Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Sustainable Innovation Conference - Alex Steffen

Hi,

Presented in the Sustainable Innovation Conference, Sweden last month, Alex Steffen had a lot of ideas on how to make the world more sustainable . While this might take time and lot of political lobbying to become mainstream, I just picked up some points from the the talk which I could gather. Of course watching the video would be the best to gain your perspective of it.

Points:

  • Favorite Quote - " We are destroying the planet and not having fun"
  • Human happiness is considerably reduced.
  • To think not only of the obvious problems but also of the accompanying usually bigger problems which have to be addressed. Here he gives the example of a car, where he tells that everyone only looks at the exhaust pipe and tries to attack that problem of pollution. But a whole gamut of problems like construction and destruction of the car, infrastructure, water pollution, accidents etc have also to be addressed.( Systems thinking)
  • Call for higher population density as opposed to sprawling settlements.
  • Walkable urban areas.
  • Higher density decreases the infrastructure needed.
  • Installing personal energy meters reduces energy  consumption by 7-12%.( works like mileage meter in car)
  • Number of trips required for renting a movie from a store (4 minimum) over Netflix(online movie renting) . Amount of time and energy saved. Calls for more innovation like this.
  • Sharing resources(like car and other accessories) to share its benefit and impact.
  • To setup a portal for easy bartering system - Connect people who want to sell outgrown products to people who want to buy them. Lesser garbage for landfill. e.g http://www.freecycle.org/
  • To be wary of greenwashing - hogwashing the environmental way!

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