environment

 by Brendon J. Wilson

Recycle Grandpa

Though I like the software industry, I’ve gotten the feeling that much of the industry isn’t producing anything especially useful. Don’t get me wrong, there are some promising areas, such as data mining, that will improve society by allowing us to maximize our utilization of existing resources and turn raw information in actual knowledge. However, the use of software and computer technology in general has been disappointing and spiraled into a new arms race: my PDA is bigger/better/etc. than yours! Gadget-envy is killing this planet.

I’ve been wracking my brain of late to think of new, simpler, ways to make society more efficient and to reduce waste. I have a personal pet theory, which I’ll narcissistically dub “Brendon’s Theorem of Resource Extraction”:

We (society) have already extracted all of the natural resources from the Earth that are necessary to sustain us indefinitely.

Think about that: we’ve already dug up all the ore, chopped down all the trees, killed all the fish, et cetera, that we will ever need to continue our way of life. The problem is we extract resources, use the resources to build goods, and then throw the resources away once we’re “done” with them! Consider your typical piece of consumer electronics: we expend enormous energy and time on extracting, separating, refining and distilling precious metals and petrochemicals required for these products, only to discard all of that effort wholesale once the next generation toy comes out. All of that effort is lost. If only we could capture that waste!

Even in death, we’re wasteful! Remember when you were a kid, when science teachers would try to put the composition of the human body in perspective by relating the values to something you could understand? They’d tell you things like how many nails you could make out of the iron in your body, how many pieces of chalk out of the calcium, and how many bars of soap. A bit gruesome perhaps, but in retrospect it does beg a certain question: why, exactly, do we bury or burn our dead when they’re such useful sources of resources?

Now, I’m not suggesting something along the lines of Soylent Green, turning our dead into a tasty edible treat, but something more practical. A person spends a lifetime, distilling raw materials, purifying them; why waste that effort? Heck, if we can’t recycle our own bodies, a fairly simple bag of organic compounds and water, how can we expect to recycle anything else we produce?

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 by Brendon J. Wilson

Disposable Everything

It’s becoming more obvious to me the extent of the world’s insanity. Flipping through the channels, I’m inundated with advertisements for products that not only do I not need, but also I can’t understand how anyone could justify needing, let alone buying. In particular I’m most annoyed at the home cleaning products, whose rate of unceasing development is a cause for amazement. How can so much development money be focused on making the task of keeping a house clean any easier than it already is?

Look at the recent rash of new paper-towel-plus-cleaner products, like Procter & Gamble‘s Swiffer and SC Johnson‘s Pledge Grab-It, that take the concept of paper towels to a whole new level. Now not only can you clean, you can disinfect like you’ve never disinfected before! And when you’re done you can just throw them away, environmental consequences be damned!

There’s such an obsessive-compulsive desperation to the pitches for these products that I half expect to see a commercial in the future that goes something like this:

Pan to shot of Brendon crouched in the corner of his bathroom, scrubbing his body with Scrubbo™-brand personal body cleaning towels while rocking gently back and forth.

Brendon (mumbling): Still not clean, must get clean…

As if diapers weren’t bad enough for filling our landfills, now we’ve got Helen Homemaker nuking every bacterium that dares to step into her household, only to throw away the toxic results and create even more garbage. With the super-duper cleansing power of these new products it’s no wonder bacteria are becoming more resistant when we’re throwing every disinfectant at them at every opportunity.

These aren’t the only environmentally irresponsible products coming from these companies. There’s also the new rash of facial cleansing cloths, and disposable containers competing for our global garbage can. What ever happened to reducing our waste output?

What’s more disturbing is the amount of technology and funding thrown at solving problems that don’t exist, while real problems remain unsolved. Christ, I’ve got toothpaste and laundry detergent that gets my teeth and clothes so white they’re positively luminescent, and we still haven’t got an electric car! Part of me wonders if somewhere in the world researchers wring their hands and wish aloud, “If only we could get some of the Colgate or Sunlight funding, then we’d have this cancer thing licked!”

Don’t get me wrong, I like things clean and orderly. But after a while it seems to be counterproductive to clean things when you’re creating more garbage than you’re cleaning up. There’s a point of diminishing returns when you’re expending so many resources on keeping things clean instead of doing worthwhile work. Could it be that we’re turning into a race of people who need to wash our hands so often and so thoroughly that we never actually accomplish anything useful?

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