Category: Sustainability

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Sustainability Uncategorized

I am Beautiful

No, no, no. This will not be a post where I can live my narcissistic side. This is about an ad campaign by German McDonald’s.

They show a used paper coffee cup and claim in bold letters: I (the paper cup) am beautiful because I might become a book someday (see here).

I was stunned to see a one-way packaging item be the center stage of a campaign. I could imagine that one-way packaging is part of a campaign advising against its use. But here, right to the contrary: this campaign clearly associates one-way packaging with positive attributes.

Why on earth would you want to do this? – Frankly, I have no idea.

If I look at this, a lot crosses my mind. The first thing is that McDonald’s is greenwashing here big time. The second thing is that McDonald’s is the largest fast-food chain in Germany. Judged by the number of restaurants McDonald’s (1,484) is larger than the next two chains (Burger King, 750; Subways, 692). So, being Mcdonald’s is something (or not nothing). What could you have done with the size and the resources that come with it, other, I mean, than hiring Scholz and Friends for this campaign?

You could have thought about establishing a system of reusable cups and packaging. I imagine that you (as McDonald’s) could have built a business from the reusable cups by (kind of) forcing this reusable packaging system on other providers of system gastronomy.

I could only speculate why we see greenwashing instead of doing something that changes the system. It would be nice to see research on the power structure, the motivations, the resource allocation, and the decision-making processes concerning circular business models inside McDonald’s. It would also be nice to see the role of business development and innovation in McDonald’s Germany and sustainability’s role in the internal discussions.

Note: The image here is by Martin Abegglen. It is not the image used in McDonald’s campaign.

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Miscellaneous Sustainability

Meat you halfway?

I have been following the trend towards more plant-based foods. I think this is important. For health reasons. For ethical reasons. And for climate reasons. Now, if this is good, how do we get there and increase the number of people embarking at least on a partially plant-based diet?

There are two approaches:

One is to restrict the offerings and make it somewhat harder for people to get their daily sausage. I have just come across Berkeley. It is the first US city planning to eliminate all animal products it serves. So for employees, it will be less convenient if they want to have an animal-based (is this the correct term to describe the opposite of plant-based?) meal. They have to get out and search for diners, restaurants, or food joints. Staying within the organization and have a plant-based meal is more convenient. Cool move by the Major and the Council.

For most company or university restaurants it would be nice to see plant-based meals to be the default and meat to be the exception. How about a Meat-Monday?

The second option is to make plant-based food really desirable and win over the most passionate carnivores. Vegan butchers (although this term seems to be a contradiction within itself) might go a long way in this direction:

Additionally, if you like the yummy taste of European sausages HEDI might be your supplier (the page is in German only).

However. I am not sure if plant-based food should ‘copy’ meat-based products. For certain occasions and certain cravings, this may be helpful. If perfect, this might win over some customers. But showing consumers that a plant-based diet has more to offer – in terms of taste and texture – can be a worthwhile endeavor.

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Art Design Innovation Sustainability

Beautiful Power

Jason Kottke has a blog post today about the beauty of gas stations. I agree that sometimes the architecture ist quite stunning.

My favorite is the Skovshoved Petrol Station located in Copenhagen and designed in 1936 by the Danish architect and designer icon Arne Jacobsen.

Skovshoved Petrol Station by Arne Jacobsen. Image: Wikipedia

Do you wonder when we will have beautiful electric changing facilities? Oh wait a minute. Again the Danes:

Ultra fast charging station for electric vehicles by Cobe

This is a charging station for electric vehicles designed by the Copenhagen architecture studio Cobe founded by Dan Stubbergaard in 2006.

He believes architects have a profound responsibility to create resilient, long-term solutions that improve life – cities, buildings, and landscapes that are made to outlast our generation.

Cobe

About the charging station Dan Stubbergaard says:

Electric vehicles are the way of the future. With our design we offer EV drivers a welcome break and an opportunity to recharge mentally in a green oasis. The energy and the technology are green, so we wanted the architecture, the materials and the concept to reflect that. Hence, we designed a charging station in sustainable materials placed in a clean, calm setting with trees and plants that offer people a dose of mindfulness on the highway.

Dan Stubbergaard

More generally he is

…inspired by the transformation of Copenhagen from an industrial port city to a beacon for liveability and sustainability… He is the leading figure in Cobe’s work to create surroundings that actively contribute to extraordinary everyday life.

Cobe

This is an excellent claim, and I promise to visit Cobe’s website more often to learn about their projects. I am sure they can convince me over and over again that sustainability can (and has to be) aesthetically pleasing.

By the way. The cover image above is from Cobe as well. It a bicycle parking spot under a hill.

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Sustainability Visualization

Glaciers Then and Now

Taking up yesterday’s post and the notion of small multiples introduced by Edward Tufte in his Visual Display of Quantitative Information, I’d like to highlight another excellent interactive visualization of climate change. This time the melting of glaciers.

The Guardian’s Niko Kommenda has an excellent piece on this.

The illustration highlights how the outlines of the 90 largest and most surveyed glaciers shrink over the course of a couple of generations.

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Sustainability Uncategorized Visualization

New Normals

This is not about the New Normal that is often mentioned when we discuss the future in the wake of the Covid-pandemic.

This is about the visualization of the shifts in average temperature for the US. This highlights pretty impressively how the temperature has changed over the last since 1901.

Every 10 years, NOAA – the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – redefines “normal” weather (in terms of rainfall, temperature, and other characteristics of the climate). The base for each re-definition is the preceding 30-year window.

Now let’s have a look at the temperature to get an impression of global warming.

Annual U.S. temperature compared to the 20th-century average for each U.S. Climate Normals period from 1901-1930 (upper left) to 1991-2020 (lower right). Places where the normal annual temperature was 1.25 degrees or more colder than the 20th-century average are darkest blue; places where normal annual temperature was 1.25 degrees or more warmer than the 20th-century average are darkest red. Maps by NOAA Climate.gov, based on analysis by Jared Rennie, North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies/NCEI. Image is from https://climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-and-1991-2020-us-climate-normals

Rebecca Lindsay’s contribution has answers to some of the most immediate questions:

Is global warming affecting the Normals? (Yes). Are the Normals adjusted to “subtract out” global warming? (No.)  So the new normal reflects our changing climate? (Yes). Then how do we keep track of what used to be normal? (Different analyses.)

The influence of long-term global warming is obvious: the earliest map in the series has the most widespread and darkest blues, and the most recent map has the most widespread and darkest reds. Today, the normal annual temperatures across the country are warmer than the 20th-century average virtually everywhere. From 1901-1930, the annual average temperature was mostly colder than the 20th-century average.

For me, this is a brilliant presentation of data. This visualization really helps us to understand that something dramatic is going on.

By the way. The visualization is so impressive because it uses small multiples introduced by Edward Tufte in his Visual Display of Quantitative Information. In this case, the small multiples assist us in tracking temperature development across time and space.

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Innovation Sustainability

The Boardroom and Beyond

Today Shira Ovide has a nice piece in the New York Times about the role and influence of tech companies’ CEOs on how we live our lives and on the overall economic, technological, and social development.

What the 21st-century tech barons like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Jack Ma believe and do matters. 

It wasn’t a spreadsheet that decided to pay Amazon employees at least $15 an hour, and influenced wages at other employers. Nothing that momentous happens at Amazon unless Bezos wants it. Zuckerberg designed Facebook with him as absolute ruler, and his beliefs are fused into Facebook’s bones.

If Elon Musk hadn’t pursued his mission to destroy fossil fuels, governments and major car companies probably would not now be planning to kill conventional cars. Conflicting corporate agendas plus personal vendettas between the chief executives of Apple and Facebook, and Amazon and Tesla, are steering the future of the internet and space exploration.

This line of reasoning breathes a strange sort of image of tech CEOs if it means that it is all only to their credit. If we forget that technology is developed not by individuals but by teams in concert with numerous partners within and outside of the focal organization, that it is developed for different kinds of reasons, driven by different types of incentives etc. we miss essential contributors to the innovation process.

On the other hand, this reasoning shows us the power of single individuals in shaping economic, social, and technological development. Winning one of these over to the endeavor of sustainability transition would certainly be helpful for the cause. If we think ‘Greta’ in this context, we realize that these individuals do not have to come from corporate boardrooms but from every walk of life.

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Art Sustainability

Earth Restored

It would be great to announce that the earth has been restored. But unfortunately, we are far from it.

When writing this headline, I should have remembered the good old René Magritte and his La Trahison des images (also known as Ceci n’est pas une pipe). It is not the earth that has been restored; it is images of the earth – pictures taken during the Apollo mission. I admit that I fell for the headline of Toby Ord’s page, who digitally restored the images.

As always, it is really humbling to look at the earth from the outside even more so looking at the remastered images.

By the way, the cover image of this post is composed of a wiki commons version of an image of the earth.

via (Kottke.org)

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Innovation Sustainability

Soccer of All Sports

The Bohemian FC, one of the oldest soccer clubs in Ireland, has appointed Sean McCabe as the World’s first Climate Justice Officer.

He says about the crisis and about his position:

This stuff has to be sincere, or we know that we failed. The world will let us know that you cannot trick the laws of thermodynamics.

A Climate Justice Officer in soccer of all sports, this is a great move. Trying out something new is highly applaudable. This is what we need.

Maybe this innovative initiative – as the first of its kind – helps promote and drive sustainability transitions by linking ideas of sustainability to existing lifetime communities.

So many people are emotionally attached to soccer. Especially as not many organizations are left (and popular) that people once felt attached to for a lifetime. Soccer clubs seem to be some of them. And the fan base is powerful, incredibly powerful, as the last couple of days have vividly illustrated in a matter that is completely void of sustainability: the Super League.

Alex Ward at The Vox writes that soccer fans destroyed the Super League:

There was just one problem: Fans hated the idea, and their revolt caused what would’ve been the biggest threat to the game in decades to dissipate after just 48 hours.

So let us hope that Sean McCabe can leverage the fan base. The German 11Freunde soccer weekly opened reporting about the fans’ role in the Super League’s failure with the title of a song from 1970 by the German agitpop band Ton, Steine, Scherben.

Break what breaks you.

Wouldn’t this be a nice motto for treating unsustainable behavior?

Source: CNN, 11Freunde, The Vox

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Innovation Sustainability

Your Carbon Footprint

Finextra reports about an initiative of the Swedish payment solution provider Klarna:

Buy now, pay later giant Klarna is to provide shoppers with carbon footprint calculation tools from Mastercard-backed Doconomy to measure the emissions generated by their purchases.

Every purchase made through Klarna’s payment methods will include a carbon footprint measured by Doconomy’s Åland Index**, reaching up to 90 million Klarna customers

Is this a perfect deflection of a company that lives of potentially irresponsible consumption? I don’t know. We might still get the impression that more is possible than what we see now. If Klarna can do it, why would other companies not be able to identify and communicate carbon footprint on products?

(via Finextra)

Categories
Innovation Sustainability

Earth Day 2021

Innovation can restore our planet. This is the second part of the headline of a piece on forbes.com. And it triggered something in me. Innovation – naturally, and restoring the planet. Great. What a promise.

This year’s Earth Day theme is restoration. We need to reverse the detrimental effects of climate change and stop the pollution of our eco-system to preserve our planet for future generations.

I fully back this statement.

Continue reading “Earth Day 2021”