WiserEarth Key Students
For students using WiserEarth to network their cause
This group provides a place for students have discussions and brainstorm strategies about using WiserEarth as a tool for their cause. Student communities are their own unique networks, and this group is a place for students to get together, compare notes, and make connections with other students who are using WiserEarth as a web-space to coordinate on the g ...learn more
GROUP DETAILS
Created: Jan 23, 2008
Updated: Oct 21, 2009
Membership: Open To Apply
Semi-Private
Return to Files & Photos for user blindspotterNational Waste Summit 'zero disposal' presentation
File Info
|
|
||||||||||||
About
Slides for my keynote talk at the National Waste Summit in Dublin, November 2008 - comments welcome.
Final draft, now just 2.1Mb, with speaker's notes.
Thanks to all those who commented already.
If it doesn't load in your browser (usually due to lack of spare RAM) then just save to disk and open with adobe acrobat reader.
Here is the outline of the talk, as taken from the Summit brochure:
"Zero-disposal is no longer a dream!
Disposal-based solutions to our waste problem, such as landfill,
incineration and MBT are now obsolete. An innovative economic
tool called Precycling Insurance developed by the NATO Science
Programme makes it possible to drive economic growth by
rapidly preventing waste, climate change and the loss of nature.
James Greyson, Senior Sustainability Analyst, BlindSpot.org.uk"
Comments (1 - 2 of 2)
|
|
James: That website is no longer available. Why not approach the problem directly instead of through a back door that affects some insurance that affects some financing that affects some planning that affects some research that makes a change in a process. Why not work for the research to make product and process changes directly? As a chemist, a technical person, I am not afraid of doing research on actual, existing manufacturing processes to convert them to cycles that never go through the step of discard. On my website, www.zerowasteinstitute.org I give many examples of how this can be done. It really isn't all that hard, once you decide to think about it. I get the impression that a lot of people in the environmental movement think of manufacturing as the third rail that cannot be touched directly. You must only put pressure on the manufacturers themselves and hope that they come up with something better. Then you wait for ten years to see if it really is better and when you discover it is destructive, you start the cycle all over again but with ten years wasted. Why don't we directly establish research to redesign social constructs (physical manufacturing is only one) so that the critical step of discard never occurs. That's what I favor anyway. Paul Palmer Sebastopol California |
Contributors to this Page
Hi Paul, Good to hear from you again! Thanks for flagging the out-of-date link which is now removed. The relevant text was copied into the about field anyway and the slides were available both above ('download file') and at the conference site, http://www.sbpconferences.com/presentations/Waste2008.asp. If you prefer a paper there is also my more recent Dubai talk at From credit crunch to planet crunch - or revival?
If you get time to look over the paper I hope you will see that my 'indirect' approach actually creates the conditions where brilliant work such as yours would not be neglected for decades, it would instead be financially and culturally supported worldwide. Precycling insurance would change the paradigm about how we view waste and our relations with nature. So it's not an alternative to hands-on research like yours; it's telling the rest of the world to try to catch up with your 3 decade head-start! It is however an alternative to direct pressure on manufacturers. Instead of asking them to do the right thing even though it doesn't make sense in the current linear (throw-away) paradigm, we just change the paradigm. Not direct but fast and effective.
Best wishes, James
BTW I'm in the environmental, economic and social movement but not the anti-manufacturing movement ;-)