Why Can't We Opt Out of Receiving the Phone Book?

Once a year, Aucklanders receive 9 centimetres or so of paper and cardboard, whether they want it or not. I'm talking about the phone book. It feels like people have been talking for years about instituting an opt-out system for phone books, but still we get it every year, whether we want it or not. Why? The Yellow Pages says:

Our research shows that 83% of people believe that it is important or extremely important that the phone book is still delivered. At present it is a regulatory requirement to produce and deliver a phone book to every New Zealand household.

If that statistic is accurate, my apartment block must be full of people in the other 17%, given that this is what the pile looked like when the phone books were delivered a week ago:

and today, a week later (and moved into the lobby), the pile looks like this:

New Zealand comedy icon Rhys Darby has been tweeting up an amusing storm about alternative uses for the recently delivered phone books. His suggestions include:

Let's gather all the phone books of the world and build a giant labyrinth. Then capture a Bigfoot, put him in there and see who finds him!

Given the choice, I'd definitely opt out of receiving the phone book. I'm never far from my computer, where I can look up phone numbers online in an instant. I think the phone book is obsolete for a significant number of people, and they should be able to avoid having 9 cm of wasted paper and cardboard dropped on their doorstep each year. If you feel the same way and want to tell the people who can change the system, the Yellow Pages advises:

We constantly monitor the requests for opt-outs and at present there are very few which means we do not currently offer this as an option. If you would like to register your interest, please contact the Yellow™ Customer Assist Team on 0800 803 803.

I'm interested to know whether you feel the same way about phone books. Would you like to be able to opt out of receiving a new phone book each year? Or do you have an ingenious alternative use for phone books?

Earth Hour in Auckland

As the first country in the world to mark Earth Hour on Saturday 27 March, it would have been a perfect opportunity for New Zealand to set an exemplary standard of participation. Sadly, I found Auckland's contribution a bit disappointing. Here's the crowd at Auckland's official event at Britomart:

For a city of over a million people, I think it's fair to say that there was a pretty low turnout. But, things may not be as disappointing as they seem. People might have chosen to participate in Earth Hour at home or with friends, rather than coming all the way into the centre of the city. Earth Hour did, after all, take place at 8.30 pm on a Saturday. WWF, the organisation behind Earth Hour, will carry out a poll to establish national participation, the results of which should come out in a couple of weeks.

It was cool to see Auckland's iconic Sky Tower switch its lights off for the hour, along with some of Auckland's other prominent high-rises, although there were plenty of lights still glowing on the skyline. But at the end of the day, it's not really about how many people spent their Saturday night sitting with candles on the Britomart lawn, or how many buildings turned off their lights for the hour. It's about how many people heard about Earth Hour, and thought about what they could do to reduce their energy consumption and their impact on the environment. Judging by how many billboards, TV commercials, banner ads on websites and stories in the media I saw, I'd say a lot of people.

The Globalization vs Local Food Debate

Locally grown vs globalized production is the hot food issue of the moment. Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail hosted a lengthy online debate between local food advocate Sarah Elton and globalization supporter Pierre Desrochers. I've extracted the core arguments for each side, and added my own analysis.

TIME TO LOCALIZE

• The current global food system is unsustainable, because it:
• uses too much fossil fuel
• erodes soil
• pollutes waterways and oceans with chemical fertilisers, killing ecosystems
• depletes soil (when monocropping is utilised)
• Locally grown food is tastier and more nutritious because it gets from garden to table much quicker.
• A sustainable local food system helps people gain more control over what they eat.
• Food that comes from far away through the industrial farming system is only cheap because we aren't paying for the true cost - the environmental cost - of its production.
• Localized food production provides food security. A globalized food system might be disrupted by war or natural disasters. [The effects of war or natural disasters on a localized food system would also be catastrophic. If a flood wiped out all the gardens in my local area, I'd like to know that I could access food from elsewhere.] 
• Globalized food production by a smaller number of large producers has led to decreased genetic variation, making the whole system more vulnerable to diseases etc.

STAY GLOBALIZED, ADD MORE TECHNOLOGY

• Modern agricultural practices, especially innovations such as no-till agriculture, have gone a long way in addressing the problems historically seen as making large scale agriculture unsustainable.
• Globalized agriculture lets us take advantage of the climates best suited to growing a particular crop, rather than trying to grow everything close to us, where it might not grow so efficiently. For example, why should people in the UK use heated greenhouses to grow tomatoes, when they could import tomatoes grown without the use of greenhouses in southern Spain? [I agree that growing everything locally is not always the best option. Whatever requires the least environmental resources is usually the best option.]
• Local food production can cause greater environmental harm, because it is less efficient. It requires more land, fertiliser and water diversion to grow the same amount of produce compared to growing it in an optimal climate. [This ignores the fact that many people who support growing locally are advocating organic or permaculture gardening systems, which cause much less environmental harm.]
• If local food growing is so great, why did we develop modern agricultural technology in the first place? [Um, maybe because large-scale farming made some people very very rich, so it was in their interests to maintain and spread that way of doing things. I can't believe you resorted to that argument Pierre!]
• Growing food locally is less efficient, resulting in higher prices. How will people on a tight budget cope with that? [Eating food they've grown in their own backyard will be much cheaper than buying food someone else has grown. There should be funding available to help people on low incomes to start their own gardens. We also need more community gardens for people who don't have backyards.] 
• Local low-productivity agriculture can't feed the world. [We've been doing large scale globalized agriculture for quite a while now, and it hasn't stopped the world's poorest from starving to death.] 
• A globalized food system gives consumers more choice, therefore consumer power is greater in a globalized food system than in a localized food system.
• A globalized food system means we can have a varied and nutritious diet year round.
• Having access to multiple sources of food is much more secure than putting all your eggs in one basket by relying on local food production.
• Most of the problems with the current global food systems flow from subsidies and tariffs. If we remove these, then food production will naturally move to the most efficient places. This would make food more affordable while keeping environmental impact to a minimum.

Both Elton and Desrochers recognised that global and local are not mutually exclusive. There is room for both. The issue is whether we should channel our investment in the food industry towards more local food production, or towards better technology and improving environmental practices in the global food industry. This is a huge opportunity for consumers to vote with their dollars. 

I think we need to look beyond where food comes from to the environmental and social impacts of its production when deciding what to buy. For example, it might be better to buy organic apples grown a few hundred kilometres away than apples grown on the outskirts of the city using a herbicide/pesticide/fertiliser-intensive growing technique. Accreditation labels on food packaging such as Fairtrade, Organic or Carbon Neutral make it easier to make the best food-buying decisions.

What do you think? What do you vote for with the money you spend on food?

Help me name my rooftop food gardens project

I recently won the Dream to Reality competition with my proposal to create rooftop food gardens on city apartment buildings. Since then I've been busy researching, planning and connecting with lots of new, amazing people. When I write to or talk to new people about what I'm doing I find myself describing it as "rooftop food gardens for people living in apartment blocks in the city" or a similar but equally clunky phrase. Now that I'm thinking about things like setting up a website and sharing what I'm doing with loads more people, I think the project needs a snappy, catchy and generally awesome-sounding name to go by. I've done a brain dump and come up with 11 possibilities. But, many minds are always better than one, so I'd like to know what you think of my ideas and whether you can think of some more awesome name ideas. Here's what I came up with (in no particular order):

Growing on Top
Green on Top
Urban Vegetables
Food from Above
Fifth Facade Gardens/Gardeners
Veges in the City
Rooftop Harvest
City Harvest
Urban Harvest
Harvest the City
Cultivate the City

Thoughts? Please let me know if you love or hate any of these ideas by commenting below. If you have other suggestions please share them too.

Inspiring People: The New Zealand Youth Delegation

The New Zealand Youth Delegation (NZYD) is a rocking group of 16 to 26 year olds who were the voice of New Zealand's youth at the climate talks in Copenhagen last December. Last night I had the pleasure of hearing some of the Auckland members of NZYD give a public debrief on their experiences at Copenhagen, and the road ahead. 

Last December, the group of 12 NZYD delegates spent two weeks in Copenhagen's freezing winter running around trying to keep on top of the myriad talks, negotiations and impromptu demonstrations that made up COP15. As part of YOUNGO, the official youth representation organisation at the conference, NZYD called for a "FAB" (Fair, Ambitious and legally Binding) agreement. Although they were impressed by the amount of recognition youth received at the conference, they were also disillusioned by how cumbersome the negotiating process was, and how so many countries were still "playing to win" rather than to reach resolution on the issues. Worst of all, they (along with thousands of others) were locked out of the conference centre in the second week of the conference.

One of the highlights of Copenhagen was when they were invited to a wine and cheese function with the official New Zealand delegation. Determined to make the most of the opportunity, two of the delegates made a surprise presentation to the New Zealand delegation about the youth position on the negotiations. To top it off they presented Minister for the Environment Nick Smith and the Minister Responsible for International Climate Change Negotiations, Tim Groser, with a spinnaker covered in messages of support from thousands of New Zealanders and the NZYD policy document. 

NZYD were ultimately disappointed by the last minute Copenhagen Accord. Looking ahead, they are currently working out their strategy for the lead-up to COP16 in Mexico in November this year, and they welcome input from other interested young people. You can find out more about NZYD and keep abreast of their plans on their website.

Demystifying Sustainable Product Certifications - Part 3

This post is part of a series on Demystifying Sustainable Product Certifications, where I share my research into the most common certifications found on grocery products in New Zealand. Previously I explained what the Fairtrade and Rainforest Alliance logos mean, and looked into New Zealand's most common organic certifications. This time I'll clarify what the carboNZero and Environmental Choice certifications tell you.

carboNZero is an internationally accredited greenhouse gas certification programme run by Landcare Research (a research institute owned by the New Zealand government). Members of the certification scheme must reduce the carbon emissions associated with creating the product, and offset the remaining emissions by purchasing carbon credits. The carbon credits for the carboNZero scheme come from New Zealand wind farm, landfill gas capture and native forest regeneration projects. You can find this certification on several brands of New Zealand wine, and a selection of other non-grocery products.

Environmental Choice New Zealand is owned by the government, but operates independently. You may have seen the certification logo on cleaning products or toilet paper. Environmental Choice certification is product specific - there is a unique set of specifications for each type of product Environmental Choice certifies. According to the website, the Environmental Choice certification symbolises that a product is less harmful to the environment than comparable products because it meets "environmental leadership specifications". The product specifications are available on the website if you are interested in what the label means in relation to a particular type of product. 

The next post in this series investigates some niche certifications.