Consumed

American Public Radio's "Marketplace" program has an ongoing series on Consumerism called "Consumed". The landing page for the series is here. When I first heard the promo spot for the series, I hoped they'd be looking more at what our world might look like if retail purchasing was not the engine for our economy, but they may get there yet.

As it is, the articles on trash, second-hand economies, the impacts of transport, and ways to recommend lifestyle changes are interesting and come from a variety of voices. Poke around if you've got some time to spare.

Taking the Ego out of Driving: Part 1

One of the great problems of the US trying to comply with Kyoto is that it would require getting Americans out of their cars. Apparently this is an even more deadly rail of US politics than messing with Medicare. Why? I've come to believe it's because our egos are tangled up with driving... what we drive, how we drive, what other people see when they see us in our cars, the whole shebang.

How does this ego-car fusion take place? I think part of it is that we have constructed the car so that the driver occupies the same place in the car that the eyes occupy in our skulls. We have created robots to command and control (insert evil laugh).

I think another part of it is the abundance of choice. In a marketplace that is saturated with options that satisfy our needs... cars that will carry two, four, six, or eight people; cars that will allow us to carry feed to farm animals and tools to our homes and workplaces; we have the option to make choices based on want. So we buy cars that reflect our self-image. Cars that are beefy. Cars that are refined. Cars that are beautiful. Cars that are zippy.

The challenge, then, is to encourage car change without directly threatening this egoic connection. The Prius and the Smart Car do this by appealing to self-images that say, "I am smart and efficient." "I am lean and agile." That's a start. My local transportation district runs adds suggesting that riding the bus means you can arrive at work relaxed. That's a start, but it doesn't address that for many of us, riding the bus means remembering times in our lives when we were broke. So it evokes a feeling of being out of control. Especially when contrasted to the high-control experience of driving your own car where you want.

There is, however, a public transportation experience that is nearly universersally enjoyed, even with the hassles of being on someone elses schedule and not getting to be in the brain box... it's flying. Sure, lots of people claim to hate flying, but most of us fundamentally do enjoy it or else we would avoid taking trips that meant we had to fly. And we don't.

So, what is it that sets flying apart from riding the bus? Comfortable secure seats. A cabin that's cleaned thoroughly once a day. Privacy. Getting to the destination faster instead of more slowly. Clean, sheltered, safe places to wait.

There's still some ego involved in flying. You can buy more privacy, more comfort, and better food to distinguish yourself from others. But all air flight involves having people poke through your stuff so you can let someone else fling you through the air at 500 miles an hour.

In terms of getting people out of their cars, air travel has been a remarkable success, and perhaps it offers some suggestions for other applications.

Doing a Carbon Footprint Analysis

Soon after I was laid-off, a friend of mine asked me to do a carbon footprint analysis on her company's product for the marketing department. It was an interesting project and one I jumped on.

Poking around the web for the current standards of what is and what is not included, I discovered their request showed up in my in-box days after the very first Carbon Footprint for Consumer Products Conference had taken place. (Info on the 2008 conference here.) If folks like Starbucks are meeting to define what the carbon footprint of a consumer product is defined as, what chance do I have? I have the chance to define my scope narrowly and find what I can find on it.

I started by doing a system analysis of the problem. A system analysis is a way of figuring out which intersection of threads you want to confine yourself to in a web. If I generated a figure that reported the amount of CO2 emitted in manufacturing the product and delivering it to the customer, that would be an interesting number, but ultimately pointless. This is a unique product that is bought because of what it delivers, not because it is the best of a set of similar products. (And because it is a unique product, I am going to try to avoid giving any specifically identifiable information about it.)

Additionally, it isn't much of a stretch to say that any product's carbon footprint is directly related to i's weight. We can see that in the formulas shipping companies use for products. If it weighs more, it uses more fuel to move, and therefore releases more carbon dioxide.

So I decided the best thing to look at was the carbon released to power the product over its lifetime and to compare that to the carbon released to replace the benefit of the product over its lifetime. Imagine a counter-top cappuccino machine. I decided that since the same amount of coffee is going to travel similar distances to get to your mouth, I should look at the energy consumed by the machines. So I compared the carbon in making the electricity to run our product to the carbon released by going to the store for a similar amount.

Another way of phrasing my results looks like this: Is it better to run a 60 watt light bulb for 18 hours every day or to go to the store twice a week to pick up an item shipped from 1500 miles away?

It turns out that shipping food is very efficient. But getting to the store is not. My estimates were based on finding out the fuel costs of running a refrigerated semi-truck and how many of these items would be shipped in a container, and then comparing that to the average fuel economy of a car sold in the US in 2006 (21: EPA 2006 Fuel Economy Trends Report), and figured a round-trip to the store as 3 miles. To convert a gallon of gas to lbs of CO2, I used the Department of Energy's conversion factor of 19.554 lbs of CO2 released in burning a gallon of gas.

For the home-based part of the equation, I took the watts consumed by the product and multiplied that into daily, monthly, and lifetime figures. I used the EPA's figure of 1.55 lbs of CO2 released per kilowatt hour to calculate the energy.

Let's use these numbers to analyze working at home under a halogen light verses driving to a coffee shop or office where the lights would be on either way.

If you drive a standard car 3 miles, that's 1/7th of a gallon of gas. 19.564/7 = 2.79 lbs of carbon. A halogen desk lamp uses 300 watts, so it takes 3.3 hours to use one kilowatt hour. One kilowatt hour off the US grid* results in 1.55 lbs of carbon. So driving your car a tiny three miles will use produce as much carbon dioxide as staying at home with your lamp for nearly 7 hours.

But if you were to walk or ride a bike that 1.5 miles out and back, you get a double savings. Nearly 3 lbs. of carbon dioxide you didn't consume which you might "normally" have.

What could you "buy" with that 3lbs? 142 hours of using a 14 watt florescent bulb. 2 hours of cooking food in a GE convenction microwave oven. 15 hours of watching a 32" HD LED television. Or since we don't have a way to sequester surplus CO2 yet, maybe the life of a migrating bird.

*Whether you buy wind power or not, the power you use comes out of a reservoir of electricity generated by a number of means. You contribute more wind power to the total than might otherwise exist, but any electricity you use comes from all the streams if it comes from the grid. If you're generating your own power, you already know better than to use the $12 halogen lamp from the big box store. ;-)