S3 E45 Doughnut Time: Our Sustainable Responsibility

Episode discussion topics

• The future is barreling towards us, and for now, our way of living is highly unsustainable, so we are on the hunt for new solutions to put on the table.
• Inspiration for this episode comes to us from Sweden, where only 1% of their trash ends up in a landfill. What are some lessons that we can learn from their example?
• Enter microeconomic actor: ReTuna (thanks to Business Insider for covering) The world's first secondhand mall. Located next to a recycling center, the Swedish mall repurposes everything from toys to furniture and electronics.
• As we ask ourselves what world our children deserve to inherit, we must also ask more profound questions about our consumer-driven economy. We believe the new age will have communities coming together to demand better waste management for health's sake.
• Small business ownership presents an answer to how Americans may sustain their livelihoods and our nation. Major corporations have had ample time at the helm of capitalism, and frankly, there are no thanks due for their innovative use of more and more landfills.
• Our age of self-rule means we can innovate and replace these dinosaurs of industry. As many have come to learn through experience, the act of scaling into a large company, one can predict the elimination of personalization and humanization for efficiency. In this area, small is more local and diverse. It also offers consumers more choices and presents us with more opportunities to attain entrepreneurship.
• The towns and cities are much older than globalization. We believe it is entirely reasonable that the model of neighborhoods and local main streets will be the place for the future economy to thrive. With community-focused solutions such as ReTuna, we might even see a few malls come back along the way.
• Calls to Action:
  • At the local level, we can explore recreating this model, which presents one example on the ground of circular or doughnut economics transition in action. A model where trash is turned into another person's gold, being resold in a responsible and sustainable way.
    • Start with asking your city or county representative questions about what their sustainability plans are or how they're planning to reduce carbon and methane emissions.
    • Then seek out proposals for what you think is missing and could be of benefit to your community.
    • Submit that proposal to the representative who responded to your question. 
    • Seek out local groups who are also keen on implementing new ways to solve these problems in our communities.
  • The Citizens Campaign has great resources to help people get involved in their communities in a reconstructive way. Check it out if you really want to make a difference where you live.
  • Each of us can do more to consider the end-to-end life of our purchases and put to bed the long-standing practice of allowing marketing to divorce us from the true costs of unbridled consumption.

Your hosts: Michael V. Piscitelli and Raymond Wong Jr.

More info

• We made reference to doughnut and circular economic concepts that we go into more detail here: S2 E25 | New Economics a la Doughnut.
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• Intro music sampled from “Okay Class” by Ozzy Jock under creative commons license through freemusicarchive.org.
  
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