A while back I wrote about self disintegrating plant pots made of plant matter. Yesterday I saw an episode of Dirty Jobs featuring a dairy farm where they turn cow poop into Cow Pots. They also burn methane to power the process. It was awesomely disgusting TV as only Dirty Jobs can deliver.
It feels like real green innovation gets done on the micro level. Big firms make a show out of it, “greenwashing” for marketing reasons (for example, the Prius is a joke, if you really cared about fuel efficiency you’d drive a 1992 Honda VX). Large scale operations can’t change their methods without incurring huge training and equipment costs. Meanwhile, smaller operations can experiment with new products: fail cheap, make small wins worth doing, maybe hit a home run. Also, there’s no committee to screw up good ideas.
It’s also possible I have no idea what I’m talking about and that there are market distorting regulations and farm subsidies at work here.
In any case, it was fun seeing Mike Rowe turn poop into gold.
One Comment
I agree that much green innovation happens at the micro level. That said, real solutions to many environmental problems already exist–there is no serious further innovation needed in order to successfully address a significant number of environmental issues. Considering this, and, as you mentioned, the ability of companies like Toyota to quite literally get away with peddling Priuses less environmentally friendly than Hummers, it is imperative that heavy government regulation intervene at nearly all levels of society, from production, to consumption, to advertising. Imagining a laissez-faire green capitalist revolution in which brilliant new miracle products and organic cotton jeans deliver us from the imminent environmental catastrophe we most certainly face is not only fantastical, it’s suicidal.