Moving water around.

I hope we're all up on the fact that drinking bottled water in America is pretty much a trend started by models.  Though it's good to get America off soda, shipping water around in plastic when we have piped the entire nation with water delivery infrastructure is more than insane.  First, take the water from the tap, soften it for Coke, or reverse osmosis for Pepsi, bottle it, put it on large trucks and drive it to people.  Really your buying a plastic bottle, and gasoline (to get it there), both made from good old oil.

I think we're getting away from that trend a bit, but we're shipping water in other ways too.  Soap.  Laundry detergent is diluted because it's easier to sell a huge canister for 12 bucks than a small one.  Some of that has changed too, and if you look, you'll find concentrated detergent (my favorite is Mrs. Meyers).  Again, this saves on oil for the plastics, as well as reducing the shipping weight and size, effectively halving the oil it takes to get it to the store.

Another area is hand soap for public use.  For sanitary purposes, reducing soap to a liquid means every one can dispense their own without touching the source.  Well, a clever idea could change that.

This probably seems silly to a lot of people.  But the reality is, simple re-thinking, or un-thinking the design of the ubiquitous can make the largest changes.  Yes, hybrids are neat, and someone needs to buy them so we can keep putting money into the technology, but even those have a net positive carbon footprint that is much worse than driving a Corolla for equal time periods.  I think we tend to adapt status symbols of green (hybrid cars), or maybe just lean toward more outward expressions of it (tote bags!).  But it's the boring stuff that we need to re-evaluate.  Everyone needs soap, dehydrate it, ship it in paper, make it happen.

Another boring one that actually got the attention of the government is light bulbs.  I wrote about waste heat earlier, and it's this problem that is killing Edison's filament bulb.  The amount of power the filament bulb actually is using for light, is only small portion of it's draw.  The rest of the energy goes into waste heat.

I am not against this idea of course, because light is a universal need.  How much wasted oil did we burn just to add heat to the houses we are trying to cool down.  This is a much needed transition and I don't have a problem with government intervention in this case because the market would probably not have made the smarter choice on it's own, that is, the choice that reduces our dependence on oil.  Those that think it's nanny-state oppression, consider the energy needs of this nation, and go find out where it all comes from.  It is a national security issue, of that there can be no doubt.

The small things add up.  Quit shipping water around.

GeorgeP