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Made by hand, tested by labs

I’m a little late to this but… like many issues, it is woven into a blanket that is easy to forget you have, unless it’s the one you pull up every night to keep warm.

In response to the furor last year over lead in toys from China and elsewhere, the government responded with the Consumer Product safety Improvement Act. Sounds reasonable enough, right? The materials used to fabricate toys should be thoroughly tested before mass production and dissemination through chain retailers and the intertubes. But what about small runs of hand-made items, clothing, dolls, toys from people who have created tiny, sustainable niche markets to make things and support themselves? What about used clothes and thrift stores? No difference at all, the Act says.

For starters, the CPSIA requires end unit testing on every product intended for use by children under 12. It is the responsibility of the manufacturer to do this testing, regardless of how small the business. That means that manufacturers (like myself ) will have to pay to get every different product they offer tested. These tests have to be done at a CSPC accredited lab, and cost up to $4,000 with an average of around $150. So for me, I offer 3 different types of dresses. Each dress contains 2 different fabrics, as well as buttons, and thread, so that’s potentially $600 to test one dress. But I have 3 styles, so that’s $1800. And when I get a new bolt of fabric, I need to start all over again. I can only make 15 dresses from one bolt, so there is no way I could make the testing financially feasible.

At present, there are no exemptions for small businesses and “micro” manufacturers like myself and most handcraft artisans.
There is no exception for quantities made, where the garments/products are made or anything else. Nor is there an exception for unadorned fabric components, unfinished wood components, materials which, by their nature, are free of lead and phthalates. Also, the Act takes a “guilty until proven innocent” approach, which would treat a handmade, unfinished wooden toy that doesn’t meet the certification deadline of 2/10/09 as a “banned hazardous substance” which would be illegal to distribute in this country. Each infraction carries a $100,000 felony charge.

This legislation is also retroactive for any pre-existing inventory as of February 10th, 2009. This means that everything on the shelves in those big (or small) stores will also be “banned, hazardous substances” – contraband. Larger corporations that can afford testing will incur thousands, maybe millions of dollars in fees, and this expense will be handed down to the consumer, probably making the prices for children’s products go through the roof. This also means that after that date, even selling your kids old things on eBay or Craigslist will be illegal. Charities will not be able to accept donations without a certificate of compliance either.

Designers and shop owners are being turned into activists by this issue and the looming deadline, as their livelihoods are at stake. The manufacturing scale here should easily connote a distinction in risk, and the handmade fabrication and retail industries should be enlisted as a corrective/alternative to mass-produced, imported goods, not lumped in with them. These are the folks who started out championing local, organic, small scale and sustainable as the cornerstones of new enterprise. And they were right. It is a crucial point of departure which is itself one of the new routes to sustainability. The time in which lawmakers could be insufficiently familiar with this distinction, and other, very related ones, has passed.

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Meanwhile,

On another planet, French president Sarkozy announced that admission to all national museums and monuments would be free to those under 25. It’s weird but the French actually connect their art to their national heritage (“le patrimoine”) and think they can attract more visitors by eliminating the entry fee.

At the same time they proposed spending 100 million euros on the renovation of le patrimoine, they also proposed four free nights at the Louvre, the Orsay, the Pompidou and Quai Branly for people 18-25. That was part of an experiment in the first half of 2008 that opened up the permanent collections in 14 national museums totally free.

Why would you want more people going to museums? Who knows? Go figure.

The Painter’s Studio – a Real Allegory by Gustave Courbet, 1855 Musee Orsay

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Disincentives

Disincentives are the levers of motivation we use on power companies to get them to sell us more energy than we need. We provide them by not expressing a preference against them. They are stupid in their own way. Why are light bulbs hot? Why do video game consoles automatically stay powered-up, unless we set them not to?

Greater energy efficiency – efficiency in general – is the elbow of the energy conundrum in which we are presently mired. It’s the least sexy part and yet the one which would have the most force if heartily applied to the mid-section of our wasteful nature. Whoa! We didn’t know we could do that! It’s empowering when you can get a creep off your back, especially using a tool you’ve possessed all along. And in this case, the shock itself would provide a little desperately-needed breathing room to take on the more difficult, sexier paths to sustainability like solar and wind (the T & A in this crazy, mixed-up analogy). Sensible adjustments to the way we generate, distribute and use energy even from dirty, nonrenewable sources would go along way toward highlighting and reforming the waste endemic to our ways.

Of course, the way things stand, the suppliers who generate the energy we waste desire anything but such illumination and reform. Their motives are also all about green, but the other kind. You can’t blame them (unless you recall that them = us); this is the system in which they/we operate. With shareholders to satisfy, their only incentives are for us to use more power. Why should they invest in expensive, energy-saving initiatives that adversely affect their bottom line?

The Department of Energy predicts a 30% increase in power demand by 2030. As this Time magazine article points out, the utilities that will supply this power are very aware that the cheapest new power plants are the ones they don’t have to build. But, if we give them no other alternatives than to build new clean coal-fired plants, they will oblige. We’ve already provided ourselves some pretty nasty choices by omission that have begun haunt the future, as we are loathe to face them.

We need to untangle some of the simple assumptions about status quo energy use in order to steer clear of the more complex and disasteful choices down the road regarding unaffordable new power production and out of control emissions. Realize that by not demanding less, we are demanding more.

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NYT blogger vs. her commenters

Nothing. The former editor of Dwell magazine waxes positive about transforming the suburbs. It’s the paper of record and the record is clear: now that we have expended grand-scale resources for decades building these monuments to isolation and celebrating them in glossy print mags, we need to devote serious thought to unworkable solutions to save said monuments for the sake of… I’m not sure but it starts to resemble the operative rationale for Iraq in that we don’t want the deaths of soldiers in the war to have been in vain so we must… kill some more.

It’s the beauty of the new media paradigm: Grey Lady with blog posts article full of vague pronouncements to re-cast past placement of deck chairs and, (mostly) without rancor, commenters come to the rescue with helpful suggestions. Practice for fire departments is one favorite.

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Beeped out*

Watching the Iggles game this afternoon, featuring multiple viewings of a Taco Bell commercial. So… they do know how much they look like pricks for having their message revolve around stiffing the coffee guy on his tip, right? I mean, some guy in line behind another to get coffee tells him that he should take back the change from paying for his latte so he can buy some crappy bacon & cheddar chalupa or whatever? The food item doesn’t matter because that’s the takeaway – stiff the poor guy who ‘only pushed a button.’ Really.

But then it segues into a Best Buy testimonial from one of their self-described geek squad installers about this one time where he gets to a job which turns out to be a party of thirty people gathered in a big house with chips and an assortment of snacks and whatever to watch the game but guess what? There’s no massive screen TV. He’s there right before game time to install it, elbowing his way through the crowd with the TV. Gets it hooked and is greeted by cheers and high-fives from the crowd. Really.

What kind of audience are and, what kind of place is this? How much do we internalize this level of Stoopid with shrugs and yes, that’s just the way it is, until it does become the way it is? This much? More? How much more? It’s aggressively stoopid and these companies aggressively identify their products with it because they know stoopid resonates with the public. Yet another ad sums up the entire philosophy best: If you don’t take advantage of these cheese combos, you’re crazy.

*It’s a family blog.

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Fun in the Hot House

Listening to the Stooges’ Fun House at the bar last night then biking home late, I was conscious of an extended moment amidst the swirl of information and goings-on. If you take so much in and do not take some time away to think and cavort, it can all be overwhelming. A sample of what’s around you:

Juan Cole on the UN call for a ceasefire and settler colonialism.

Well-chosen words on the aforementioned Obama stimulus package.

A fire burning for forty-six years?

The search for signs and meanings.

Astrophysicist/author discusses the implications of death by black hole.

DH Lawrence on Democracy (‘flip’ to page 63).

1997 Salon interview with Robert Hughes.

And finally, just a few things to look into.

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Green Stimulus

Jokes about the size of Obama’s package notwithstanding, discussion on once-and-future efforts to get the country going again but in a different direction are a re-run of the initial green wave. As a correspondent at Marshall’s puts it

My practice group works exclusively in the public sector. Obama’s only constituency in Congress and the nation for bold initiatives, such as Green infrastructure, will come from states (a small handful) that are ahead of the curve on green initiatives. The biggest candidate is CA, where the Governor has already signed legislation that is more aggressive than the federal government, or likely, any other state in the Union. How much congressional representatives from CA are in line with these initiatives is not clear. Other constituencies will be politicians from states with companies heavily invested in green technologies and industries, such as wind farms, solar, and solar thermal (big energy, small footprint so far). Ironically, many of the bigger companies are based overseas.
My conclusion is that the constituency is not ideological, nor is it very deep. Politicians love Green the way they love “tough on crime.” It’s a great ad, and you don’t have to do too much, other than build a few prisons in the latter case, and show pretty pictures of wind turbines in the former. Green initiatives have been seen as a potential boom catalyst. In a global economy that has driven down the price of oil, the national security imperatives that were the strongest political selling points, are lessened. Obama will need to make a case directly to the people and drag a disinterested Congress with him. Does he care enough? Time will tell.

What this financial collapse on so many levels boils down to is an open opportunity to pivot. We already know that we cannot go back to doing/living/driving/buying/building/traveling/growing/powering the way we used to. So this gargantuan effort to stimulate the economy must be informed by that reasoning. It was going to take a gigantic re-investment in public-oriented (mass transit, updated electrical grid) infrastructure all along. Now we are going to get one under the not very different pretext of saving the economy and creating jobs.

Our energy problems and the depressed economy are related, we must let them be one.

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Distorting the public conversation

It mostly goes without saying, for long gaps on this blog at least, that the reason Green is so compelling as a stand-in for sustainability is that it also happens to be highly useful slang for money. And has been for what’s going on an epoch, in any meaningful sense.

It’s the double-entendre that provides its edge – as divergent as the two meanings in one word are. Incoherent is more like it, but just enough to provide a little of each to lap over onto the other and provide some of the ambiguity that might pull us through the rough patch where our pursuit of money has outdistanced its effective ability to shield us from the consequences of its single-minded pursuit. Vagueness is a currency that itself can and will lose effectiveness as the clearly-spelled out cruelties of life re-assert themselves. We’ll hope for vague cover again, to attempt surreptitious movement toward better, more sensible pursuits. Because we can’t do it out in the open.

All this is to point up the way green as money has stepped to center stage again, becoming more precious as its gotten tighter, even more precious than the precarious fate of the planet on which it is spent, invested, given and taken. It’s pitiable but this is the way it is – the way we are. This mentality leads with ‘we will become more energy efficient/invest in new sources of renewable energy when we can afford to’. It ends up where? Like capitalism or any ism, it doesn’t care. Only we can show concern or guard special preferences. We have to decide some things. Like when we might be able to afford to become less wasteful, for one.

And as quickly as the massive financial losses spilled into the open this fall, the money is crawling back into its holes as fast as possible. It might even be able to provide the cover of vagueness again soon and enable us to return to making more (safely) ambiguous motions toward sustainability and ‘going green’. But we won’t be able to decide or allocate anything in any different way as long as this trend remains in tact.

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energy flows & waste streams

in communications, that is. Whether it’s their own supply chain and carbon footprint liabilities or those of thier clients, it seems that what green means has begun to have an impact on the advertising and marketing industry other than as a must-have trend. Here’s a video from Advertising Age, with Don Carli from the Institute for Sustainable Communication saying some smart things about… sustainability.

Sustainability as an ‘actual marketing strategy for growth’ is still a contradiction to my ears; but even as practiced by W*lmart, the savvy it portends will eventually boil down to a small playing field whereupon we witness, via pay-per-view, the cage match featuring a closed system vs. messaging. The closed system will prevail and then the whole cycle will begin again with the closed system as the premise – which will change the meaning of the terms actual, marketing, strategy and growth. Then things might get interesting.