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I'm stealing a page from Bill McDonough's wonderful book Cradle To Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. Rather than selling us mere devices, manufacturers should be selling us services following the car leasing model: computer services, television viewing services, &c. That way, at the end of an item's amortised useful life (3-5 years), the consumer trades it back in for an updated model. Therefore, the manufacturer has an economic incentive to make recycling as easy as possible. Some people may say, 'But I want to own my widget!' My response: do you really want to own a depreciating asset? For rapidly-changing classes of asset, ownership makes little sense.

On a related note, Congress needs to ratify the Basel Convention like, erm, yesterday.

Currently, product waste is an "externality" - the cost of recycling/disposing of the product is borne by someone other than the manufacturer.

Yeah, externalities, essentially, dumping your dog's crap in your neighbor's yard hoping they won't notice.

Cradle-to-cradle describes the process of designing for full lifecyle. McDonough distinguishes "re-cycling" from "down-cycling" the process we generally use today that recycles plastics such at PET into playground equipment and fleece.

Designing for re-use, disassembly, and re-use gives companies such as Interface a competitive advantage while reducing externalities.

Free markets can be good at this, but externalities must be internalize, or it is simply not a free market. This is a valid role for governments, working to ensure a level playing field that doesn't give anyone an unfair right to abuse the commons. Once that level playing field is established, eliminating perverse subsidies, smart companies *will* go to more cradle-to-cradle designs because it makes great sense on so many levels.

I've always said, companies should be responsible for the entire lifecycle of any product they produce, including its safe disposal.

That is exactly what is needed. The Smart companies will stop disposal all together, by choosing materials that they can reuse indefinitely, or materials that will decompose back to soil safely. But you don't have to take my word for it: http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm

I agree completely except that changing SEC rules to focus on a longer timescale could certainly help companies focus on longer timescales. The reason the SEC requires quarterly profit reports is to prevent fraud. What have we just had a decade of from Enron to Fannie Mae? Fraud. It doesn't work.
As much as I like Bill Joy and your suggestion of Adam C Powell, my top pick would be William McDonough. He is an optimistic far thinking designer whose engineering is as ahead of his time as Thomas Jefferson was ahead of his. McDonough's "Cradle to Cradle" approach would not have allowed sponsorship of oil and food burning ethanol policies. He might use the Chinese milk additive scandal to draw attention to our own failings in addressing the known health effects of lead, mercury, asbestos, tobacco and coal tar as well as reminding us that we continue down this path with our blinders on with respect to BPA, NOx, particulates and CO2.

The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.

I'm feeling down on subsidies and I'm not sure they are needed. Regulation is still needed since electricty, at least at the retail level, is still single source for the most part.

One of the neat things about solar panels is that they are so valuble even after they have degraded by 20% (typically in 30 years). They are still solar grade silicon so they are worth about $25/kilo as raw material for new solar panels. This pretty much ensures a cradle-to-cradle type-treatment http://www.mcdonough.com/ for solar panels, and this is certainly part of our business model. Did you get my question on your blog about vondage?

I think I'll blog on cap-and-trade soon (note to Sierra Club Board: don't support it!) but that mechanism might be a little bit in line with Adam Smith.

You've hit an important point here. William McDonough http://www.mcdonough.com/writings/extravagant_gest ure.htm argues that renewables allow us to live abundantly. I find his critisism of the eco-efficiency movement as lacking anything that can motivate people quite interesting. Run you christmas lights and your neighbor's too.

But, be sure they're aimed down please. I don't like light pollution: http://www.darksky.org/

Disclosure: I sell solar power (reserve a system at my home page).

My point is that people need to get involved sooner in the process.

I can certainly agree with this, although sometimes it is difficult for everyone to understand what is happening until it is too late.

I appreciate and understand (and believe) in your academic response, but the laws in the United States don't back up your utopian complex organism.

Not in smaller population areas, but definitely in established cities where people better understand the complexity. Setbacks were developed in New York during the 1920's for just such a reason. Unfortunately, here in the U.S., we sometimes have to create a horrible situation before a community passes laws preventing it in the future. It is a better situation when everyone wants to work and live together, but worse when outside investors can put up real estate that they never see.

I was simply stating that when a Planning Commission is faced with approval of a development plan and the plan meets all codes and is in agreement with the Comprehensive Plan, they MUST approve it. Anything else is arbitrary and the courts say so.

This is true in principle, but in reality the political lives of a city's governors is always at stake. And no developer can afford to go through the law suit process. If a developer/owner makes a community angry enough, he will destroy his investment. There are always options for the community, such as strict enforcement of parking regulations, modifications to traffic patterns, etc. I've been on both sides, and the best path is cooperation and consensus.

Since I am in the same boat as you, philosophically, I can rectify this situation by getting people like our neighbor in the above scenario to get involved BEFORE the owner of the adjacent parcel applies for a building permit. Put into law a zoning ordinance based upon real quality of life issues, and put into law things that protect neighbors with enough mustar to pass through the US courts (and the pocket lined developers).

In your role, I would agree these are good goals. However stipulating "good" merely through legislative efforts is both weak (ineffective) and avoiding of the central problem: Individuals should live in the communities they own, and own the communities they live in. Many developmental monstrosities are created by investors and developers who do not live in the beasts they create. It is a fundamental violation of the Golden Rule. When a project is out of touch with the rest of the community, it is sure to fail. This has been documented as a central problem in urban blight, and is also directly responsible in most of the cases where a community is in discord with a particular development.

So the problem isn't zoning, it's ownership and an individual's responsibility in his community.

To the claim that I'm backing up developers, that's a farce.

Point taken, I was not trying to make this a personal affront. But your comments were easy enough to polarize in order for me to make the other side of the argument.

I'm for infill development, though. I'm for urban growth boundaries and density that supports nodes sufficient for mass transit, reducing our dependence on automobiles.

I'm a LEED® AP, but am not convinced that comprimising quality of life is sustainable. You might check out William McDonough's Cradle To Cradle, essentially we must not force the appearance of sustainability in place of the real thing. Density for the sake of density just repeats the same mistake made in Le Corbusier's Garden City, and results in another round of Pruitt Igoes.

To me, this scenari

As a starting point, I'd like to suggest designers read, "A Whole New Mind" by Daniel Pink, and check out some articles at: http://www.danpink.com/. Furthermore, I suggest visiting IDEO http://www.ideo.com/ideo.asp. Pay special attention to their "method card" deck. Lastly (for purposes of this discussion) I suggest visiting http://www.mcdonough.com/# . The common thread in all this is DESIGN. William McDonough says that the need for regulation indicates a failure in design.

The design of the product goes 'way beyond just cosmetics. There is only so much you can do with an enclosure for a PC board, but there is LOTS you can do with the system as a whole. Case modding is just a place to start. Functional design improvements are being made in everything from the input devices ( http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1112012 ,00.asp http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/input/ ) to really innovative interfaces ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_project http://www.sun.com/software/looking_glass/).

The IDEO method cards are different from the "Creative Whack Pack" or "Thinkertoys" cards, in that they redefine the product design domain. The jobs of the future are going to be design jobs requiring both high creativity and high technical ability. If someone in India or China can do your job as well and cheaper than you, or if a computer can do your job better and faster, your job is obsolete.

you might be interested in the cradle to cradle folks:
http://www.mcdonough.com/writings_new_paradigm.htm
"Why not shift the focus of green design from managing the environmental impact of a destructive system to creating buildings and materials that generate wholly positive effects for people and nature. This changes the entire context in which design decisions are made. Rather than asking, 'How do I meet today's environmental standards?' designers would begin to ask, 'How do my design decisions make sense in the overarching context of the natural world?'"

"Imagine a world in which all the things we make, use, and consume provide nutrition for nature and industry--a world in which growth is good and human activity generates a delightful, restorative ecological footprint."

Some friends and I were complaining about some of the same things I hear in this thread, about poor audiences, high prices, etc., and we thought we'd buy a theater and start a "Theater Club". Imagine my surprise when I found out that a 6-theater complex had a $75 - $80,0000/mo. air conditioning bill. (Houston, Texas yearly average). Basically, when we figured it all out, it would take about $300,000/mo. just to operate the thing, if we could even find a ditributer for films. (Highest expense: Movies distributed cost based on the number of seats in the theater.) I'm not surprised that theater prices are high, and I'm not surprised that theater managers will take money from anyone coming in the door.

Given that these problems will not go away by themselves, what are the solutions? (I agree with William McDonough (http://www.mcdonough.com/) that regulation is a result of poor design.) There is a huge fortune to be made by the designer who resolves these problems and makes theater-going a pleasant experience again. (I usually see 3 or 4 movies a week, but I usually go in the afternoon early when there aren't any kids or crowds. Summer is a bummer for movie goers like me.) I know there are places in Japan that have counter-frequency generators that kill cell and pager transmission. That would be a good start. perhaps if each seat was provided with individual noise-cancelling headphones, that would also help (and, yes, I know that brings up other problems of hygiene, etc, but that's where solving those problems brings in the fortune. Legitimately patentable solutions.)

Of course, maybe we could change society? I have a friend who is a cameraman for Fox Sports, and he described a goodwill game between the Astros and a Japanese team a few years ago. All the players were applauded when they came on the field. All the players were applauded for good plays. Players bowed to the crowd to acknowledge the applause. When the game was over, all the spectators stood up and applauded the teams. Then they sat back down, and rose one row at a time to file out of the stadium in an orderly fashion. And they took their trash with them!

This kind of thing was described/foretold/requested in the book "Cradle to Cradle" , by William McDonough & Michael Braungart, which after reading the /. review I bought and read. (BTW, here is their company) An interesting read. Lots of propaganda, but lots of really good ideas, and a few real results, too. Other related links here and here.

"is a manifesto calling for the transformation of human industry through ecologically intelligent design. Through historical sketches on the roots of the industrial revolution; commentary on science, nature and society; descriptions of key design principles; and compelling examples of innovative products and business strategies already reshaping the marketplace, McDonough and Braungart make the case that an industrial system that 'takes, makes and wastes' can become a creator of goods and services that generate ecological, social and economic value."

annmariabell.com