There seems little point banging on about biodiversity conservation when we live in such an high intensity consumer world. If we think we can wait for events like COP-10 to solve our issues on their own then we deserve to fry and be the only species left.

The world now lives in cities: water (if you are lucky) comes out of a tap, materials are mined and refined (with lots of heat) into shiny objects and food comes out of the factory, not farm, gates. How is anyone going to care or understand the value of natural capital when the view out of their window not the onset of autumn but a wall, motorway or advertising hoarding? We live in a world where a resident of Manaus is less likely to have visited the Amazon jungle on his doorstep (or be bothered about its existence) than the suburbanite 5130 odd miles away in London’s commuter belt.

Being properly introduced

The tragedy is that the complexity of the value of environmental goods and services means that those that trump reasonable green/ enviro credentials aren’t challenged to improve at a rate or scale that is proportionate the the type of mindset change needed. Add to that science which at best is dull and at worse doom-laden (or unappealing so not listened to) and you can see why we are going backwards.

As a result, less well off megacity residents will bear the brunt of environmental goods and services loss first  - think water shortages, pollution, extreme temperatures, and more. All making their ability to prosper that much harder.

Companies and governments need to look beyond environmental target setting and into finding better ways to properly introduce customers and citizens to nature. The benefits to all sides fit into ideas around health, use of public space, civility, interactivity and social strengthening.

A better introduction will help build a relationship/friendship with environmental goods and services that will be needed as natural capital gets squeezed.

Depressed, stressed and self-obsessed

Nature and reimagining public space can help get us out of our two-speed work/consume lifestyle that compels people to seek gratification from such a limited list of sources. The built environment should no longer be solely in the hands of developers (such a nice bunch), but be the responsibility of all companies and organisations that have a physical footprint. We need to be formally introduced to nature if we are ever going to give it the props it deserves. This means transforming striplit retail boxes, drab parking lots, and antenna laden roofs into jungles, gardens, and meadows.

When you start to look around at how grim and lifeless cities are, its no wonder we are all depressed, stressed and self-obsessed. Bringing the natural world into such bleak surroundings can lift peoples emotions and get the juices flowing. They may even reward you with a bit of engagement…

As with resetting retail, this is all about improving the experience of living in a city.  It’s about more than getting a green roof to save on heating bills. We should be digging up pavements and planting trees,  taking responsibility away from developers and using the natural world to improve relationships and enhance experiences. And when we all get to see how cool the natural world is, we might actually give a sh1t about it.

Reclaiming ‘urban jungle’

After getting properly introduced we can get to know each other a bit better. Before we know it we will be BFFs. That’s when we will realise that its not normal to tarmac over rivers or use them as convenient open sewers. Meaningless environmental reduction targets have long had their day. Waiting for an edict from an intergovernmental or national body doesn’t exactly mark you out as an inspirational business leader. Become a pioneer and be part of a movement that reclaims the ‘urban jungle’.

Thanks for reading. Do connect with me on twitter to chat more about this or give it a mention if you feel so inclined.

Some more stuff on this

Branding biodiversity -  We need to heart nature from Futerra

Prime numbers megacities – Foreign Policy gets geopolitical w/urban spaces

MMB architects - amazing project to reinvigorate an old river in Paraisopolis, Sao Paulo

This is not normal (Isso não é normal) – collective in Brazil exploring urban issues w/ panache

Related posts

Resetting retail (saving our cities) – adding creativity to squalid high streets

Buy less, get more: sustainable consumption goes social – ownership is for losers

This is not normal (nor is Bhutan) – why so much concrete?

Sweat the small stuff: No more generic sustainability branding

Rebuilding blocks: sustainability, economics, design

Loyalty programmes have been given a boost by location-based services and social media. Companies like Groupon can use twitter and the like to pump out masses of offers to huge groups, taking advantage of ridiculously fast scaling to become HUGE. Location-based applications like Foursquare, Gowalla and the rest have created a bridge between peoples movement, their custom and the chance to personalise services, deals and offers based on their habits and a GPS signal. Real-time, customised retailing is not that far away (shudder).

This is all great if a) you have a smartphone, b) you feel it’s worth it letting people know where you are 24/7 and c), all you do is shop.

Local loyalty

In exploring wider retail issues (read ‘decaying retail landscape’), like the point of constantly acquiring more ‘stuff’, the hoarding of capital (and jobs) by massive retailers, and the transformation of high streets into either ghost towns, or, freakish copies, perhaps we can do better than thinking we’ve cracked it by offering an extra-shot to the mayor?

Location-based loyalty programmes, enabled by cheap, easy-to-use technology, can become  a transformative mechanism for resetting retail (pt I here) and helping high streets, neighborhoods and communities thrive by offering an incentive to participate in a local economy. Location-based loyalty programmes can combine the shift to collaboration and new currencies that are emerging online based around reputation etc, with the now urgent need to reconfigure our approach to retail and consumption.

This is not a new idea – the Brixton pound,a type of social currency which recently celebrated its 1st birthday, aims to keep money in Brixton. it has over 170 retailers signed up and over B£30o00 in circulation – (and they do good discounts).

Creating wider networks

Taking a social currency and adding a location-based loyalty effect that taps into the emerging  participative economy and personal digital currencies landscape should be a logical step for all neighborhoods. The networks and ideas are already there both on and offline. Also, you don’t need a smartphone.  It can be done by text message or by keyring.

More importantly , loyalty currency earn’t doesn’t just have to come in the form of a physical discount. Offering something distinct, unique and community-focused adds another layer to participation in a neighborhood, stimulating more interaction and broadening the network effect.

You walk into the store your card checks you in and you earn currency which can be used  across a range of local networks, making it a more attractive choice than schlepping to the megastore and racking up your points. It helps independent retailers collaborate rather than just compete giving them scale against the rapacious megastores. It also brings customers into the equation as well as other parts of civil society. For although the customers wont be buying out of altruism – i.e. wanting to help their area out, they will undoubtedly get more out of a growing relationship and loose network benefits of being part of a community where you know where your money is going.

Collaboration wins

This is the essence of why collaboration trumps 20th Century scalable efficiency every time. Who has your best interest at heart?  The chain retailer whose profits end up being spent on the CEOs alpine retreat? Or, the neighborhood business that values your personal participation in their venture (their real lives). Friendly customer service alone, much like uninspiring corporate responsibility and faux-localism, don’t cut it anymore.

Giving over money for an inanimate object has had its day -and it was found wanting. Next gen retailers will win by building communities around their enterprises. These communities will extend across local, physical and digital networks. A new social currency that takes advantage of location-based loyalty possibilities has the potential to take spending back from the big retailers (until they up their game and respond to the changes demanded) and create participative, neighborhood-focused economies that are diverse, supportive and enjoyable. Eventually retail will become less of a zero sum game. These type of incremental rewards can become powerful (quickly scalable) demonstrations of an alternative.

Thanks for reading, do check out these articles below for more on the subject and tweet if you liked it.

More on this stuff:

Where banks and socials can agree

Beyond Foursquare: The Next Generation of Customer Loyalty

Loyalty in 4-d How brands and consumers can win at location based services

Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On

Metadata – the New Language of Marketing

Related posts:

Resetting retail (saving our cities)

Reaching our with sustainability and Epicwin

Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (for everyone?)

Think of the centre of a city and its shopping district. From Oxford Street to smaller high streets and shopping centres they are almost universally grim. The stock story goes that the combined forces of the internet and the recession have made high street retail more and more costly. The only way to win is to squeeze prices. So we have 3 quid jeans and two pence t-shirts. High volume retail is the only route left. 

High streets – the centres of our cities –  have become bottom feeders, squeezing us for that last bit of novelty spending we can afford (despite our decades of hoarding and throwing away). We are at the bottom of the barrel. What type of high street do we want in 5 years time? Can retailers move beyond the last resort way of thinking, rethink their approaches and get out of this mess? Can high streets move to the centre of a new approach to living well that fits our rebalancing world.

Getting better at the wrong thing

Most high streets and shopping centres specialise in short, simple transactions. Money in till swapped for a bag with stuff in it. The better you are at this the more successful you are. Maybe some envisage moving from high volume retail to super high volume retail as a means to an end. Well that will certainly be the end. For as the transaction becomes smaller, faster, simpler, the satisfaction of the purchase will also drop. And if everyone is doing it, satisfaction will drop faster. At some point this breaks (if it hasn’t already).

Taken together we have got rapid urban decay in the centres of cities and towns, companies racing each other to the bottom (and out of business), and people drowning in paper shopping bags and rooms full of unwanted stuff, unable to prosper as their economy is knackered.

Resetting retail

Responsible retail is no longer just about having a tight supply chain and being hot on sourcing and labour standards. Building a new relationship with people and creating a business that is setup to thrive is about about urban renewal, making brilliant stuff and providing people with experiences that enrich their lives.

Imagine an Oxford Street where shops become workshops and retailers appeal to peoples creativity by teaching them how to upcycle clothes, cook delicious food, take better photos, make, build and share, hold inspiring talks, give career advice on how to get into their industry. Giving over retail space to creating these type of fora where people can learn and interact – backed up by online and mobile (think geo-location stuff) communities – is how retail resets for its next phase. Becoming the physical space for communities to come together will reboot retailer relationships with people who will visit their centre-of-town location to do something other than just buy stuff.

Oxford Street as mass collaboration hub

Instead of being loaded up with big brown bags, people will leave charged with ideas and new skills. This will turn city centres into mass hubs of creativity bringing people in, drawn by the desire to learn, share and make – helping them enjoy themselves more and live better. Who know’s, region specific user-led design workshops may help retailers make better stuff that people might actually want (and pay a premium for)?

Going home with more than bags

Making this happen needs third party partnerships, cross-sector collaboration and learning that comes from the outside – three things hopefully going on already. A starting point might be giving over a small concession to an organisation like Traid -which already has clothes banks in shops like Timberland – where they can hold upcycling workshops. Or it might look like Ikea’s recent idea – perhaps inspired by things like www.preloved.co.uk – of selling 2nd hand furniture in-store (which could turn into carpentry classes etcetc).

Saving our cities is about resetting retail. We might not be able to go back to an era of small independent shops everywhere but this is a type of 21st Century version that promotes interaction, relationships and creativity over our defunct consumer reality. I’m off to Oxford street to start mapping it out to draft a blueprint for what this might look like.

Check out Traid video here. Thanks for reading, do tweet if you’ve enjoyed.

Related posts

Your data is no longer just for analysts

Reaching out with EpicWin

Buy less, get more: sustainable consumption goes social

From thought leadership to mass collaboration

Speeding up understanding of social and environmental issues is going to be pretty hard if all the good info is imprisoned in tables. The three trends of data being more open, everything being more visual and life being on-demand/always-on should mean that numbers are no longer just for the analysts and ratings agencies.

This is a chance for companies to build trust and gain relevance to peoples lives (in an increasingly sceptical world) using information they already have. It may also help in answering the question ’why sustainability branding sucks?’, by providing information – i.e. non-financial data that is central to business operations – with an outlet fit for the 21st century. All this fits into the idea of enabling people to live better lives (for which you may be thanked with their custom) against the backdrop of the big technological, social, economic and environmental shifts going on.

Below i’ve outlined three areas where data visualization can help make sustainability fit for the new operating environment.

1. Risks – outline what the problems are

Your business is exposed to social and environmental risks. It’s likely that your stakeholders are too. It’s also likely that your stakeholders  - lets call them people – don’t spend their free time working out how much water is embedded in their evening meal and what the implications of this are.

from Linda Yuki Nakashini click to visit her site

2. Opportunities – how to do things better

Creating tools for people to understand that by changing their behaviour they can be healthier, use less energy etc. You could write this but again, people don’t generally spend their free time looking up corporate websites. If you make an enabling tool like this one from GE and Pentagram, you become relevant to peoples lives and more likely to engage around issues that matter.



3. Performance – data is not just for the analysts

Potentially the most exciting part. Lets think of a corporate responsibility report  - a catch all document that comes out once a year meant to serve lots of different stakeholders. Performance data on water and energy use, emissions and other stuff goes at the back. The work that goes into hitting targets on reducing these impacts condensed to once-a-year numbers at the back of a report -(granted explained in the body of the document).
Now, Imagine a live visualization that expands or contracts as new data is fed into it – as explained in the talk above – on a quarterly, monthly, weekly, or daily(!) basis. This gives you the chance to demonstrate the efforts you make everyday to reduce your impacts.

It’s expected, it’s easy

In a increasingly visual, on-demand and open world, companies are lagging behind. It in someways mirrors the ground lost to NGOs who harnessed low-cost social media platforms to engage with people long before companies got a sniff. More data is being made available to people to use for themselves. There are also more and more APIs out there to help people use data and other tools to create something relevant to their lives – see this video of live tube map of London created with live tube time data and google maps. Add a bit of  cognitive surplus idea to this-  people spending more of their own free time creating stuff (for free) – and getting your data out there is required if you want permission to engage.

The good news is you are almost doing this stuff already. The numbers (and comparative data) exist. As a company you can move away from trying to position yourself as sustainable – an increasingly futile exercise in a highly (rightly) sceptical world – to sharing info on risks, helping people live better and demonstrating that you are on the case.

For more see Information is Beautiful , Visualising Complexity, Good,Infosthetics or this post from Inspired Magazine

Related posts:

Sweat the small stuff: No more generic sustainability branding

Rebuilding blocks: sustainability, economics, design

From thought leadership to mass collaboration

Clay Shirky: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (for everyone?)

How to: Futuregazing, sustainability and creative content

Thanks for reading. Do tweet if you like or share your thoughts in the comments.

fires underway all over this vast country

Here is an audio report I’ve put together looking at the fires that are happening all over Brazil at the moment.

I explore:

• the spread of the fires
• the climatic conditons
• how environmental goods and services are the new oil and minerals
• the use of twitter to mobilize and engage the country (and it’s presidential hopefuls) in debate w/ the #chegadequeimadas hashtag
• the need to shift of the discussion away from 20th century enviro-fundamentalist vs industrialist/agriculturalist to one that is more considered, inclusive and reponsive to 21st century challenges.

Do tweet this and include the hashtag #chegadequeimadas (stop the fires) to keep the campaign alive (60 ooo tweets of this tag and counting!)

related posts

• This is not normal: (Isso não é normal), nor is Bhutan

Beyond the glass doors of the boardroom, ethics and ‘eco’ fit the green consumer well. The rise of ethical consumption has, to a certain extent, raised all boats. For example, the mainstreaming of certification standards has been helped by the push of retailers to use these standards on their own branded goods.

Collaborative consumption has a huge role to play in shifting attitudes to owning more ‘stuff’ and showing up those who talk about sustainable consumption and shifting more units in the same breath.

Corporate efforts so far have mainly dealt with work around reducing waste, reducing resource use in production, raising labour standards, promoting certification standards and adding socioeconomic benefits to products and services. All good but, at its heart sustainable consumption must mean buy/use less stuff.

In the context of big global shifts and the rise of the new middle classes, the big sustainability question is consumption. The world is about to experience more demand for prosperity-generating stuff than it ever has and, unless things change, it will attempt to deliver this with a system which we know isn’t cut out to do the job.

I’m really excited to be speaking at the EABIS 2010 event. My topic: Prosperity and Brazil’s new middle classes. The basic premise is that if we foist a high consumption lifestyle on all the new consumers these markets will very quickly pop.

new middle classes consumption route

I’m looking at  how sustainability, the experience of citizenship, service design, co-creation and the digital world demand new techniques and strategies from companies. These will enable them to build new relationships with these new consumers and redefine what it means to live well.

Collaborative consumption makes up part of solving the puzzle. I have been looking into in more detail thanks to the work done by Rachel Alstrom and Roo Rogers (great site here + TEDxSydney talk here). Boiled down: access is more important than ownership. Rent don’t buy.

Access not ownership

This rethinking of use and how we define are ourselves – not with what we possess but what we have access to and what we experience – will help a lot of pre-crisis relics readjust to new realities. Currently, few companies will feel they are in position to grasp the idea. They are still firefighting as we go through this volatile rebalancing where tried and tested assumptions fail to get any purchase.

Collaborative consumption fits into other ideas that are gaining momentum as we shift from away the hyperconsumption model. For example, building stuff that lasts (and kickstarting export industries) ties into lots of different strands of thinking about how destructive  the ‘pile ‘em high sell ‘em cheap’ ethos has been.

Product cycles have squeezed build quality (and manufacturing wages) to create a system that is at breaking point. This system, also recognised as contributing to imbalances in the global economy, is feigning inability to right itself against a backdrop of a jobs and growth discussion that leaves little room for qualitative debate.

Collaborative means community

Modularity, upcycling and reconditioning all branch off co-consumption as do other ideas around sharing (e.g. jobsharing, land/office sharing) A lot of these concepts come with communities built around them.  These communities help to generate meaning and value around the shared experiences of making and using these products and services.

This all feeds into redefining prosperity and making consumption fit into the world that we are moving into. Forget high income countries, the consumer power of the world’s new middle classes, and how business and government interact with them, will decide what happens to this century.

Selling less, selling better

Companies in this consumer space need to get on with adjusting to this rebalancing environment and work on:

• Getting as tight as possible on lifecycle by squeezing as much water, energy and materials out of the production process.
• Designing products and services that fit the social,economic and environmental lives of their new customers (start talking with new consumers)
• Reconfiguring their approach to making things so that access not ownership is their customer proposition.

Measuring value

This brings us back to the metrics/measurement question of wealth and happiness. A neat little example emerged the other day of why the game is up for GDP when a senior doctor advised that statins be handed out with Big Macs.  We don’t live in such a zero sum world do we?

Collaborative consumption is a central part of this sustainable consumption puzzle. So yes, let’s make coke bottles thinner and use organic cotton, add social benefits to products and build hybrid cars. But anyone who says we don’t need to buy less is going to struggle to build successful long-term relationships with new (and old) consumers.

Check out/add to the #collcons hashtag for great examples of collaborative consumption.

Also see:

Resetting retail (saving our cities)

From thought leadership to mass collaboration

Rebuilding blocks: sustainability, economics, design

Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (for everyone?)

Thanks for reading. Please tweet if you like or share your thoughts in the comments below

Leaders say the funniest things – these days it’s only worth listening if it’s funny.

Before the internet went social and we still lived in an age of push, companies that wanted to engage with big issues through their CR programme would pump out mega treatises on their approach to dealing with their social, economic and environmental issues.

Focused on their business risks and their impacts, these papers, reports, campaigns and eventually microsites (!) were consistent with their way of doing business. For although stakeholders were involved in producing the stuff, end results quickly lost relevance.  The debates and issues evolved as the thought leadership stood still, stacked in piles in a back office or hiding out at a lonely url that no-one knew about.

Thankfully this walled garden approach is no longer consistent with a new operating environment that requires collaboration, openness and new types of engagement with new consumers.

Embedding sustainability + deepening partnerships

As these things have evolved, companies have learnt to deal with the wider issues that effect the sector that are not only material to their business but also have a wider impact. For example for SABMiller, taking on water use is helping them become an effective partner in water stressed regions where they operate.

Deeper partnerships with civil society and the growing strength of industry initiatives such as the FSC, the Equator Principles, the IBLF and the ICMM, to name a few, have helped wage a more united front in response to big issues. But in a constant effort to outdo each other, companies are still hooked on the need to demonstrate leadership. Collaboration too, has to be set within a few walls and have clear benefits.

How mass collaboration  (and crises) changes everything

The financial and environmental crises have shown up weaknesses in the structural inability of companies to help us get sustainable. And now that everyone can all talk feely and cheaply and cut out the marketing, people don’t need to trust companies.

Now that no-one is listening, companies need to move from thought leadership to creating the enabling environments and help people come together to tackle big issues. This is about facing the big challenges with mass collaboration.

This type of facilitation is ably demonstrated by Openideo (in partnership with Sony and WWF don’t you know). Openideo is an online platform for people to come together to work on solutions to big social and environmental challenges, such as:

From behind the walled garden you may be wondering why anyone would contribute their time to this –they aren’t getting paid so the quality will be rubbish etcetcr. Watch the video to see how it works:

Why does it work:

1. v low/no cost to entry. The concept takes design thinking of Ideo and funnels the wisdom of the crowd to find the most effective solution.
2. Thanks to the platform all ideas are shareable, remixable and open meaning there is plenty of scope for refinement and repurposing.
3. People contribute/self-select because they are passionate
4. People are rewarded with kudos and a type of ranking (called a design quotient). This ranking may help them in other things they do.
5. People gather from all parts of the world with a variety of skills and life experiences (rethink who your stakeholders are).
6. It is constantly evolving, changing and adapting… and its fun.

Creating enabling environments

I’ve posted before about mass collaboration (here and here) and remember Clay Shirky being asked in his talk where should a company go to tap into mass collaboration. His response was to sit on the sidelines and be humble as people work together (without you) to create new things.

This is the natural evolution of thought leadership and companies should be happy about this. By curating and ‘taking the friction out’ of helping people collaborate, you can help speed up the search for solutions to big challenges and build new conversational relationships.

So if this suits you, don’t feel you need to build a massive platform – go and find one and help them do more. Sit back and watch it work. If you want to go a step further release some data sets or patents. It might actually help to shift other parts of your organisation to explore ideas of open innovation and co-creation and help you realign the rest of your business to a rebalancing world. It also means that you don’t need to say something funny just to get heard.

Related posts:

Rebuilding blocks: sustainability, economics, design

Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (for everyone?)

RSA: Animate -What motivates us

How to: Futuregazing, sustainability and creative content

There is no contest in a footrace between a well-oiled, just-in-time-schooled car maker, looking to shift as many units as possible in a new market, and a decision-by-committee megacity administration trying to put in place an urban infrastructure fit for the 21st century. Handily, the auto maker also gets to socialise the losses (more gridlocked roads, fuel dependency, air pollution, deterioration of public space etc) and move on.

One of the big challenges I’m exploring at the moment is how do we redefine prosperity for the huge new group of global consumers (for lack of a better definition the new global middle classes) . They now have the means to buy the goods and service they need (great) but live in a public infrastructure constrained environment (bad) with a differentiated experience of citizenship and, more worryingly, are only being offered a high income country version of consumption (v bad).

If you consider the size and scale of demands from the new middle classes (for instance have a look at this GS note on BRIC consumer trends) I’m fairly certain these markets will disintegrate pretty rapidly. So the risk is there for the companies, the question is whether they care about getting back to business as usual or want to establish deeper long-term relationships with lots of new consumers.

The first path is pretty easy but a dead end. Hopefully the rebuilding blocks (in the slides above) point to a simple route to a smarter road ahead.

I’m speaking in September at the Eabis Annual Colloquium in St Petersburg whose theme for this year is Corporate Responsibility and Emerging markets. My topic is Prosperity and Brazil’s New Middle Classes which goes into these themes of service design, co-creation and sustainability in more detail. I’ll post more about that soon

For a bit more on socialising the losses and how we fail to account for environmental goods and services, this video of Pavan Sukhdev, Head of UNEP’s Green Economy Initiative is very good

My stuff about global economic shifts and the impact of a new global middle class on EVERYTHING  has been helped a great deal by this post from Umair Haque which introduced me to thinking from The Power of Pull (great downloads at link) and The Shift Index from the Deloitte Centre for Edge from John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Lang Davison and Richard Florida’s The Great Reset I’ve also been inspired by listening Paul Seabright, author of The Company of Strangers, on how we are collaborative not competitive by design, The Future of Competition and platforms such as openideo.

The above slides (PDF here) attempt to explain how some big trends should be the foundations for rethinking how to build a business fit for a rebalancing world. They are part of a full deck that has got plenty of examples and more depth about how to map these blocks onto your organisation’s footprint.

Get in touch or DM me if you want to see the whole deck or to talk some more about these ideas.

Have you seen the app which takes your photo and makes it look like you’re really fat? Yes. And the game where you land all the planes on the runway? Yes, that too. Hey, how about this thing with the funny red monster that repeats everything you say? Please leave me. Please just leave me here to die. (C Brooker)

The above clip from Futurama and the article by Charlie Brooker in today’s Guardian, add a dimension to the e-waste/toxic mineral/assembly line debate which I think points to a smarter future for the consumer electronics industry. If you add together conflict minerals, e-waste, toxic chemicals used in production, and the now well-documented unrest among Chinese assembly line workers, the satisfaction footprint of our gadgets is miniscule.

Conflict minerals break cover

There has been plenty of noise recently about conflict minerals,not least coming out of the financial regulation bill recently put through the US congress. Brought to light by the Enough Project, whose recent spoof of an Apple commercial highlighted the use of conflict minerals in our much cherished gadgets, the bill’s provision was a welcome recognition of the issue.

Steve Job’s even put himself out there, as has now become customary, exchanging emails with a concerned  customer about the issue. Here is what was said (via wired):

Hi Steve,

I’d planned to buy a new iPhone tomorrow – my first upgrade since buying the very first version on the first day of its release – but I’m hesitant without knowing Apple’s position on sourcing the minerals in its products.

Are you currently making any effort to source conflict-free minerals? In particular, I’m concerned that Apple is getting tantalum, tungsten, tin, and gold from Eastern Congo through its suppliers.

Looking forward to your response,
Derick

Jobs’ reply:

Yes. We require all of our suppliers to certify in writing that they use conflict few materials. But honestly there is no way for them to be sure. Until someone invents a way to chemically trace minerals from the source mine, it’s a very difficult problem.

Sent from my iPhone

A bit of honesty (good) but detail-lite (customary/fail). Other manufacturers (sadly not CEOs) have also got their acts together in terms of having a response to the question as can be seen here.

Drowning under Ataris

Added to conflict minerals is e-waste. A recent UN report stated that e-waste is growing by 40m tonnes a year. Phones generally end up being recycled in the developing world and ‘remined’ for their precious minerals in horrid conditions.

Some manufacturers are doing better than others at eliminating BFRs, pthalatates and PVC plastics out of their products  - if you add in conflict minerals and dodgy recycling practices and you can see the scale of the headache.

Pre-crisis relic

These are huge international issues, involving diffuse supply chains, unstable governments, antiquated legislation and a seemingly insatiable desire for gizmos . The industry is a classic pre-crisis relic. It is wholly unsustainable, in overreach and heading for a fall. There are 2 strands to a solution.

One path is a coordinated international response where stakeholders can sort out some commitments and organisations such as Gesi can get the industry to pool its resources,  and try and coordinate an serious international shift in policies etc.

While we wait for that to paper over the cracks, a big chance lies in trying to get everyone to take a break from the satisfaction-negative hype machine.

Post-sweat shop scandal era

We have moved into a post-sweat shop scandal era. Corporate reputation damage alone is not enough of a disincentive. These days, a Sunday supplement feature can be drowned out by millions of media channels churning press release friendly stories. Futurama and Charlie Brooker are onto something far more powerful which can work in tandem with an achingly slow legislative approach.  I’ve spoken about measuring happiness before and how at a national level it doesn’t quite stack up.

I do think, however, that a product happiness footprint for the consumer electronics industry is workable. If you took all the people involved in the lifecycle of a product and gave it a (human) satisfaction rating, you may end up with consumers moving away from making purchases burdened with misery as they wont want to add to their own increasing dissatisfaction with a range of (unsustainable) facts of modern life. This might help to slow down the wholly unsustainable consumer electronic product cycle  and help the industry realign towards a smarter future that involves:

• less, better products
• more focus on ugradability/upcycling / modularity (e.g. replaceable battery please!)
• stronger commitments to each step of the lifecycle
• more honesty and input into social utility of products (realignment of advertising, support for more Ushahidi-type initiatives)
• less dependence on Asian export-led economic growth model which is about to pop.

Anyone think this is workable? Or, are we destined to to be submerged by Ataris and Gameboys? I’d be really keen to hear anyone’s thoughts on this.

Related posts -

1. Clay Shirky: Creativity and generosity in a connect age (for everyone?)
2. This is not normal, nor is Bhutan
3. Back to the Future: Samsung environmental competitiveness and revenue growth