Please enable JavaScript to view this page content properly.
Easy and Practical Ways to be Nicer to Mother Nature
Is this:
A striking case study of the complexity of industrial metabolism is provided by James Womack and Daniel Jones in their book Lean Thinking, where they trace the origins and pathways of a can of English cola. The can itself is more costly and complicated to manufacture than the beverage. Bauxite is mined in Australia and trucked to a chemical reduction mill where a half-hour process purifies each ton of bauxite into a half ton of aluminum oxide. When enough of that is stockpiled, it is loaded on a giant ore carrier and sent to Sweden or Norway, where hydroelectric dams provide cheap electricity. After a month-long journey across two oceans, it usually sits at the smelter for as long as two months.
The smelter takes two hours to turn each half ton of aluminum oxide into a quarter ton of aluminum metal, in ingots ten meters long. These are cured for two weeks before being shipped to roller mills in Sweden or Germany. There each ingot is heated to nearly nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit and rolled down to a thickness of an eighth of an inch. The resulting sheets are wrapped in ten-ton coils and transported to a warehouse, and then to a cold rolling mill in the same or another country, where they are rolled tenfold thinner, ready for fabrication. The aluminum is then sent to England, where sheets are punched and formed into cans, which are then washed, dried, painted with a base coat, and then painted again with specific product information. The cans are next lacquered, flanged (they are still topless), sprayed inside with a protective coating to prevent the cola from corroding the can, and inspected.
The cans are palletized, forklifted, and warehoused until needed. They are then shipped to the bottler, where they are washed and cleaned once more, then filled with water mixed with flavored syrup, phosphorus, caffeine, and carbon dioxide gas. The sugar is harvested from beet fields in France and undergoes trucking, milling, refining, and shipping. The phosphorus comes from Idaho, where it is excavated from deep open-pit mines�a process that also unearths cadmium and radioactive thorium. Round-the-clock, the mining company uses the same amount of electricity as a city of 100,000 people in order to reduce the phosphate to food-grade quality. The caffeine is shipped from a chemical manufacturer to the syrup manufacturer in England.
The filled cans are sealed with an aluminum “pop-top” lid at the rate of fifteen hundred cans per minute, then inserted into cardboard cartons printed with matching color and promotional schemes. The cartons are made of forest pulp that may have originated anywhere from Sweden or Siberia to the old-growth, virgin forests of British Columbia that are the home of grizzly, wolverines, otters, and eagles. Palletized again, the cans are shipped to a regional distribution warehouse, and shortly thereafter to a supermarket where a typical can is purchased within three days. The consumer buys twelve ounces of the phosphate-tinged, caffeine-impregnated, caramel-flavored sugar water. Drinking the cola takes a few minutes; throwing the can away takes a second. In England, consumers discard 84 percent of all cans, which means that the overall rate of aluminum waste, after counting production losses, is 88 percent. The United States still gets three-fifths of its aluminum from virgin ore, at twenty times the energy intensity of recycled aluminum, and throws away enough aluminum to replace its entire commercial aircraft fleet every three months.
Recent Email
We recently received an email that I felt was important to share. Our goal is not to upset anyone, but to be practical and realistic in our mission to be part of the solution. I personally feel that if we are too radical, we will push people away. It is important not to judge others, as we are all in different places with our decision to be green. Some people are able to afford solar panels surrounding their home and only buying products that are organic or made from sustainable products. Others are only able to afford more energy efficient light bulbs and incorporating more eco-friendly products into their lives as their budget permits. We should encourage people when they recycle or switch to reusable water bottles instead of disposable ones. We should smile at someone making the effort to bring their reusable shopping bags to the grocery store instead of using the disposable plastic shopping bags. Positively reinforcing good habits is much more effective that negatively reinforcing bad habits. Anyway, here is the email and my response:
From: Chicago, IL I am very disheartened to see you continually promoting Walmart. I NEVER shop at Walmart for political reasons. The water glasses you promote were probably made in some Chinese sweatshop. I encourage you to watch the documentary "Walmart: The High Cost of Low Prices" by Robert Greenwald. You can find it on Amazon.comHope you will please get the dvd and make a commitment to shop elsewhere. Thanks. -Chicago, ILP.S. I thought every website was supposed to have contact information on it. You have absolutely no info on your site about your company.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Chicago, IL,
I'm sorry that you feel that way. Unfortunately, Walmart is not going anywhere. Instead of trying to put them out of business (which is not very realistic) we can encourage their efforts to be green and ethical in their practices. We need to think of positive and realistic solutions to the problems that we face in our society. I appreciate your political reasons for not shopping at Walmart, but for the millions of people in the US who cannot imagine shopping anywhere but Walmart (yes, they exist) for financial reasons, I feel that it is more important to gently guide their shopping decisions to include more environmentally friendly choices. If you are making less than $30,000/year, your choices are very limited when making the decisions to feed and provide for your family. You may not be able to shop at Whole Foods or another similar store, but you can afford to make small choices that, when combined as a whole, make a big difference.
As for your comment about our contact information: we choose not to put our address and phone number on the website because our business consists of me and my fiance out of our home. The website is our passion, but it is not our source of income. If you have any questions at all about our business that you feel can be addressed on our website without compromising our privacy, I would love to answer them.
Thank you for your comment. I truly do appreciate your commitment to make a difference but please understand the position that we are in. Change may not happen overnight, but by encouraging everyone to make small changes to their lives, eventually change will come.
Sincerely,
Brandy V. Antilla
Be Part of the Solution
www.livinglavidaverde.net
_______________________________________________
Love our website?
Help keep us energized! Donate $3 to buy us a cup of coffee!
