This chapter is about the production and usage of textiles and paper products.
The beginnings of industrialization were tied to textile production with the spinning jenny, cotton gin, water frame and the power loom. "The history of textiles is intimately linked to child labor and slavery, to colonialism, and to world trade and conquest" (p170).
Conclusions for today, growing cotton uses too many resources, pesticides, and chemical fertilizer, and degrades topsoil, and we are using too much paper.
Solutions :
Go paperless - inspiring figure Dan Caulfield, the CEO of Hire Quality, a Chicago job-placement service.
One suggestion I wonder about, though, is to try to restrict the number of emails that sent around by abolishing distribution lists amongst other ways of discouraging emails unless it's really important.
Looking downstream and upstream for compound savings. In order to calculate how much new wood fiber is needed, we multiply these four factors together.
-Human population
-Affluence - ave amount consumed/person
-Unsubtituted Fiber - wood fiber required/demand
-New-Materials Dependence - fraction of good made from new fiber instead of recycled
Potential savings are in
-Functional efficiency
-End-use efficiency
-Conversion Efficiency
-Field Efficiency
-Materials Cycle
-Unsubstituted Fraction
examples of new materials - Engineered Wall Framing system saves 70-74% of wood in a wall.
Bellcomb system of cardboard-like honeycombs
The authors make a long list of recycling projects. Big City Forest, Decopier Technologies, Green Bay Packaging Company...
Fiber farms
alternative fibers - bamboo, kenaf, agriresidue
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