The neighbourhood leaf blowing got me thinking about sustainability. Rather than just dealing with the problems, solving them properly the first time around, issues are too often thrown around, responsibility pushed from one group to the next. Businesses and organisations report about it on their websites, solutions are proposed and then when we feel the issue has been discussed enough, it disappears. The problem is, often it hasn’t actually been dealt with, just like these leaves, just because we don’t see it anymore, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t still there.

As of December 2011 the last antennas were removed. Why? Depending on who you ask you get different answers. Some say it is because the antennas were old and provided a safety risks. Many others say that because the antennas haven’t actually been used for years (all that is now being done by subterranean fibre optics) and that BT was keeping them there for sentimental reasons and those reasons were just getting too expensive. So now the BT Tower is naked.

This got me thinking about how we have lots of things in our cities and communities that we get attached to, Old buildings, signs, corner stores. But when there is no obvious benefit to them anymore how do we keep them when they just cost a lot of money? Perhaps we should have funds through city government to pay for sentimental things that may seem useless but are important elements of the community. You could have members of the community submit proposals and then the public could vote on them. I’ve got a few things that I’d give my vote to.

It seems that there is a serious need at the moment to rethink the design of cars, a design that hasn’t changed much at all over the years. Why do we need a big long car if generally only one person is ever sitting in that car and hardly ever carrying any luggage or bags? What about having cars that come apart and clip together like lego, you only leave with the front part if you are driving alone and if you have your whole family or know you will be buying something big you clip on the back. I’ve just spent the past hour sketching ideas for new cars. Perhaps this will be my next career…

When it comes to sustainability, things don’t always turn out well. There are initiatives that work and others that don’t. But just because one egg in the dozen is rotten it doesn’t mean that the other eggs are. You have to take the time to open them to know if they are or not and if you just throw the whole bunch away because of one bad egg, you are missing opportunities….to make a pretty good omelette!

This is such a fantastic idea and one that we are seeing more and more. Many businesses are realising that rather than sell products they can rent them. Think of all the things that we buy that we either use only for short periods of time or have to replace often, both at work and in our daily lives. Sustainability presents unlimited opportunities for entrepreneurs!

The problem is I wanted to touch the art too. There are quite a few pieces that look like they are meant to be touched. We aren’t talking Van Gogh paintings on the wall. These are textured sculptures. One room is covered in light bulbs, another has what looks like a re-creation of a roman road. We experience the world around us through our senses, the more senses we can use the more connected we become with an object. In that sense, modern art galleries want us to connect with the art, but not completely. They want us to hear, smell, look … but not touch.

This had me thinking, as I often do, about sustainability. There are a lot of issues, a lot of problems, like climate change that are happening all over the world. We ask people to care but it is hard to really get engaged, to really understand if you can’t use your senses. We need to see it, to feel it, smell it, taste it. If it isn’t really affecting you in some way, it is more difficult to connect. So how do we do that?

A standard feature of every elevator is a little metal sign which tells you how many people/how much weight can safely be put into the elevator. These guys did something a bit different. This is from the elevator at the The Hospital Club in London. I think it is great, a great conversation starter too. I wonder how you would even fit a horse into an elevator and I can think of better uses for 10,526 one pound coins.

It is an effective technique to communicate messages to the public, especially when the numbers get really big. For example, 3.3 billion liters of water is lost from pipes daily across Britain is the headline of an article that ran in the Telegraph. As the first sentence points out, that amount is the equivalent to more than 1,300 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Crazy. This isn’t a problem that is unique to Britain. In cities, towns, communities around the world, a lot of water is being lost because of leaky pipes. It is estimated that more than 45% of water in the US is lost through leaky pipes, A leak of only one drop per second represents a water loss of 10 000 litres per year. That’s a lot of water.

Its all about communication…

To me this is a bit like plastic bags in stores. By not providing plastic bags for free, stores are now making a profit by selling something that had always been seen as their responsibility to provide. There are many studies around sustainability and what consumers are and are not willing to pay extra for. Generally people say they aren’t willing to pay more, but then they do. If a Siberian Tiger Park can get customers to pay to feed the cats, what else are we willing to spend out money on, in particular in sustainability, if marketed in the right way?

I have taken my fair share of taxis around the world and to me the definition of a taxi is a car that has a driver in it that is knowledgeable about the roads in that particular location and that if you give them an address their primary job is to know where that address is (or find out themselves) and then get you there in the shortest amount of time possible. Seems that is not the case here in Houston. In the world of sustainability if you look green, talk green, smell green but aren’t actually green in any way that is called greenwashing. So perhaps this is ‘taxi’washing?

Worst thing is that at the end he expected me to leave a much bigger tip than I was prepared to leave. Paying extra for service that wasn’t rendered. Sounds a lot like greenwashing to me!