An online resource center

[JSKW...@gmail.com]

I am wondering if anyone knows whether someone has started a resource
center where someone can get informed on the sustainable options out
there for everything from new construction (such as Leed certification
http://www.usgbc.org/), to tech choices, to daily living(such as
eating vegetarian x days in the week). I'm wondering if we should
start up a site, or become part of a large site that can inform our
specific field and the broad tech field.

[Tom Igoe]

There are many of them. Worldchanging and treehugger are two of my
favorites. One of the problems is that the area is so vast that to
go into depth on any one part of it takes a monster site. What I
like about those two sites (and the worldchanging book) is that
they're very general, and take an encyclopedic approach to the
writing: just enough to introduce the topic and to tell you where
else to look.

t.

[Bartosz]

I'm a web application engineer by trade.  I've was just talking with friends in the world who are conscious of sustainability concerns about this idea.  My corner of the community totally agrees would be awesome if coordinated and executed in a clever way.

I have ideas. I'd be willing to share. The biggest concern would be the constant stream of fresh information needed to keep more dynamic topics fresh while other less elastic information can best serve as a HowTo reference, for example.

What does everyone else think?

http://traincheck.com
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/bartknows

[John C Thomas]

Karl-Henrik Robert started the "Natural Step" program in Sweden.   It's worth looking into and I won't try to summarize all his work here, but one of his concepts may be particularly relevant to the current thread.  I tried to capture it in a pattern called: "Community of Communities."  Rather than have everyone in Sweden try to deal with everything, every community agreed to certain basic principles (such as, "If there is a finite amount of something and we use it up faster than we replace it, eventually it will be gone.") but each community focused on what it had interest and expertise in.  Thus, there might be (my made up examples) "lawyers for a sustainable Sweden" who looked at legal issues and "City Planners for a sustainable Sweden" which tried to determine what cities could do and exchanged ideas, successes, etc.

 
More about Karl-Henrik Robert: http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC35/Robert.htm


My attempt to capture the essence of this in a pattern:

http://diac.cpsr.org/cgi-bin/diac02/pattern.cgi/public?pattern_id=77




John C. Thomas
1S-A14, IBM T. J. Watson Research
PO Box 704 Yorktown Heights, NY 10598
(non-US Post Office: 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, NY 10532)
www.truthtable.com
jcth...@us.ibm.com
(01)-914-784-7561
T/L 863-7561

[carl myhill]

I like this idea a lot. It would be great if we could do this, perhaps a wikipedia style thing? That might ensure that the content remains fresh.

This week I tried to buy an eco floor covering. It is extremelt difficult to really get hold of the best options (which is of course a regional thing too - bamboo might be eco in china but in the UK? Not so sure).

There are various websites out there that help with such choices. I know of one that helps people buy FSC wood* but it would be great to have it all in one place. Just stuff like - how on earth DO you buy recycled business cards? I challenge you to answer that question by googling within 10 minutes. I now know ONE way to do this. I wonder what another 5 ways of doing it would be and how much each option would cost?

*it just took me 30 minutes to find it http://www.fsc-uk.org/product-search/about/  - this is what annoys me about Greenpeace campaigns. OK I understand the various problems but you know, I need to go and buy some wood for some home improvement right now. I want to do the right thing. How about some practical advice on actually doing the right thing??

You know, we throw things out like you would not believe and greenwash is one reason we do it. My washing machine just broke. I was tempted to buy a new super efficient one. But there was a lot of embedded energy cost in producing my existing one. At what point is it an environmentally more sensible thing to do to throw it out?? As it is I just bought a new heating element and fitted it myself. My friend just bought new buttons for 2 microwaves and I bought a replacement shelf for my fridge. Does anyone even know this is possible? If the buttons break on your microwave what do you do? I assume you must throw it out and buy a new one. Not so, you can very cheaply get parts for most appliances. Even this is useful information.

While I think of it, this is helpful... http://www.greenspec.co.uk

Another form of information that is helpful concerns choices. I drive 10 miles to take things to be re-used by a charity called Emmaus, who repair and resell things (or recycle). Is this a good choice for the planet? Would I be better to throw it all into the garbage (landfill) and save the Gas I used in my car taking it there? This is a much more marginal decision than you would think. I was once told by Greenpeace folks that if you must make a separate trip in your car for recycling you would be better to just throw the whole lot in the garbage and save the car journey. What I really mean is that getting some help with choices like this would be extremely helpful.

Right now, today, I want to connect up my 12V DC solar lighting system to a PIR and a couple of outdoor LED lights. Would you beleive that is quite difficult, well, so far, impossible. This should be cake.

I just bought some books from these folks too - a good alternative to Amazon perhaps. http://www.greenmetropolis.com

This is a very dynamic topic in general. Consider the whole idea of using corn crops to make ethanol. Some thing this is a good idea but there are lots of negatives too. A wikipedia style convergence on an agreed statement on that sort of thing might be helpful. In truth though I never really know how wikipedia solves polarizing issues like the 'evolution vs creation' stuff. I feel the eco stuff could become polarized too, though not in quite as significant a way.


You have my vote on this. I would also be very happy to help. I was thinking of attempting something similar myself. There are already sources of information around but they are none of them definitive and reliable. How can we make it compelling and provide the right answers? If I want to look up a word I go to Dictionary.com; to buy a book I go to Amazon; to surf the web, Google; to look something up in an encylopedia, wikipedia. If I want help with an eco decision I go to <BLANK> - this is what I need!!!

Cheers and thanks for the ideas!!!

Carl

[Bill Tomlinson]

Yes, trying to figure out the trade-offs between various lifestyle choices is definitely a tricky problem.  Some kind of community-based system sounds great.

For a year or so I've been working on a project called GreenScanner that relates a bit to this issue.  It's a database of environmental impact reviews of consumer products designed to be accessed via a mobile phone.  With your phone's camera, you can scan the UPC code of the product, and then the system looks up that product in the database.  The database is designed to be populated with community-generated content.  A prototype is online at http://greenscanner.net including UPCs for >600,000 products (although with environmental comments on only a very small subset of them).  

I'm working on a grant proposal to the EPA about the project in another window as we speak.  Part of my argument is that, while the EPA's databases have lots of good content, they're pretty hard to navigate for everyday consumers.  To increase the impact of those and other databases, people need to have a way of accessing the right bits of information easily at a point of purchase.  

By the way, if anyone has any other suggestions about where to find environmental commentary on consumer products, please let me know.

Thanks!

-Bill Tomlinson, UC Irvine

P.S. It's great to see this community coming together!

---

Bill Tomlinson

Assistant Professor of Informatics

University of California, Irvine

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wmt

w...@uci.edu

[Jennifer Mankoff]

I've been keeping track of everything I can find on the topic on http://del.icio.us/jmankoff
I've tagged all of the sustainability stuff with the tag "footprints" plus other tags as appropriate.

jen

[John C Thomas]

It seems as though we may need some sort of "eco-pedia" that is organized and that many people can contribute to.  It is an interesting question whether to make it completely open or not.

I would see this to include tools as well as facts; pointers at least to visualizations and calculators that help people make reasonable choices.  Historically, people did not have to make most of
these choices consciously because their culture determined default choices for most of these decisions.  Unfortunately, our own so-called culture has default assumptions that are unsustainable.

One potential way to make the calculation tenable is to have groups of similarly situated people work as teams and come up with tradeoffs wrt that cluster of situations.  For instance, where I live --- in Westchester county, New York
it is almost impossible to get anywhere reasonable with public transportation.  Riding a bike is an option, albeit, a dangerous one here because there are often no shoulders, many blind curves, and drivers who routinely go 20-30 mph over the speed limits.  On the other hand, I can (and do) often work from home and even when I do go to work physically, I can almost always avoid rush hour (and therefore idling in traffic).   I am also in that quadrant of folks with enough money not to worry overly much about it, but very little time (unless I choose to quit my job of course).  So the general point is, there may be 20-50 "clusters" of people who are in different situations and the possibilities and trade-offs may be different in these different situations.    

John C. Thomas
1S-A14, IBM T. J. Watson Research
PO Box 704 Yorktown Heights, NY 10598
(non-US Post Office: 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, NY 10532)
www.truthtable.com
jcth...@us.ibm.com
(01)-914-784-7561
T/L 863-7561

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