Category: Uncategorized

[Post author: Scott Butner]

Had an interesting experience in the phenomena known as viral media the other day, which I think might have some relevance to the world of P2.

I had taken a series of photos of a rare eastern Washington lightning storm — we don’t get them very often — which I’d posted to my Flickr site. It was sort of a dramatic shot, and not too surprisingly it soon became one of my most visited photos — racking up about 700 views in the first week.

Then, one day last week, someone posted it to the social recommendation site, Digg.com.

In the next 5 hours, it was downloaded 18,000 times. In the next 3 days, it was downloaded nearly 39,000 times — 3 times as often as ALL of my 2,500 other photos combined.

We live in an age where attention spans are short, but once you capture the (internet) public’s attention, you can get a huge amount of focus almost immediately. Problem is, making this happen is almost like lightning — hard to control, hard to predict.

Figuring out how to get the P2 message out on the viral media — places like YouTube, Flickr, and Digg — ought to be the focus of some real attention. Perhaps a workshop session at the next NPPR meeting?

[Post author: Scott Butner]

this is a mixing station at one of the factories we visited here in Busan — this is where polyurethane is mixed with solvent and dyes to the customer’s specifications, then mixed before being sent to the knife coater.

The factory recently installed fume hoods over each mixing station, to reduce vapor concentrations (the solvent mix is a blend of toluene, MEK and DMF — DMF is relatively non volatile (bp around 153 C) but the other two are of course fairly volatile.

Some of the material is sprayed onto the floor and fume hood walls, as it wicks up the impeller shaft and is then scattered about. This creates a clean-up problem as well as some loss of working material.

Perhaps a bigger concern is that the facility emits about 30 tons/mo of solvent vapors which is not recovered. The b.p. range and water miscibility of DMF make this a problematic recovery, but I’d be interested in hearing if anyone’s aware of case studies…..

SB

[Post author: Scott Butner]

Busan skyline, originally uploaded by Scott Butner.

Well, the NPPR team (Ken Grimm, Pollution Prevention Resource Center; Tony Cooper, WA Department of Ecology; Thomas Vinson, Southwest Zero Waste Network; and myself) spent a day acclimatizing to Busan, South Korea. We’ll be here all week conducting P2 assessments and training.

Busan is Korea’s 2nd largest city, and while it’s architecture is often uninspired, the setting of the city is beautiful — nestled amongst steep hills that surround a bustling harbor, it is somewhat reminiscent of San Francisco.

Evidence of growth is everywhere. As you can see.

Tomorrow, we’ll be starting our first assessments.

[Post author: Scott Butner]

Lunar Eclipse sequence – Feb 20 2008, originally uploaded by Scott Butner.

Couldn’t resist posting this sequence of photos of last night’s lunar eclipse, even though it has absolutely NOTHING to do with pollution prevention or information technology, much less their supposed intersection.

Though I will say that digital photography is a great example of dematerialization, the replacement of a material object with pure information. In “the old days” when I did film photography, I would have needed to go through dozens of pictures, a couple rolls of film, and the associated gallons of rinse water and processing chemicals, to come up with the same image. By working entirely in bits and bytes, I’m left using a small amount of electricity to charge the camera’s batteries.

Have we dematerialized all the products we can? What’s the next big breakthrough that will eliminate the need to make products, much less waste?

SB

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