Monthly Archives: June 2007

A leader from the traditionally eco-skeptic Economist admits that recycling is “mostly worthwhile,” and proposes three steps to encourage the practice. Relying on mechanisms technological, political, and economic, the magazine recommends

1. a single stream from the consumer, with automated conveyor belts at the processing facility to separate items;
2. selling recycled waste to emerging markets; and
3. monetary rewards to consumers based on how much they recycle.

I haven’t yet read the magazine’s current Technology Quarterly, which features recycling and other environmental issues; I’m interested in how the writers handle the question of streaming recyclables into the third world.

I recorded Stuart Hart’s 1997 paper for Harvard Business Review, “Beyond Greening,” at the the studio yesterday, as part of a collection of articles on organization development. As is typical for papers in that publication, it’s a mousse of hard-nosed analysis whipped together with long-term vision and topped with blue-sky dreams, but the central point may turn out to be sound: the smart businessman will find a way to cash in by solving environmental problems instead of creating them. He has elaborated his position in the book-length Capitalism at the Crossroads. Hart is unique, in my limited reading, in that he treats poverty issues and environmental concerns as being of a piece.