Terracycle upcycles consumer waste into new salable goods. They primarily harvest their raw material from schoolchildren as part of charity drives, though they are now placing recycling stations at certain Walmart stores. At the Walmart centers they pay 3 cents per piece, but only for a narrow range of product packaging; the website supports a wider range of recyclables.

The spirit of the project is wonderful, but the problem is that it creates zombie advertising and branding for these undead consumer objects. Which is actually not all that surprising, as the Walmart program is sponsored by the very brands whose packaging are featured in the upcycled goods.

Now you can send your children to school with Capri Sun drinks, Lunchables, and Oreos in their Capri Sun lunchbox, and feel really good about returning the packages to Walmart, where you can buy more of the same processed food to send your child to school with. Capri Sun, Lunchables, Oreos, et al certainly feel really good about the branding opportunity, as do the big box retailers who are are partnered in the program as well.

Despite my cynicism about sponsorship and branding, the program is pretty incredible in the interpersonal organization that it has created, and the logistical barriers that it has overcome. The mechanism that it has put in place can hopefully be used to produce tools or goods whose central purpose is not advertising and branding. It seems that some of the products they are making either come from unbranded raw materials like film strips and bike chains, or they are using the plain inside surface of the packaging. These are more like Freitag bags. Not only are this last group of upcycled goods unbranded, they are actually much nicer looking and much more likely to be actually used.

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Denial and commerce: it is the American way.

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I know, total cliche’d title. Oh well.

I bought carbon offsets on a Continental flight. I particularly like the fact that you could choose your own science… and your own cost…

I really wonder about offsetting. For a while I thought of it as a useful costing mechanism. And planting trees is a barely useful short term mitigation, though repairing deforestation is always good. But I feel deeply cynical about it. Especially as greenmarketers send me email after email wanting to get their carbon offset product into my carbon plugin The Real Costs. It ads carbon footprint information to airplane and travel websites.

I had an email exchange recently about this with Mark Purdon a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at University of Toronto. We also talked quite a bit about Carbon Taxes. I sent him this article from the NYTimes on why Carbon Tax is a tax you actually don’t want to have to collect.

Being a political scientist, he has a distinctly different viewpoint on these issues. It is interesting to see is approach. He says:

I agree, a carbon tax is great but politically difficult to implement. It’s actually a leading election issue in Canada now: see the opposition party (the Liberal’s) website on The Green Shift as well as the Green Party of Canada. My feeling here again is about costs: the tax starts out low but at a certain level people are going to start resenting it and pushing back. There’s really no reason we can’t do a carbon tax within a cap-and-trade system, with offsets to mop up what’s left over.

How do people behave is such an interesting question. It comes back to marketing and social marketing. I mean, we have such problems with tax marketing in the US. Republicans stand for lower taxes and Democrats stand for higher taxes, right? WRONG. They all tax, they just tax different people. Just look at this amazing graphic from ChartJunk:

Sadly, its all about the marketing.

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Do I even have to explain why this is so retrograde? Oh Facebook.

Or, maybe it might work… do pledges work? I know that competition has been shown to work in reducing energy use.

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a New York City bottled water company with a local twist and knack for honesty. We don’t travel the world from Fiji to France seeking water or offer the usual bottled water gimmicks. We work with NYC’s public water system to source the world’s best tasting tap water, purify it through reverse osmosis and bottle it locally, leaving out ludicrous transportation miles.

Fuji Water and Evian and San Pelegrino are bad offenders in terms of transportation miles. I’m not going to argue with that. BUT, it is still filtered, which takes lots of energy. So its basically like the Coke/Dasani and Pepsi/Aquafina products in that respect: filtered local tap water.

Get a water bottle folks. Carry it with you. And if you are still afraid of NYC tap water, get a britta. But drink the water. Not the marketing coolaid.

It reminds me of Tiffany Holmes’ Lake Water project, where she bottled Chicago’s Lake Michigan water. The point being that bottling local water was exactly all the big Coke and Pepsi distributors were doing.

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Okay, I’m going to come out and probably break with Anti Advertising Agency official policy, and say that I support ad-supported bike share programs. It is kind of making a deal with the devil, but the urban planning benefits have been demonstrated strongly. Getting cars out of the city, is worth the extra visual advertising. Plus people exercise, and are healthier, and are happier — bike riding is fun.

But this AdBike is just preposterous. The whole point of riding a bicycle in the city is to get somewhere. Transportation. Less space on the road. This is going to be worse than those trucks that drive around with billboards because it slows traffic down: I can’t imagine that beast of a recombent can move fast enough to remain save in the road. So its either going to stop traffic in the car lane, or dangerously take over the bike lane.

Just to give you a sense of how not-real-world this scenario is, check out his slacks and his shoes. He is wearing dress loafers. The only person who is going to be able to safely ride that bicycle in the city is going to be a real bicyclist. They are going to have serious muscles, and some kind of urban riding clothes and shoes. Like the bike taxi folk who have to work just to keep their behemoths moving. Dress slacks, that says a lot.

And all this is avoiding the fact that it looks stupid. If I were a marketer, I can’t imagine wanting my brand to show up on something that bulbous and dorky. Bikes are definitely cool. A lot of marketers and companies want to cash in on the bike = cool factor. But this bike is not cool. It is laughable.

And I’m restraining myself.

For more fun, check out the media kit

For more on why I like bikes, check out FoundBikes.com. Here is my ride

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Several people have sent me invitations to this Facebook application called (Lil) Green Patch. The invitation says “Here is a Jenny Appleseed plant for your (Lil) Green Patch. Could you help me by sending a plant back? Together we can fight Global Warming!”

So a little research later, I have learned that this game is a tamagotchi garden, where you share plants with people. It is one of the most popular Facebook games, with either 500,000 or 50,000 daily active users (there was a typo on the page!) It is driven by ad revenue, and the maker of the game gives a portion of the ad revenue to The Nature Conservancy to buy rainforest land. So far they have given $33,600. So that is less than ten cents for every active daily user. They are probably making 10 cents per active user every day. Does the carbon offset from buying the trees cover for the server farm required to run the application? To play annoying nay-sayer, what in the world is this teaching people about how to ‘Fight Global Warming?” It is teaching them that advertising will save the day, and that greenwashing is the way to go.

Okay, that was a rant.

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