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Ever take the subway at rush-hour? In New York City where I live, rush-hour commuters regularly stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their fellow travelers. They do it because they need to get where they’re going and they know the subway is the most efficient way to get there.
Next weekend, we're bringing designers, developers, educators, and storytellers together to rethink our global relationship to energy. GOOD's Hacking Energy Culture hackathon, organized by Senior UI Designer Doris Yee, will be held February 8 to February 10 at Maryland Institute College of Art.
Green consumers do not drink from disposable plastic bottles. They do not use styrofoam cups. They eschew foam packaging. They refuse disposable chopsticks. They certainly do not accept plastic bags at grocery stores. And if a group of London restaurants succeeds in what one local merchant called “a very ambitious project,” they will not drink from disposable plastic straws.
The restaurants’ Straw Wars campaign aims to reduce waste by pushing back on the use of cheap plastic drinking straws. “Don’t be a sucker,” the campaign admonishes. In the United Kingdom, the campaign’s website points out, 3.5 million people buy a McDonald’s drink with a straw in it every day. That is a lot of straws, which tend not to be recycled and instead make their way to the ocean with so much other single-use plastic. The campaign asks restaurant and bar owners to respond by handing out straws only when asked.
But as The Guardian wrote in its report on the Straw Wars campaign, “There are no figures for the proportion that plastic straws make up as a proportion of total plastic waste, though it is thought to be very small.”
In aggregate, the personal environmental choices that we all make do have an impact. But some have a bigger impact than others. On the scale of choices that make a difference, saying no to drinking straws ranks low. If restaurants and bars are going to join together to promote environmental awareness, I’m much more interested in the efforts they’re making to minimize the energy they use for transportation and their physical space than the tiny, tiny energy and waste savings they achieve by holding back some of the plastic straws they normally dispense.
I don’t know about you, but I plan to spend Sunday eating and drinking beer and watching lots of commercials and eating some more. Oh, and watching some football, I suppose. I’m not really a sports fan, though my dad roots for the Giants. (Go Giants!) But Super Bowl Sunday isn’t about football. Or, at least, it’s not exclusively about football. It’s a national holiday dedicated to eating as much as you want, drinking as much as you can, and wishing for that car/snack food/sneaker/E*Trade account you just saw on TV. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Americans consume more on Super Bowl Sunday than any day except Thanksgiving.
That makes this weekend a less-than-obvious time to think about sustainability. Discussions about living sustainably often come around to sacrifice—giving up meat, incandescent light bulbs, gas-guzzling SUVs, cheap coal—and we are not going to give up the Super Bowl. The only path forward is to try to minimize its impact, to design the most sustainable Super Bowl possible. Here is what that might look like.
The New York Times has put together this terrific infographic (view larger) that compares the per capita availability of boneless, trimmed beef, pork, chicken, fish and shellfish, eggs, turkey, and veal over the past 100 years in the United States.
The big story is the explosive chicken boom and the corresponding beef decline. Interestingly, this is reflected in their frequency in the written word, as we discovered in our Google N-gram survey of the American diet back in December. Turkey has also benefited from the white meat craze, while veal and eggs have lost ground, victims of animal welfare and anti-cholesterol campaigns respectively, I suspect.