Bruce Mau is a great designer, one of the designers that guided my design education during university. My teacher Hugo Werver has always been his fan, and introduced me to Bruce’s work. After that I have read some of his books, and got lucky to buy Massive Change without having a clue of what he would talk about. Now, in this post he talks about hos we gonna be able to change the world. I do agree with him 100%, that we gotta do things in a positive way. We gotta offer more advantages other than just a less polluting car. The less polluting car gotta be fast, confortable, sexy, high tech, it gotta have DVD screens in it, be fast to recharge, it gotta bring that illusion of “dick enhancement” that a lot of guys look in a car, and above all, it can’t be more expensive than similiar model that runs with gas.
The world lives in capitalism, and the rule #1 that dictates what all the big and small business will are doing and will do is money. If we can offer a cleaner solution for the same cost, or less, it will work, no matter what.
If an 18 year old guy goes with his father goes to a Car dealer to buy a brando new car for him, and they have ten thousand dollars to buy a car. The salesman offers a model for 9.999,00 that runs on gas, and the same model, with every accessories that runs with eletric energy for the same price, the chances of that guy to choose the eletric car are huge. But if you can buy 2 smokey gas powered cars with the price of one 60 km/h eletric car, I’m sorry, but I will get the cheaper car, and screw the air we are breathing.
This same thing happens with aluminum cans here in Brazil. The numbers for aluminum cans recycled here are 96,5% of all the cans are recicled. Thats pretty amazing, is’t it? But the reason why people are recycling so many cans is not that they are ecologically responsible, or just overly good people. I don’t bite that shit. So many cans are recycled here, because the energy cost of recycling a can is 5% of the energy cost of producing the same can using raw materials extracted from our planet. It’’s simple as that. Thats why aluminum can recycling is hot around the world. Brazil is the #1, Japan #2, and teh list goes on. Because the industry spends 95% less energy to produce cans, the planet wins in 2 things. 95% less greenhouse effect gases emissions from those industries and less extraction of raw material to make more cans.
So, I do think we gotta make our green stuff sexier, and more efficient, but the most important thing we gotta keep in mind is to make green things cheaper than the dirty things. This way, they will win.
numbers extracted from guiadasiderurgia.com.br
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[...] other front to take action, is to make our existing recycling processes cheaper. Making recycled paper cheaper and as good as non-recycled paper, will cause a lot of people start [...]