. This also reduces need for duplicated expertise scattered over people who have many other responsibilities. When I went to Sharepoint training I recall two classes with about 30 administrators each, all were learning how to manage the servers from the hardware, application layer, security layer, and end user layer on top of their other responsibilities to the institution. This is extremely inefficient.

Have experts on all of these layers, utilizing each person’s expertise rather than scattering even more people in many directions, wasting time on duplicating skills, reinventing wheels, etc. If you centralize services such as these, you can now have a few experts manage a centralized server setup for the whole organization, doling out sub sites to departments and campuses, with one fail- over setup at a different location. Not to mention that departments can collaborate without having to reinvent the wheel, and you reduce network vulnerabilities and potentially expensive breaches.

- Use the underground river water for cooling system of data center. This may seem obvious, but it is not to everyone. To this day large air conditioning units are being put on roofs to cool the datacenters in the basements of buildings, while ground water (in our particular case just a few feet underneath the foundations) is running. The Spokane river is literally a stone throw away from this facility and yet this water is not being utilized for cooling. Google and Hanford were located near the Columbia river to take advantage of the water cooling as well as the cheap electricity from the nearby dams.

- To follow up on the paperless initiatives already started, transparency and visibility bring more awareness of waste. Don’t allow personal printers, have only departmental printers, this not only saves on printing costs/maintenance/tech support tickets, but also makes it less tempting for staff, faculty, and management to print non-university related things. Make sure full duplex printing is allowed and turned on and send out directions on how to access and use it. (Having been in IT support, I have seen a lot of people indulge in this behavior)

- Leaving non-essential electronics on at night, during holidays and weekends is a waste of university money, have facilities monitor departmental energy usage in the same way bandwidth usage is monitored. By publishing the usage numbers by department publicly you create transparency and accountability, which induces more mindfulness and awareness of energy use. Our organization is just starting to monitor electricity usage using the many available software on the market today.

- Avista has incentives for organizations that make use of system wide workstation hibernation.Their incentive last checked was 10 dollars per workstation.

- Find and eliminate phantom loads (copiers, printers, adapters not on powerstrips, projectors, etc)

- Make sure all new buildings use passive solar techniques; this is free energy saved in the winter and does not come at a cost of esthetics.

- Use passive solar water heating and geothermal heating and cooling.

- Save water, install or at least replace broken toilets with waterless urinals and dual flush toilets.

- Harvest gray water from roofs for supplemental irrigation.

- This may sounds small, but it nevertheless is reflective of the sometimes-wasteful institutional culture. Here in Spokane in older buildings, toilet paper rolls are thrown out after half or two-thirds is used, meaning in the trash by most janitorial staff. Leaving computers (many with dual monitors) on during nights and weekends costs about 90 dollars per computer per year, times several thousand computers, and you're talking tens of thousands of dollars down the drain, not pennies!

- If it is too expensive to recycle, go directly to the source, only accept vendors who sell containers (such as aluminum cans and glass) that can be recycled for money so there is not a negative cash-flow with recycling. While at it, only accept beverages and snacks that are wholesome and avoid frankenfoods which will ultimately have medical consequences and costs.

Some ideas may be small, but in the global and flattened marketplace America is competing with people who are willing to produce and serve for much less and also don't take these little things for granted. By not taking anything for granted we won’t marginalize the organization's future competitive edge. See "Living Companies" which outlive those companies that don't grow.

- Energy generation may be one of those things that is better to distribute or de-centralize. There is energy loss when importing from far away. Diversify and ad more redundancy in the portfolio of energy sources while becoming a more sustainable campus.

- Reclaim waste heat from the IT server rooms, campus restaurants etc to heat rooms that need extra heating for example by using heat exchangers or a sterling engine. Figuring out how best to do this can be another engineering student project/competition.

- Reuse all fryer oil for organization vehicle use (biodiesel or straight vegetable oil conversions), I have put over 25K miles on “free” waste vegetable oil on my truck with no problems. If you can’t do that, the oil can also be burned in a waste oil heater to generate heat in the winter, either way, it is usable energy.

- Put engineering students to work capturing energy generated from workout machines at the campus wellness/gym, it would not be that complicated for them to hook these machines up to alternators. Again, this sounds small, but people who work out on machines generate energy, why waste it? If anything, it turns the university in an exiting place to learn and directly apply that understanding.

- Put students to work on putting solar water heaters on roofs, this has a much quicker payback or return on investment than photovoltaic at this time.

- Don’t just export the energy efficient houses or cars that students enter into competitions, use this technology in new buildings and retrofit buildings with this new technology.

- Capture methane gas energy from the composting, dairy farms, and waste generated, again put the students to work right on their own campus rather than outside.

Landscaping

- Change to edible (useful and beautiful) landscaping instead of only esthetic landscaping.

- Save some on fossil fuel fertilizers, do mulching instead, and convert some of the lawn to producing vegetables, nuts and fruits, similar to the millions of victory gardens back during the Second World War.

- Landscape maintenance is being paid for already, so why can’t they help produce food, (generating extra income and avoiding imports of foods, while sending a self sufficient sustainable message to the students) while they are maintaining the grounds. Replace new or broken landscaping with edible landscaping (produce can then be sold by the cafeteria, sell fruit to vendors, or let the hotel and restaurant department do the vending, try to keep the money circulating within the university, similar to what the dairy is doing now)

Whole Systems Health

- Business has already found that for every dollar invested in employee health, you can save 3 dollars or more in health care costs (see link below). Yet, surplus sales at its last sale of February 13, this year, was selling high quality exercise equipment to off–campus users. There are lots of people on campus who would love to be able to do a little exercise on their lunch break instead of going off campus and paying a big fee to a gym. With that in mind, encouraging such practices as healthy eating, local diets, exercise, dance, yoga, tai chi and meditation will have long term pay-offs in terms of healthier, happier, more adaptable, and more resilient employees. Happy employees are hard workers too. See concrete cost/benefit cases for large organizations: http://www.welcoa.org/worksite_cost_benefit.html

Our country's new president said, "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works…We will Transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age."

Rather than the idea of how do we keep business as usual the same old way without cutting jobs etc, what if this could be seen as an opportunity to change and the way we do business, to transform our institution into the change we wish to transmit into the world through our own example and through the graduating students?

There is a lot of collective knowledge and experience to tap into within this university's community and yet in various areas there is disconnect between what is being taught in the organization versus what the organization practices on their own campus.

This recession is an opportunity in this new era of interdependence, responsibility, humility, transparency, and openness. During this time of uncertainty people are more motivated to change if that would save job cuts etc, making people more likely to adopt new ideas and practices as well as give them some ownership in the future.

Spokane's waste incinerater burns tons of usable goods every day

When you go to the waste to energy plant in west Spokane, there you'll see people dumping perfectly good building materials, consumer electronics, aquariums, you name it. Many times I have wanted to just take something as it was still usable, but this is not allowed. I understand that they don't want people scavenging, however, this is a completely unsustainable system.

First of all, why is there not a Goodwill or other thift store drop-off point directly in the vicinity of the plant? If you think about it, people who are moving or in a hurry, don't have the time/energy/patience to go to a thriftstore to drop usable items off. I asked a truck with good looking kindling wood last time why he didn't just post that on Craigslist, he had not thought of it as having value to someone else, so he didn't think of it. So in many cases people are not even aware of the value of goods. This is regrettable, but it is the way it is.

So then why not have a drop-off point, a drive-through, where a second hand store employee can take out the usable items before the driver proceeds to the plant, that would significantly reduce the barrier to recycling usable goods, and result in a win-win for both the driver having less weight, so less cost to dump their trash. The Thrift store would have more goods to sell, and finally folks who buy recycled or second hand goods have more to choose from. Perhaps I'll bring the camera next time.

Related, go here to help the effort to prevent e-waste dumping:
http://www.care2.com/go/z/e/AFKI_/zjVp/PfoO

Recycling old computers and monitors, etc

"To encourage recycling, a law takes effect Jan. 1 that will allow Washington households, schools, charities and small businesses to recycle TVs and computers for free. Electronics manufacturers will pay for the program, which is expected to cost about $8 million annually.To find a free drop-off location after the New Year, call 1-800-RECYCLE"

Goodwill drop-off locations will take your old computers and monitors, as well as some of the local recyclers, like Inland Retech.

The Story of Stuff

Teaser Trailer about a site that shines awareness on consumer culture and the forces behind it. To view this video in it's entirety, go here:
The Story of Stuff



Couple of the main points that this 20 minutes video shows:

- Only one percent of all the new stuff bought after 6 months is still being used. The rest either trashed or filling up people's increasingly large homes. This is an almost unbelievable statistic, have to check where they got that figure from.

- Victor Lebow on how to keep the economy growing after WWII, "Our enormously productive economy ... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.... we need things consumed, burned up, replaced, and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate."

- President Eisenhower's council of economic advisors chairman stated:
"The American economy's ultimate purpose is to produce more consumer goods."

- Paul Wachtel writes in The Poverty of Affluence: "Having more and newer things each year has become not just something we want but something we need. The idea of more, ever-increasing wealth, has become the center of our identity and our security, and we are caught up by it as the addict is by his drugs."

How does an unsustainable economy keep people spending money on stuff?

- Planned Obsolescence

An endless market is created by introducing rapid, disposables, one time use items, basically designed for the trash heap, so you have to go out and buy it again. Examples, disposable diapers, cameras, brooms, carpets, etc. Upgrade the motherboard on the computer, and likely many other things will need upgrading as well, many just get a new computer to avoid the hassle of incompatibilities. Disconnection from the earth as a whole system is literally written all over these products. It is a symbol of our disconnected separate thinking state of mind. The video discusses designers figuring out a way to keep consumers loyal to their products while at the same time making components break fast.

- Perceived Obsolescence

Convince the consumer to throw away stuff that is still useful. How to do that? By changing the way things look, basically, changing the fashions often, whether that is for clothes or gadgets. Look at advertising, it appeals to people's manufactured self image, "do you really want to look, breath, show yourself in that way?", with our product, xyz, you will look cooler, more color coordinated, get more happiness, more girls, look younger, act more confident, show you care, etc, etc. Basically preying on people's insecurities, and limited self image. The video mentions the example of shoe fashion changes each year. An important element in this conditioning is creating a perceived value to the user. Again, this comes from a disconnected, separate thinking self identity, one that puts ficticious value judgements on people things and planet.

How to keep people from questioning their conditioning and continue shopping?

- Carpet bomb them with advertising, a bombardment of the average person of 3000 ads per day.

- Telling the consumer that they are not happy, unless they buy xyz. Similar to a priest a few centuries earlier telling people that they are sinners, and they can only go through the church to get a chance at eternal rewards. Basically by projecting small identities onto the consumer.

- Keep the nasty stuff or REALITY out of the field of vision, as though it doesn't exist. Examples are the cartoony happy chickens running around on the farm (instead of the undignified factory farms where they are fattened up with who knows what, beaks cut because they are stuffed in small cages so they can't kill each other, avoiding humane killing to save a penny, etc), the bugers that grow on trees, the face that suddenly looks 50 years younger. It truly is the "matrix" of manufactured happiness, version of reality. The advertisers have no incentive to show where the stuff comes from, as that would bring out the citizen, or perhaps move people's heart, which is in conflict with the non-feeling, non-connected consumer persona which just wants to consume, neural networks which are encouraged to grow like weeds in people's heads and sanctified (endorsements by public figures, heros, or celebrities).

- The connection between national happiness falling and consumerism rising is made. We have the gross national product as a standard for wealth, Butan has the gross national product of happiness. Different emphasis, different outcome. While neither might be the best way to go into the future, it sure would be nice to have product life cycle cost, national wellness, and impact on environment or future generations included in this mix.

- More time off is not neccessarily better if it is not quality time, but less time off in order to buy more, which creates a cycle of even more work to pay for keeping up with the Jones's.

Gardeners can find plenty of leaves for free in bags during the fall

Brown's edition and the South Hill are good places to get your free mulch for your organic garden. I like to mow them up some more, then spread them on my vegetable beds, they also discourage weeds that way. Folks have already put the leaves in bags for you and they are on the curb. Why not grab some...

Downtown Recycling Club!

The Lands Council has a new project: The Downtown Spokane Recycling Club. This project, which consisted of surveying local restaurants, pubs, and bars to assess rates of recycling and business reasons for lack of recycling, was conceived to increase the rate of recycling among local businesses. If you go to their website, you'll find a link to the project, and then a link to cards that they have created. These cards ask businesses to start recycling. You can bring these cards with you to restaurants, and ask them if they recycle, and if so what they recycle. If they don't, or have limited recycling, leave a card with your bill to encourage them to start recycling. If they do, make sure you thank them. Consumer pressure for recycling is the best way to make businesses listen. With your help, we can begin to increase the rate of recycling among businesses here in Spokane. Thank you! Here is a link to the recycling page:http://www.landscouncil.org/Downtown%20Spokane%20Recycling%20Club/Downtown_Spokane_Recycling_club.html