Where Recycling is a Way of Life For These High School Students

Meaningful work is a way of life at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School. This independent day and boarding high school was founded in 1953 based on this principal. Today the students participate in two afternoons a week on a campus work crew. This can be anything from organic gardening and ranch work to glassblowing and electrical. Today we meet the Recycling Work Crew. For more information please go to www.crms.org.

Paint-Free Coke Can Saves Energy, Reduces Pollution

by Sarah Parsons, 11/23/09

Designer Harc Lee has created a “naked” Coca Cola can that forfeits Coke’s typical bold red and white stripes in favor of au naturale silver. The aluminum can is created without using any paints or dyes, and stands to greatly reduce pollution and energy use associated with producing and recycling soda cans.

Instead of coloring the can with toxic dyes and paints used on traditional Coca-Cola Classic cans, Harc Lee’s monochrome coke can would use a pressing machine to make the brand stand out from its background. The result is a sleek, updated look fitting for a 21st-century beverage.

Though the can may be silver, its design is decidedly green. By giving up its bold colors, the can reduces air and water pollution that occurs during the coloring process and eliminating the energy and toxic dyes required to give the can its color. Plus, the naked can streamlines the recycling process: before any aluminum can can be recycled, it must first be stripped of its paint. Ditching color during production saves a ton of energy and effort at the recycling plant.

Sure, this is just one type of can in America’s ever-growing lineup of tasty, single-serving beverages. But let’s put things into perspective: according to Gizmodo, Coca Cola produced 67.8 million cans of Coca Cola Classic in 2007. That’s about 24.7 billion cans a year! And if Diet Coke and Coca-Cola Zero also adopted the naked look, the tally would total about 75.3 billion cans every year.

It’s unclear whether Coca-Cola will pick up the new look, but we should definitely give props to Harc Lee for coming up with such an innovative design. It’s up to consumers to convince advertisers and beverage producers that brands can still retain their own identities even without bright, bold colors on the labels.

+ Harc Lee

Via Sundance Channel and Gizmodo

Tipped by Anna Brew

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via inhabitat.com

Nobel laureate says happiness important for growth

By Harpreet Bhal

LONDON (Reuters) – Levels of happiness could help shape economic policy in the industrialized world in the same way such factors have gained prominence in developing countries, said economics Nobel laureate Amartya Sen.

Sen, 76, said citizens’ quality of life and their general wellbeing should be considered as a measure when looking at overall economic success, particularly since developed countries face social issues such as unemployment despite economic growth.

Last week France said it planned to create new statistics, in addition to traditional Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures, in response to a report by Sen, fellow Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and the OECD, which recommended using happiness, quality of life and distribution of income to assess economic growth.

Sen, professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University in the U.S., welcomed France’s move. He said considering such indices rather than just the narrowly focused GDP — a country’s total value of goods and services produced — could improve policymakers’ responses to problems in the economy in the wake of the global financial crisis.

“If you have indicators that concentrate on human wellbeing and human freedom then you could get there much more quickly by thinking about policy decisions in that light,” the Bangladeshi-born economist told Reuters.

“It is a question of seeing the need for a dialogue… and to adapt your policies connected with a more informed understanding of human predicament,” he said in an interview.

In the 1990s Sen helped created the Human Development Index (HDI), a United Nations statistic ranking countries’ level of development based on health, knowledge and standard of living.

The annual index often attracts attention from policymakers and non-governmental organizations and highlights disparities among countries which have similar levels of income per capita.

Sen said developed countries should discuss the need for indicators which were less elementary than the HDI, but which would provide a better understanding of social issues which are not covered in GDP calculations.

“You take the situation in America now where the gross domestic product has stopped falling and is beginning to rise … but as long as unemployment continues to rise, the lives of many Americans remain very precarious,” he said.

“And given that fact, we have to shift our attention from gross domestic product to other indicators which are more sensitive to the adversity of human predicament such as unemployment,” he said.

The United States’ GDP grew at an annual rate of 3.5 percent in the third quarter, pulling the country out of the worst recession in 70 years. Despite the better-than-expected growth the unemployment rate in October rose to 10.2 percent, the highest in 26-1/2 years.

via feeds.reuters.com

CSR Minute: GE Partners with China; Boston College Corporate Citizenship Advice

Corporate Social Responsible News: GE Partners with China; BOS College Center for Corporate Citizenship on Web Advice

Fairtrade language tutoring with Cindy Cooper from Speak Shop

Cindy Cooper, Co-Founder of fair trade language tutoring site Speak Shop, recently shared her thoughts with Development Crossing.

1. Could you provide a brief overview of the organization and your role and responsibilities in it?

Speak Shop (www.SpeakShop.com) makes it easy to take one-on-one Spanish lessons online via webcam with teachers in impoverished countries like Guatemala and Nicaragua. A lot of people study languages abroad, but not enough to make it a year-round sustainable source of income for these language teachers. So we bring the customers to them and empower them as micro-entrepreneurs. Customers get personalized lessons that fit their schedule. Everyone benefits.

A big part of our mission is to create connections between people coming from different cultures, locations and beliefs. We think that more human contact and cross-cultural understanding are keys to a better, more peaceful world.

As for my role, I co-founded Speak Shop with my husband and work on strategy, marketing and partnerships.

2. Fair trade language tutoring sounds like a brilliant concept! Could you briefly explain how the process works?

We’ve helped the tutors to become micro-entrepreneurs. In other words, the tutors don’t work for us. They are not our employees, and we don’t take any of their lesson fees or charge them to use our service. They set their own hourly fees. They can decide to charge more or less based on experience and demand. Some tutors own computers and others don’t. Depending on their situation they pay a share of their earnings to partner schools to cover direct expenses and staff support. We work with tutors to negotiate with the schools and ensure their net earnings are fair. Tutors are netting three to four times local rates by teaching at Speak Shop and they can teach when they want, all year round, as opposed to just 3 or 4 months during tourist season.

3. How do you ensure that the tutors are qualified? Do you work with specific language centers or with freelance tutors?

First, we work with a couple of Spanish schools that are experts in identifying good tutors. Second, we interview each tutor personally. If they make it that far, we train them on teaching online. Finally, we have a continuous quality assurance system: our customers leave feedback after their lessons.

4. Is this a service that complete beginners can take part in as well? Or do you need at least a basic knowledge of Spanish to get started?

Absolutely. With personal tutoring, even a beginner will start speaking Spanish during the very first lesson and they don’t have to feel embarrassed about what a class full of people will think of them. The tutors are very friendly and encouraging. It’s also excellent for people who have studied Spanish because they can quickly improve, and they appreciate how fun and effective it is.

5. Speak Shop currently works with tutors based in Guatemala and Nicaragua, are there plans to expand its reach to other countries and languages?

Our vision is to offer a multitude of languages and bring new sources of income to developing areas. Right now, we’re working on Spanish. And in the future, I can see Arabic, Chinese, and, my favorite, Portuguese!

6. Any additional thoughts?

This year we will have delivered 15,000 hours of tutoring and provided sustainable income to 12 tutors. We hope you join us in making the world a friendlier and more peaceful and economically fair place for all.

via 3blmedia.com

Greenpeace tells you The naked truth about the F-word and climate

Flaunting Socially Responsible Consuming

We are at an interesting crossroads in consumer culture.  Where luxury purchases used to be the ultimate sign of affluence or, at least, aspiring affluence, more consumers now may be driven to make conspicuously conscious purchases.  According to research co-authored by Aronte Bennett and mentioned in her MediaPost article, corporate social responsibility (CSR) seems to be becoming a strong motivator influencing consumers today – even in these bad economic times.  As she put it:

In a variety of experiments, our research found that consumers like CSR-associated products for two distinct reasons.

First, the fact that these products send out highly visible, social signals to their friends, family and co-workers regarding their kindness and charitable nature.

Second, they like the more private, self-signaling potential associated with the purchases of these products, even when a strong public social signal is absent to others.

These consumers like the visibility of what they are doing and they also gain in self-regard.  This is sounding familiar, like a whole other market – luxury.

continue reading.

Andrea Learned is a marketing dot-connector with a focus on gender and a longterm view on coming trends. Andrea’s broad, colorful commentary can be found regularly on her blog, Learned on Women.

McKesson Leads Collaborative Effort for Safe Access to Health Records

In 2008, McKesson joined the Executive Council of the Health Information Trust Alliance, also known as HITRUST, a multi-stakeholder initiative consisting of healthcare companies, government officials and non-governmental organizations. The goal of this group is to create protocols and systems that allow safe and protected access to health records in order to make more informed healthcare decisions.

In early 2009, HITRUST released the Common Security Framework, a security control standard developed for healthcare information. For the first time ever, healthcare IT professionals can enter and maintain patient data using a prescriptive set of certifiable and scalable standards.

HITRUST is dedicated to refining the Common Security Framework and coordinating with government officials to implement and build awareness of the standards. Moreover, the group is working to educate and train professionals on their importance.

As a company that provides healthcare connectivity solutions, McKesson is proud to take a leadership role in HITRUST. In our role as an Executive Council member of this important group, we will continue to work with HITRUST to develop tools that will help protect private health information and reduce the risk of security breaches.

via 3blmedia.com