Progressive Meandering

Mike Chino at INHABITAT writes:

Recently St. Lucie County in Florida announced that it has teamed up with Geoplasma to develop the United States’ first plasma gasification plant. The plant will use super-hot 10,000 degree fahrenheit plasma to effectively vaporize 1,500 tons of trash each day, which in turn spins turbines to generate 60MW of electricity - enough to power 50,000 homes! Cutting down on landfill waste while generating energy is a pretty win-win proposition, and the plant will also be able to melt down inorganic materials to be reused for other applications, such as in roadbed and heavy construction.

I think it’s important to remember that, while reclaiming as much energy as possible from a process is admirable, this process is NOT a green electricity source. It will always require more energy to vaporise the waste than is recovered by using the “syngas” to drive turbines.

Pop climate change, biofuel, renewable energy or any similar buzzword into Google and you’ll be greeted with a plethora of articles, reports and blog entries detailing the woes we face as a race, how we must act now etc. 

The goal of a lot of these articles is to increase awareness of this issue and to try and bring about change. These articles are trying to sell something, in this instance they are selling an idea. While I wholeheartedly agree with these ideas the means by which they are put to the public is, in my opinion, poor.

Let me explain:

Imagine if you will that you are looking to purchase a new washing machine. You walk into your local Currys and a sales assistant approaches. You ask him to explain some of the features of a particular model.

“Well if you don’t buy this WasherDryer-O-Matic you’ll have dirty clothes, that aren’t dry and you’ll spend all your time waiting for your washing to be done.”

Yes, it does sound a little off doesn’t it? Well that’s because this is HOW NOT TO MAKE A SALE! 
Let’s try again, this time he says:

“Well, the WasherDryer-O-Matic offers the best cleaning results in its class, it’s drying function is excellent, and it achieves these results in the shortest time of any machine on the market.”

I think you’ll agree that’s much better. So what’s the difference? 

The first example is trying to make a sale by emphasizing the negative consequences of NOT BUYING this product.

The second is trying to make a sale by the emphasizing the positive consequences of BUYING this product.

It’s a remarkably small difference, but as you can see it can make a dramatic change to the customer’s perception of the product, and even the store as a whole.

It doesn’t take much to extend this and see where a lot of the green articles are going wrong, and how they could be improved….. 

The goal should be to make people want to live in a more environmentally considerate way, rather than make people not want to live in a wasteful manner.