My tech team and I were having a discussion the other day about printing. Specifically, we were trying to figure out ways to encourage people to print less, enforce accountability when they choose to print, and make the process as easy as possible for both us and the end user. We know that we are a long ways from becoming a paperless school, but we believe we can become a less paper school.

Whether it is incompatible print drivers, fonts that don’t print correctly, mechanical failures and jams, or the constant feeding of paper, ink, and toner, printers are the bane of every IT department’s existence. All this trouble for a pieces of cellulose that often end up being thrown away or recycled within a few minutes, days, or weeks of being used. In my organization alone, about 1 million sheets of paper go through our copy machines every year; a few hundred thousand more through our printers. According to GreenPDF.com, each ream (500 sheets) of paper is equal to about 18.5 lbs. of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere through the harvesting of the tree and the manufacturing process. 1,000,000 pages = 2000 reams of paper, or 37,000 pounds of CO2.

There are abundant ways for IT departments to encourage less paper use:

1. force duplex (two-sided) printing. One sheet is better than two.
2. provide economic disincentives for printing by making users pay for each page they print.
3. provide economic incentives for print savings, perhaps by using cost savings for professional development programs for faculty and staff, or a beer bust. (Which would YOU choose?)
4. provide printer release stations so that people have to walk to the printer and release the print job, thereby cutting back on print hobs that are never picked up.
5. provide ubiquitous access to non-printing alternatives, such as electronic document exchange, markup, collaboration tools and e-readers.
6. guilt. Yeah, there may already be enough of this in the world, but sometimes we should feel a sense of guilt for what we’re doing to the planet.

But at the end of the day the overuse of paper is not an IT problem, it’s a human factors problem.

People are addicted to paper. That means that anything that is going to supplant paper has a long row to hoe, and it darn well better give us a bigger and better fix than paper.  Criminalizing the use of  paper won’t work (when paper is outlawed, only outlaws will have paper). Perhaps we need a 12-step program, or a paper-patch.

Sarcasm aside, if schools want to get serious about reducing the use of paper, the place to start is not with technology, but with people. Just as our school has decided not to filter internet content, perhaps we should restrict printing in any way, shape or form. Instead, we could engage our colleagues and students in a discussion of printing, and help all of us make mindful decisions about the use of paper and other printer resources.

Mindful printing. What might that look like?

Well, it might entail thinking about the soil, the rain, and the sunlight that grows the tree that provides the pulp. Thinking about the lumber workers who harvest the tree, the truckers who bring it to the mill, the mill workers, chemists, and other laborers who manufacture, transport, and stock the warehouse.s Thinking about the electricity to power the printer, the factory and the workers that made the printer and the toner. All these people. All this electricity. All these chemicals and raw materials. It’s a lot to think about. And in that brief moment when you think before you print, perhaps you’ll decide that you need fewer copies, or that you can print two-sided, or that a PDF or Google Doc is just as good as paper.

My spouse (and personal shopper) was recently looking through my closet, assessing my wardrobe for the coming school year. I love her for this, for if I trusted my own sartorial sense I would surely look the slob. So each year we trek off to the mall, an almost viscerally painful experience for me, and we purchase new clothes for the year, to be supplemented later by a couple of holiday additions. I’m free to purchase clothing on my own that can’t be readily seen, such as underwear and socks, both of which I consider to come in two colors: white and not-white.

As you might guess, I don’t pay much attention to fashion, but I have listened in on a enough lunch-time conversations among faculty and staff to know that there is a certain shared angst about what to wear to school each day, the rising costs and decreasing quality of what we purchase, tips for where to find good deals, and even offers of clothing loans and swaps. My gaze then falls upon our school’s maintenance staff, each wearing an olive colored shirt with jeans to ask my self “what-if?”

Our school has a long tradition of a uniform for students—a tradition not likely to fall by the wayside. While some students may try to push the boundaries of the uniform form time-to-time, I think deep down they like the notion of having less choice at the start of the school day. Public schools are adopting uniforms as a way of instilling pride among students, while lessening the economic burden on cash-strapped parents to keep up with the latest fads in clothing, thereby equalizing the school fashion runway for all students.

So why not extend these benefits to faculty and staff? Think of the gains:

• Less time figuring out what to wear in the morning, resulting in less stress.
• Group purchasing power can bring down the cost of school clothing; certainly an economic boon in “these tough economic times.”
• Uniforms could be sourced from organic, fair trade sources helping us fulfill our school’s mission statement regarding sustainability and justice.
• Students would spend less time talking about faculty and staff clothing, and more time on, well, Facebook where they can talk about what they’re going to wear outside of school. (This one needs some work, granted.)

Maybe such a dream is a “guy” thing, but I think not. I think  it’s a “green” thing. Better for the pocket-book, better for the environment. Fashion can still flourish among the uniformed through accessories (or in my case underwear and socks.) I’m already designing the Tech Department’s shirt in my head. I wonder if I could add a Dilbert embroidery to denim?

Hey, there’s a serious idea in here!

In honor of National Bike to Work Week, and as someone who has biked to work for the last several years myself, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on how biking has made me a better driver. Yes, I still drive my car from time to time, but much less so and with much greater care when I do. I attribute my better driving habits to what I have learned from biking.

1. Context is key. I am constantly thinking about where the hazards are mostly likely to be and alter my behavior accordingly.

For example, I ride down a tow-lane, one way street every morning. Is it safer for me to be in the right lane or the left lane? I choose the left lane for two reasons: (a) in the early morning it is mostly drivers who are getting into and out of their cars, and the driver’s door is on the curb side if I am in the left lane, and (b) with right turn on stop allowed at stop lights I am less likely to be cut-off by a driver if I am in the left lane while stopped at a traffic signal.

My ride also takes me past a couple of nursing homes frequented by elderly drivers. I exercise more caution there, and do the same when I pass a local high school frequented by less experienced, younger drivers.

2. Non-verbal communication keeps you safe. Eye contact with others around you on the road can speak volumes for your safety. Clear signals (hand signals, in my case), let people know my intent.

3. Cell phones are evil (when used by drivers or riders). My closest calls regarding accidents have all involved drivers with cell phones and missed stop signs, traffic signals, or simply unawareness of my presence on the road. Cyclists who try to talk on a cell phone while riding their bike are even worse.

4. Courtesy begets courtesy. There are a lot of cyclists who are real jerks when it comes to sharing the road with cars. And there are a lot of drivers who are real jerks when it comes to sharing the road with bicycles. But I have found that a friendly hand wave and even chatting with drivers at stop signs and signals is not only fun to do, but I think often results in creating a more positive environment for both drivers and riders.

5. It takes a lot of energy to start riding up a hill from a dead stop. If I am expending a lot of energy on a bike, think of what your car has to do with hundreds of times more weight! Rabbit starts in a care waste energy. Drive like you’re on a bike and save fuel.

6. Similarly, I really notice the difference when my bike tires are under-inflated, even by a few pounds. That’s prompted me to be more vigilant with my car tires. The U.S. Government says that properly inflated tires can increase fuel efficiency by as much as 3.3%.

7. While riding, I get to enjoy things such as the feel of the road, smells, the feel of the air against my skin, things that as a driver I am insulated against by shock absorbers, AC, and windows. I’ve learned as a driver to appreciate the days of my youth when my dad would take us for a drive on a warm summer night, no air conditioning of course, and we’d feel the coolness and moistness of the air as we passed lakes and streams, the difference aromas of regions of the country near farms or in forests. I drive with my windows down a lot more now.

8. Routine can lead to disaster. We’ve all had moments where we’ve “zoned out” and wondered where the last few minutes went. Perhaps we’re taking our morning shower and can’t remember if we washed our hair or not. Or we’ve been driving and have gone past our exit – the same one we’ve taken for years. God help you if you do this on a bike, while a motorist does the same thing while driving. When this happens to me it’s time for me to vary my route or do something new so that there’s less chance of my mental autopilot kicking in, resulting in an accident.

My worst cycling crash was due to my own inattention. It happened within a few blocks of home, and involved nothing more than a half-inch lip to a driveway from the street, too soft of a grip on the handlebars, and a mind that wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Scrapes, bruises, cracked ribs, and a deeply wounded ego resulted.

I hope you ride a bike to work this week and, if possible, more often than that. If you’re like me you may find that you’ll end up a better driver, too.

In my last post, I wrote about greening a school’s operations, curriculum, and culture. A large part of greening a school is “voting with your money.” That is, you make decisions about what the school purchases with an eye towards purchasing the most environmentally sustainable products. This will likely mean changing habits, introducing people to different products, and in some cases, paying more. (But as more and more people make these choices, costs will decrease.)

Where to start? The following list, containing information gleaned from dozens of web sites and my school’s own green business audit, might provide a starting point. It is written in the form of a policy statement that may be easily adopted for your own school.

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[School Name] Sustainable Goods and Services Purchasing Policy

Wherever practicable, [our school] will give preference to environmentally superior products and services, where quality, function, and cost are equal or superior.

All employees are encouraged to select products that comply with this procedure, unless the cost/benefit trade-off cannot be justified and documented on the purchase requisition.

Wherever practicable, [our school] will purchase materials that:

• minimize packaging,
• favor durable versus single use or disposable items,
• are recyclable or, if not recyclable, safely disposable,
• are made from raw materials that have been obtained in an environmentally sound, sustainable manner,
• are manufactured in an environmentally sound manner, and in factories which provide humane, fair, and sustainable working conditions,
• cause minimal or no environmental damage during normal use, maintenance, or disposal and
• meet the standards of the EPA’s Environmentally Preferable Purchasing (EPP) database or other appropriate green purchasing guidelines.

Wherever practicable, [our school] will purchase services:

• from organizations with a record of environmental sustainability,
• who use virtual consulting, training, and installation opportunities to minimize travel,
• who pay their employees a living wage and which provide humane, fair, and sustainable working conditions,
• and who minimize the use of paper in favor of electronic documents.

We will communicate this policy with our vendors and work with them to meet its criteria.

These policies will be reviewed annually by the school’s [insert committee or person responsible here] in consultation with the [whoever else you wish to name].

Janitorial and Gardening Supplies
Wherever practicable, we will

• use Green Seal certified janitorial supplies,
• use compost and natural, safe soil amendments in lieu of chemical fertilizers, and
• use an integrated pest management system will be used which favors the least toxic means of controlling pests.

Office Furniture and Carpeting
Wherever practicable, we will favor

• furniture and carpeting composed of recycled materials with low emissions of formaldehyde or VOCs,
• and which is designed to make recycling easier when it is no longer in use.

Painting and Building Repairs
Wherever practicable, we will

• use low voc paints, varnishes, and driveway coatings,use recycled paints, varnishes, and building materials,
• and properly re-use or recycle waste construction materials.

Vehicles and Landscaping Equipment
Wherever practicable, we will

• use alternative fuel, hybrid, or electric vehicles, and use alternative fuel, electric, or human powered landscaping equipment.

Copiers, Printers, Fax and Multifunctional, and Other Office Equipment
Wherever practicable, we will purchase office equipment that

• is Energy Star certified,
• has a two-side copying/printing function, with easily refilled or recycle printing cartridges,
• is easy to recycle or donate, and
• incorporates recycled parts and/or materials.

Servers, Computers, Monitors, Projection Devices, Televisions
Wherever practicable, we will purchase computer equipment that

• is Energy Star certified,
• can be upgraded for a longer useful life,
• use LCD rather than cathode-ray tube displays, and
• are designed to facilitate recycling and re-use of component parts.

Refrigerators, Freezers and other Large Appliances
Wherever practicable, we will purchase appliances that

• are Energy Star certified, and
• use non-CFC materials and refrigerants.

Light Bulbs and Lighting Equipment
Wherever practicable, we will

• replace incandescent lights with low-mercury, long-life fluorescent, LED, or other low energy alternatives,
• recycle bulbs and lamps or, if not recyclable, properly dispose of them,
• use lighting fixtures designed to facilitate dismantling and recycling,
• promote the use of natural lighting and light rooms to the optimal brightness for work and energy savings,
• utilize brightness sensors, human motion sensors, timer functions, and light adjustment functions, and
• appropriately combine localized and wide area lighting.

Disposable paper (facial or toilet tissue, paper towels, coffee filters)
Wherever practicable, we will purchase disposable paper products that

• contain a maximum blend of recycled paper,
• have low brightness or whiteness (no chlorine bleach),
• are single ply.

Paper for Office Machines
Wherever practicable, we will purchase office paper products that

• contain a maximum blend of recycled paper,
• have low brightness or whiteness (no chlorine bleach), and
• are easily recyclable (no coated papers).

Office Supplies (note pads, envelopes, labels, file folders, and other paper; transparencies; tape; pencils of all types; pens; markers; erasers; and correctional tools)
Wherever practicable, we will purchase office products that

• use a large percentage of recycled materials,
• use water-soluble adhesives, and
• contain no or low levels of VOCs.

Food, Snacks, and Dining
Wherever practicable, we will purchase food that

• is locally produced and organically grown,
• adheres to fair trade policies,
• minimizes packaging, and
• comes in recyclable/returnable containers.

Clothing and Uniforms
Wherever practicable, we will purchase garments that

• are made with organically grown natural materials and/or recycled materials,
• are made to be washed rather than dry cleaned, and
• resist staining, shrinking, fading, and other wear and tear.

Athletic Equipment and Supplies
Wherever practicable, we will purchase athletic equipment and supplies that

• are designed for long life,
• use non-toxic materials, and
• use recycled materials.

Science Classroom Equipment and Supplies
Wherever practicable, we will purchase science equipment and supplies that

• are designed for long life, and use recycled materials,
• are non-toxic and present no hazards for disposal or recycling.

Books
Wherever practicable, we will purchase books that

• are distributable in electronic format or, if printed
• are designed for long life, and
• use paper with at least 30% post-consumer recycled content.

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Want to learn more about how going green can save you green? Listen to this NAIS podcast.

Several years ago, NAIS president Patrick Bassett described a wonderful “multidimensional definition of school sustainability,” including finances, curriculum, demographics, global networking, and the environment. This multidimensional definition of sustainability is an important and helpful model for thinking holistically about school’s sustainability, and I recommend it as a construct for such discussions.

Yet for many people the meaning of the term “sustainability” is still restricted to environmental sustainability in general, and global climate change in particular.

For years many schools have silently practiced aspects of environmental sustainability in the form of conservation’s three-r’s (reduce, re-use, recycle) and through environmental and outdoor education programs. But to many of us it is clear that we must do more than “pick the low hanging fruit” of energy and materials conservation, or mark Earth Day each April with special programs. Rather, we must make significant changes in how we operate our schools and teach our children if we are to truly reduce our environmental footprint and to help students adopt behaviors and attitudes consistent with a sustainable future.

Fortunately, there are many resources available to assist schools in reaching these goals, and many schools have or are creating programs that can be models for the rest of us to learn from and emulate. One such organization is the Green School Alliance, whose logo is depicted here, and I am proud to say that my school is a charter member.

Another useful construct for thinking about your school is to consider three aspects to green initiatives: greening your school’s operations, its curriculum, and its culture.

Greening School Operations

The problems associated with global climate change may seem overwhelming, and the contributions of each of our schools to solving them insignificant. It is imperative to guard against any feelings of helplessness that may occur as you learn more about these issues. (Righteous anger is justified, if it leads to righteous action.) It is especially critical to help students look to the future with a realistic sense of optimism. This is why it is useful to have programs that provide a means for students to take action, and I think that school operations represent the easiest place for this to first occur. Getting students involved in conducting audits of your waste and recycling stream, for example, can not only provide valuable information to the school but can be the springboard for wonderful curricular connections.

A more formal approach to addressing school operations exists in the form of “green business” certification programs, often sponsored by your local county or municipal government, to assist local businesses in assessing and improving their current environmental practices. For example, Castilleja School in Palo Alto, CA is turned to its Santa Clara County government for such a program. Not only was the program of no cost to to them, but it provided them with thousands of dollars worth of consulting assistance in such areas as solid waste reduction, recycling, composting, energy efficiency, toxic chemicals abatement, water use, landscaping, and food service. The goverment also provided to them, again at no cost, replacements for more efficient water and bathroom fixtures.

Greening the Curriculum

Many schools have faculty who are deeply committed environmentalists, and as such bring ideas about sustainability into their classroom in both informal and formal ways:

• Distributing handouts, collecting homework, and correcting student work electronically.
• Providing recharging stations for batteries used in student calculators and computers.
• Modeling conservation by turning off lights when leaving a room, printing on two sides of the page, re-using the blank back sides of printouts for scratch paper, and so on.
• Facilitating age-appropriate discussions of global climate change in their classrooms or advisories.
• Using opportunities to connect sustainability to their subject area, such as measuring and graphing the school’s power and water consumption, writing persuasive essays on environmental topics, reading the great works of fiction, poetry or essays with environmental themes, or expressing a love of the earth through photography, movie making, sculpture, painting and drawing, dance, and music.
• Engaging students in discussions about scarcity (something most children in the U.S. have little first hand experience with), social and environmental justice, and their own economic choices.
• Performing community service projects such as tree planting, coastal and waterways cleanup, creating and tending a school vegetable garden, or helping senior citizens replace incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs.

Greening the School Culture

Creating a culture of sustainability is challenging, particularly if it has not been core to the school’s mission or habits. Indeed, environmental sustainability can appear to be at odds with other school values:

• Your Development office prides itself in the high quality of its print materials used to communicate with parents and donors. Moving to electronic means of communication may seem less personal, and printing on recycled paper using soy-based inks may be more costly.
• Your parent organization is responsible for a number of school events. Getting them to use ceramic plates and cups and cloth napkins instead of disposable paper products may mean more work for the volunteers.
• Your board of trustees may perceive purchasing carbon offset certificates for your utility use and travel as an unnecessary expense rather than as an investment in a clean future.
• Your school lunch program runs on a tight budget. Purchasing locally grown, organic food may be more costly, and using more seasonal fruits and vegetables may require changes in their menus and food preparation practices.
• Your student and athletic uniforms are a big part of your heritage and identity. Switching to fabrics that are organically grown may be difficult, and assuring that the workers in manufacturing plants where the uniforms are created are properly compensated and work in safe conditions may be difficult to validate.

Changes in school culture seldom occur quickly, and require buy-in from the community and persistence on the part of school leaders. Formalizing your goals for sustainability in documents such as the school’s long-range plan, regional or national accreditation goals, and the school mission statement are a means to demonstrate commitment and help to keep environmental sustainability in your community’s eye. Creating connections with other schools and universities, environmental groups, business organizations, media outlets, and local government can also provide you with resources to bolster your efforts to raise awareness, celebrate and publicize your successes, and learn about programs that can assist your efforts.

First Steps

Given the complexities involved in all of these issues it may be difficult to decide where to start. But this very complexity means that there is no “right” place to begin. Rather than getting mired in “analysis-paralysis,” simply start doing. Whether it’s water conservation, reducing landfill-bound waste, the use of environmentally friendly cleaners, pesticides, and herbicides, planting trees and native plants, purchasing carbon credits, creating “green teams” of faculty, staff, and students, or installing solar panels does not matter. These are all great projects and contribute to a sustainable future for your school and our planet. And with action comes hope, and with hope comes a new habit of mind that, ultimately, is the only way that we can save ourselves, and our planet.

If you teach in Missoula, Montanta, you can’t show The Story of Stuff (below) in your classroom. As reported in the Missoulian, a local Biology teacher has been banned from showing the video because it violates the school’s policy about controversial issues and academic freedom. Apparently, the Board believes the video to be one-sided.

Personally I think this is a marvelous little film, and I am outraged (but not surprised, based on what I know of Montana politics) that this has happened. But the important thing is that people engage in the dialog about this. Express your voice by writing to the Missoula board of education and/or the local paper:

Folklore suggest that the Chinese symbol for “crisis” is combined of two characters, “danger” and “opportunity.” While this is untrue, it’s still a great concept.

Recently, a colleague sent me a wonderful column by Gus Speth, dean of the School of Forrestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. The entire article is worth reading. But I want to focus on one particular point he makes:

“Perhaps the financial crisis will teach us to live more simply, with less consumption. Materialism, psychologists report, is toxic to happiness, and our hyper-consumption is one of the main drivers of environmental decline. Being less focused on getting and spending (initially, in part, because there is less to spend) can help us rediscover that the truly important things in life are not at the mall nor, indeed, for sale anywhere.”

This sentiment is close to my own heart, but I will admit to a high amount of personal discontinuity between my beliefs and my job as a technology director in an elite college prep school.

Technology is arguably one of the most materialistic, consumerism-driven (not necessarily, consumer-driven) enterprises on the planet. Just today I was sorting through piles of perfectly functional equipment dropped off at our school for an electronics recycling fund raising drive. And while I am delighted that the equipment will be responsibly recycled, and that a worthy charitable organization will receive the proceeds from the drive, I am also appalled by the waste.

I suffer from my own “techno-lust” and its related waste, having purchased an iPhone this past year well before the contract on my perfectly good LG phone had expired or the phone shown and visible wear and tear.

For years my school has had an “evergreen” policy for “refreshing” computers before they got too “old.” And why did they get too old? Not usually because they wore out. Rather, they got slow. And why did they get slow? Because software companies created new versions of products that consumed more CPU cycles, laden with new features and bug fixes that also occupied more RAM and hard disk space. But optimizing the code to make it smaller and perform more efficiently mattered little to them because hardware was getting faster. And so this unholy alliance between software and hardware companies led to phenomenal growth in each sector. And as educational technologists we bought right into it, always complaining about how our schools did not have enough money to keep up, how our computers were antiquated, our networks slow, and our file storage capacity meager. And, by comparison to business and industry, we were right.

Time out! King’s X. Or as Quick Draw McGraw used to say to Baba Louie: “Ho-o-o-old on there!”

What’s so “green” about an “evergreen” policy? It’s not particularly good for the environment, and it’s expensive. Color me red with embarrassment to be so slow on the uptake about this. Or covered with red ink. Take your pick.

“But wait!” says the angel (or devil) sitting on my shoulder, “what we’ve been doing is actually showing how schools could and should operate in the 21st century, this digital age that we live in. It’s not conspicuous, mindless consumption, it’s leadership. It’s innovation. It’s what these kids need, and what society demands.”

Perhaps so. Our western minds aren’t very good at holding something as completely true and completely false at the same time. (I wonder what the Chinese character is for that idea?)

We do consume too much. As individuals, as families, as institutions. And the technology adoption cycle is crazy. And technology holds the key to solving many of the world’s crises, from increasing communication between people, to better managing our scare resources, to finding cures for diseases.

“But, but you can’t have it both ways!” yells my devil/angel provocateur.

Yes you can, and yes we must. We must consume more, but mindfully. We must waste more, but mindfully. We must use more power, but mindfully. And we must also consume less, waste less, and use less – mindfully.

Our economic recession has created a great deal of anxiety among millions of people. And each day I thank my lucky stars that I am employed, have reasonable house payments, and despite a frightening hit to my retirement funds I am relatively okay. And so it is perhaps easier for me than others to try to treat the recession as an opportunity rather than as a crisis. It is both, and by simultaneously holding that dualism and that tension within ourselves perhaps each of us can deal with it more effectively.

The Obama administration is encouraging the congress to invest in “shovel ready” infrastructure projects as a means to spur economic recovery and put people to work.

For many environmentalists, the idea of infrastructure makes them nervous when it means more roads, bridges, and airports. When infrastructure means high speed rail or other mass transit, environmentally friendly investment, environmentalists often sing a different tune.

Infrastructure, for most people, is not a very sexy subject to think about or to invest in. It’s something where the expression “out of sight, out of mind” is spot on! And unless you’re a mole, nothing is more out of sight that things underground.

This is why I found the video below, referenced in an email from our local water company and produced by Penn State’s Public Broadcasting group to be both interesting and timely.

What does “clean” smell like to you?

Many people have strong associations between cleanliness and certain aromas: PineSol (Powerful Scent of Clean™), Clorox bleach (Cleaner Homes Start with Clorox), or Glade Air Fresheners (for the perfect expression of every mood or occasion). Personal cleanliness often equates with smells like soap: Dial (now with Yogurt?) or Dove. Are you Zestfully clean? Or perhaps you smell like an Irish Spring.

We like our clothes to come out of the dryer smelling “fresh,” and add scented dryer sheets to help the process. I guess it helps to cancel out the fragrances used in the laundry detergent that we wash the clothes in. I was bathed in the fragrance of dryer sheets for about 30 seconds the other night as I rode my bike home from work and it seemed that everyone for a couple of blocks was venting their clothes dryer directly into my nostrils. I think I’ll start wearing an oxygen tank.

As my mother (age 93, bless her) grows older, her tolerance for fragrances lessens. I think I inherited those genes, as I find myself being olfactorily offended with greater frequency. When I enter a room in our home or at school that has been recently cleaned, my first hint that this has been done comes via my honker. And increasingly I find it to be an unpleasant experience.

It seems to me that equating the smell of “clean” with anything remotely associated with the fragrances added to cleaning products is disingenuous. A clean room should have the absence of artificial smells. And forget about products that claim to mimic the smell of the “fresh outdoors,” such as Bounce fabric sheets. If I want my clothes to smell like the fresh outdoors, then perhaps I should line dry them in the fresh outdoors. Except that my fresh outdoors is right next to a heavily traveled street that smells more like car exhaust. Maybe I should invent a dryer sheet that smells like diesel fumes for those people living in rural areas who want to smell like the fresh air of the city.

I’m hoping that web 4.0 will sites where you get a whiff of an aroma along with 3D holographic video and tactile feedback. Imagine the possibilities for services such as Facebook (Dude! Don’t breathe on me!), Moodle (I think I could smell alcohol on the teacher’s breath today), Google (search by scent), OpenTable (smell what’s cooking tonight), Travelocity (inhale the cool salt air), Web MD (what does gangrene smells like?), YouTube (fart gross out)… You smell the picture.

But I digress.

The point I set out to make is that clean, for me, has no smell, aside from that of the natural smell of the thing itself. And when we begin to equate artificial fragrances with “clean,” I smell a rat. (Not that I’ve personally smelled one lately.) I suspect our planet will smell a lot worse before it gets better. But when it is better, I trust that it will smell, you know, “clean.”

I only caught a portion of a report on NPR last week so I am afraid I can’t properly credit the speaker who first mentioned the idea of less consumption leading to more local trash. But it’s such an interesting concept I had to write about it.

Most of us don’t think about what happens to the packaging our stuff comes in. Many of us just throw it away or recycle it. When it’s recycled, cardboard and other waste paper often ends up being processed and bailed at the recycling facility for export to countries that, oddly enough, can’t get enough of this stuff. Places like China and Japan, where they make lots of stuff but don’t have a lot of trees to make into paper and cardboard to put the stuff in.

So China makes stuff, sends it to us in boxes, we buy the stuff, recycle the boxes, that go back to China, to make packaging for more stuff, and the cycle goes on and on.

But apparently, we’re not buying enough new stuff from them and the waste paper we’re sending to the Far East is piling up in their shipping ports and the bottom has fallen out of the recycled paper business. So China et al. may not want our waste paper products any more, or at least not in the quantities we’ve been sending it them in the past.

Meanwhile, all of the stuff from China and company that was already in the pipeline to the U.S. will eventually be sold and the paper and cardboard sent off to recycling centers without a market to sell it to. So where will it go? You guessed it, into landfills, perhaps even the one in your city or neighborhood. It could be worse, at least this paper and cardboard is biodegradable. But it takes up a lot of room in landfills, room that we’re rapidly running out.

So then, is the lesson to buy more to keep the cycle of consumption and waste recycling going? I think not. The lesson is to consider the entire life cycle of what we purchase, including the stuff it comes in. For example, less packaging, less to throw away or recycle. No packaging? Well, good luck unless you’re buying used in which case someone else has already dealt with the packaging.

Here’s an interesting video in Chinese with English subtitles about the problem of over packaging as seen from the Chinese perspective.