Ethical Sourcing & MEC

Renewable Energy and Renewal in China

We were tempted to install a solar panel on our garage roof top to heat our home's water.  We were quoted about $2500 - 3000.  Wow.  The pay back time on this is over 3-5 years with no real tax break and still leaving us largely dependent on the local electricity grid.  The economics didn't work. 

I'm on a roof top of a 700 worker factory in Dongguan, Southern China.  The factory GM installed solar panels on the dormatory rooftops to heat the hot water for the workers.  The total cost was $12,000 to supply enough hot water for a dorm of 700 workers.  (note hot water for workers doesn't mean 15 minute showers.  It means a bucket of hot water drawn from a central tap and taken to your room for bathing).  The solar panels have taken the dormatory's hot water tanks off the the city's dirty coal burnng electricity grid. 

A few months ago, I was on the roof top of another factory in the same region.  This facility planted a roof garden as a means to cool off the manufacturing floor.  It gets bloody hot in this area (40 degrees and humid).  The factory was disappointed with the results as it didn't have the dramatic effect they were hoping for.  Nonetheless, its a start.

For the past 300 years, China has only known chaos, violence, famine, mass murder, corruption and destruction.  The ability of the current government to largely stop this at the scale it was in the past is somewhat of a feat. This in no way legitimizes all the hardship the dictatorship has imposed on its people.  It's definitely a step forward from the level of violence China had gone through from the 1700's onward. 

Many of my Chinese colleagues believe its only a matter of time for China to evolve to a modern democracy.  I think they're right.  The adoption of renewable energy initiatives demonstrate forward thinking.  The same type of thought that will eventually renew China.

Want Not and Waste Not

The average Westerner discards about 400 KGs of municipal waste per year.  That's a lot of food scraps, old shoes, and broken or discarded stuff.  This waste is more than just a heartbreaking story about overflowing landfills or pollution.  It's also about a lifestyle of excessive consumerism.

It's dangerous to be blogging about consumerism when your employer is a retailer that is planning modest same store growth in a globally hemorrhaging economy.   After all, my employment and those of my MEC peers are directly dependent on you loosening your wallet at our cash registers.  To even hint of excessive consumerism, say at my last employer (a $7 billion retailer), I would have been quickly shut down and shipped out.