There’s more to a vehicle than metal. And chances are if it’s not metal, it’s something created from petroleum — like plastic trim and polyester fibre.

But times are a changing.

Consider this quote on Ford’s website, attributed to Cynthia Flanigan, a technical expert with Ford Plastics Research: “Whenever petroleum-based materials exist — in plastic, rubber, foam, film or fabric — we are looking to minimize its proportion and replace it with a sustainable material.”

A “sustainable material” would either be a plant-based material and/or a recycled material.
Ford has been using soy-based foam for car seats for a few years now (starting on the 2007 Mustang). It recently expanded its soy-foam portfolio to the industry’s first soy-foam headliner on the 2010 Escape.

And among Ford’s recycled materials initiatives are seat fabrics made with varying degrees of post-industrial yarns, suede-like material created from plastic pop bottles (Taurus SHO and Lincoln MKZ), and sound deadening and carpet backing fashioned in part from old blue jeans (2012 Focus).

While recycling efforts are useful and necessary, the cooler science projects are happening with non-traditional materials, such as plants.

Consider the recently announced BamBoo, which Rinspeed, a Swiss auto design firm, will unveil at this spring’s Geneva auto show. It’s called BamBoo because many interior components are made from bamboo fibre.

Rinspeed’s press release says the open-top electric-powered concept car “awakens the longing for sun and summer; for lightness and easiness; and the desire to be at the beach.”

And it gets better: “It is a reminiscence of the 70s, of the south of France and St. Tropez. And one would expect to find Brigitte Bardot behind the wheel with playboy Gunther Sachs at her side heading toward Tahiti beach.”

Rinspeed figures that retro and greeness go good together, like wine and cheese, claiming that its old-new design creations are about channeling “the yearning to get back to the roots, paired with the absolute desire to be in harmony with creation.”

May be a highfalutin way of expressing the sentiment, but probably not a totally off-base one for a lot of people.

http://green.autoblog.com/2010/12/04/rinspeed-previews-bamboo-well-ahead-of-geneva-debut/

“It is assumed that the momentum for change must come from outside the situation, rather than from the self-reflection and creativity of those within the situation to restructure their own patterns of interaction.”

~ From Elinor Ostrom’s speech upon receipt of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics

Christmas has been largely hijacked by capitalism, it is true – but the underlying desire to meet another’s need and fulfill a loved one’s dream has neither died, nor is it likely to as long as human beings exist. Many of us shop ‘til we drop to find that perfect gift.

Of course, we all now realize that there is another invisible price tag attached to what we buy: it has to do with human health and the environment on which our health depends. That second price tag also involves the poor health of slave labourers in those countries to whom our profit-hungry corporations outsource as much work as possible, and our own health when we buy goods made by that slave labour – goods often laced with all kinds of chemical toxins in fabrics, foods, furniture, electronics, etc. The wealth of a nation can now be readily interpreted in terms of the health of its people. The pursuit of profit has brought a great deal of sickness to people and to our natural support system – the world of plants, animals, water, earth, and air. The core problem, however, is something very unemotional: economic inefficiency based on illusions about reality and negative assumptions about human nature.

Consider, for example, that 50% of Ontario’s annual budget goes into health care. Will there be money for anything else in the future? Political economist David DeGraw, discussing “economic terrorism,” points to some grim statistics: 50 million U.S. citizens live in poverty and have no access to health care, and 50% of all U.S. children use food stamps (in Canada, one million children use food banks). In 2009, about 1.4 million people filed for bankruptcy, an increase of 32% in one year, and 60% of those were due to medical bills, even though all of them had health care insurance, which turned out to be dramatically insufficient. Despite the high concentration of medical research, products, and technology in the U.S., it rates 37th in overall satisfactory health care in the world. The U.S. unemployment rate hovers at 20%. By 2011, the U.S. national debt will surpass its entire gross national product of over $15 trillion.

“Fuzzy stuff” like love and respect for nature, and valuing the common good above maximization of personal profit, do not generally get expressed in the language of mathematical models, empirical experiments, and hard core economic analysis of real life situations. Nor do they get enthusiastic support from publications like Forbes Magazine and Fortune 500. But that is what happened when the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics went to Elinor Ostrom. Educated at Indiana and Arizona universities, her work represents the most radical departure from current economic thinking, and that of the last three centuries, possibly since Adam Smith.

The Nobel Committee stated in their press releases on October 12, 2009 that “Ostrom challenged the conventional wisdom that resources held in common must be poorly managed [and showed] that common resources can be managed successfully by the people who use them, rather than by governments or private companies.” Her many studies over four decades, including user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, groundwater basins, decentralized police forces, and more, showed outcomes “better than predicted by standard theories.” She analyzed the spontaneously arising collective behavioural and administrative rules and how these “promote successful outcomes.” Indeed, Ostrom created a solid research foundation for Margret Mead’s famous observation: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”

To appreciate the tectonic shift involved, we need to look at what it is that Ostrom reinterprets. An examination of the current economic mess is perfect for this. The world’s economy is dominated by notions of globalization, deregulation, and its attendant spin-doctoring of the facts to suit the dogmas of the Church of Capitalism. These notions made corporate self-interest go viral and brought the world to the brink of a total economic meltdown in October 2008, as the President of the Bank of Canada explained to CBC Radio’s Michael Enright on November 21. (Nevertheless, $150 billion was paid out in bonuses to Wall Street executives in 2009 in apparent appreciation of their diligence which wrecked the U.S. economy and messed up the world’s money supply.)

To read the full article, please visit:
http://www.vitalitymagazine.com/dec10_helkefeat

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David Suzuki: On Big Business, the Environment & the Future

"In 1989, when the Exxon Valdez oil spill happened, the American GDP went up by $2 billion. If you looked only at GDP growth, then you'd say, "Well, that's great--spill oil all over the place, it's good for the GDP." This is a nutty, stupid notion of an indicator of anything, and yet every politician will turn somersaults to try and keep the GDP growing."

To read the full article, please visit:
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/managing/ceo_interviews/article.jsp?content=20060108_173119_4708

The Newfoundland and Labrador government has implemented amendments to the Waste Management Regulations, under the Environmental Protection Act, in order to introduce a paint recycling program targeting waste paint products.

These changes will allow producers to play the primary role in managing the end-of-life treatment of their products through the development, funding, and management of a recycling program for most types of residential and commercial paints. The program will take an Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) approach, meaning that paint producers will be responsible for the paint from the point of production through to post consumer recycling. This will be the first EPR-based recycling program for the province.

http://www.releases.gov.nl.ca/releases/2010/env/1115n05.htm

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Related Links:

Metro Vancouver’s Newest Water Plant Uses UV as Primary Disinfectant
http://www.wateronline.com/article.mvc/ITT-Technology-Gives-New-Meaning-To-Mountain-0001?VNETCOOKIE=NO

Don Pettit doesn’t mind drinking his own urine or his sweat, for that matter. Pettit is far from insane. As an astronaut, he has no choice but to drink all available fluids. Welcome to extreme water recycling.

“You make water inside your body, through your breath and your sweat,” explains Pettit, a veteran NASA astronaut who has lived on the International Space Station for six months. “On the ISS you capture all of that water and recycle it.”

Astronauts are each allowed only 3.5 liters of water per day – for hygiene and food combined. They wash themselves using wet wipes, and so they consume 92% less water on hygiene than Earth-dwellers.

Recently the ISS cut its need for water supplies by 65% after installing a state-of-art water recycling machine. “It captures your breath, sweat and water from damp cloths and turns it into water,” Pettit explains.

There’s also a urine processor, which turns 80% of urine into drinkable water. “In the morning, you can dehydrate your breakfast and make your coffee with water from the processor.” Says Pettit.

And we on Earth may follow suit. One study shows that 75-85% of people in Western European countries would consider using urine-diversion toilets, which allow urine to be recycled.

In truth, radical water reuse may be more palatable than it sounds, as Pettit insists: “Recycled urine tastes like bottled water.”

Urine-diversion toilets are indeed the future, according to Cecilia Ruben, a sanitation researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Since today’s sanitation system has so many problems, there are two million such toilets in China alone. Countries from Germany, South Africa and Vietnam have also joined the trend. In Sweden, some apartment complexes have urine-diversion toilets with a common compost for feces.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30855045/ns/technology_and_science-space/

“HAPPINESS INDEX to gauge Britain’s national mood,” was the headline of Britain’s Guardian newspaper (www.guardian.co.uk) last Monday.

The story ran: “The UK government is poised to start measuring people’s psychological and environmental wellbeing, bidding to be among the first countries to officially monitor happiness. Despite ‘nervousness’ in Downing Street at the prospect of testing the national mood amid deep cuts and last week’s riot in Westminster, the Office of National Statistics will shortly be asked to produce measures to implement David Cameron’s long-stated ambition of gauging ‘general wellbeing.’

“Countries such as France and Canada are looking at similar initiatives as governments around the world come under pressure to put less store on conventional economic measures of prosperity such as gross domestic product. …

“On 25 November, the government will ask the independent national statistician Jil Matheson to devise questions to add to the existing household survey by as early as next spring. It will be up to Matheson to choose the questions but the government’s aim is for respondents to be regularly polled on their subjective wellbeing, which includes a gauge of happiness, and also a more objective sense of how well they are achieving their ‘life goals’.”

On France, the Guardian said: “The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, announced last year he intended to include happiness and wellbeing in France’s measurement of economic progress. Sarkozy was responding to recommendations made by two Nobel economists, Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, who called on world leaders to move away from a purely economic concept of gross domestic product, which measures economic production, to wellbeing and sustainability.”

On Canada, the Guardian quoted a member of Canada’s National Statistics Council thus: “The UK plans are putting into action the two most important elements of the Stiglitz/Sen report: systematically measuring subjective wellbeing as part of a broader national accounting system, and using these data to inform policy choices. … Canadian statisticians and researchers also poll subjective wellbeing across the country, but the data have thus far not attracted much policy attention. What is or could be dramatically different in the UK is for the government not just to undertake more widespread and thorough collection of subjective wellbeing data, but also to give them a central place in the choice and evaluation of public policies. That would be a global first.”

Incidentally, the Guardian overlooked Bhutan, which officially seeks to promote Gross National Happiness. But so far the Bhutan government has only produced technical papers on it, and no actual measure of its GNH.

The role of government. It is quite proper for a government to design and regularly generate its own official measure or measures (for there need not, and I think should not, be a single index) of its national wellbeing, if it sincerely wishes to apply public policy to that end. The UK government would be the first to do so, unless beaten to it by France or Bhutan; I don’t know if Canada has made a policy statement on it.

The interest in “happiness” of the governments of the United Kingdom, France, and Bhutan shows their dissatisfaction with Gross Domestic Product as a measure of wellbeing. By “happiness” they surely mean, not a single concept, but a heading for the many social conditions that are much more meaningful than GDP to their citizens.

The role of surveys. Good practice of measuring national wellbeing or “happiness” necessarily involves scientific surveys of the general public’s subjective statements or reports about their own personal feelings and conditions. Such reports should be accepted as truthful, and not denigrated as “perceptions,” as though the people’s feelings and conditions could be changed by mere publicity campaigns.

Simple survey questions like “How happy are you, in general,” or “How satisfied are you with your life as a whole,” have been asked in many countries, including the Philippines, with interesting findings, but are too broad for government-policy use. Wellbeing has many dimensions. People can feel separate satisfactions with personal provision for basic needs, health, family relationships, income, work, etc., and also separate satisfactions with social conditions like the quality of governance, democratic rights and freedoms, the environment, security against warlords, criminals and rebel groups, etc. A government’s survey agenda should be wide, yet need only include matters for which the government may be held responsible.

The relevance of unhappiness. In surveys of wellbeing, I think that those at the lower end of the subjective scales, i.e. the “unhappy,” deserve special study. Surely, those involved in the strikes in France and the riots in Britain were not happy people. The enjoyment of justice, unlike wealth, is not something that haves can share with have-nots.

Reliability. Finally, how can the public trust that surveys done by official statistical agencies on the people’s wellbeing are fair, and not biased towards findings favorable to the government? In the first place, the official agencies should be transparent with their survey methodologies, and should open their original or raw data for study.

The bottom line is that the people should see if the official surveys are replicated and validated by non-governmental surveys, from time to time. Any subjective subject matter—for instance the people’s personal voting intentions—is proven to have been surveyed objectively when the findings are the same, regardless of who the surveyors are.

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20101120-304218/The-UK-wants-a-happiness-index

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Related Links:

Social Democracy and Happiness
http://www.social-europe.eu/2010/01/social-democracy-and-happiness/