Greyston is a bakery with a different view on the world. They don’t hire people to bake brownies, they bake brownies so that they can hire people. Founded in 1982, Greyston is the USA’s “leading social enterprise“, and explicitly aims to support underprivileged people in New York state by providing them with the employment, skills and resources needed to lift …
Category archives: Solutions
Living buildings
I think it was the science fiction writer Harry Harrison who first proposed the idea of genetically engineered buildings: you plant a seed, and in 24 hours it grows into the building you want, according to the design embedded in the seed. This summer, a step towards that idea will be built in New York. A new cooling tower is …
Concentrated Solar Power
The concentrated solar power plant shown here has just been called “a pioneer for future power stations.” It has won an award from the Desertec project on the basis of its ability to store heat energy by melting salt, and so be able to generate electricity for 24 hours/day. The plant has been in operation …
No change on Climate Change
The IPCC has released its latest report on climate change. In summary: Climate change has already impacted natural and human systems on every continent. Climate change is also damaging global food production, cutting our supply of fresh drinking water, and damaging our infrastructure. Coastal flooding could reduce global economic production by 10 percent by the end of the century. And the widespread damage already …
Holacracy: changing the future of management
Yesterday we posted about the four-day-week startup: an organisation that is growing fast, yet there are no managers and all employees work only a four day week. (Technology manages the workflow, anybody can propose a new project.) Feedback from some readers has pointed us towards holacracy, “a real-world-tested social technology for purposeful organization”, which “radically …
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IPCC and renewable energy — the view from Texas
So, the IPCC has concluded that averting climate change catastrophe is ’eminently affordable’. Of course it is — it always was. Quibbles about the ‘cost’ of averting climate change have always been spurious, partly because the cost of not taking action will always be greater (ie death), and partly because any ‘cost’ will always show …
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Welcome to the four day week startup
When the going gets tough it can often seem that the future must be worse than the past. But here is a story about one new company that is already turning over several million dollars a year, growing at 120% a year, and achieving all this by working a four day week. Yes, a four …
Why we need a new system for business
and some example solutions:
Climate change and human survival
Even the British Medical Journal is talking about climate change. “The IPCC has already concluded that it is ‘virtually certain that human influence has warmed the global climate system’ and … its new report outlines the future threats of… increased scarcity of food and fresh water; extreme weather events; rise in sea level; loss of …
Straw buildings cut energy bills by 90%
Better living doesn’t have to be high-tech or expensive. Residents of a new housing development in Yorkshire are paying only a tenth of their previous energy bills, by living in homes built from straw. The pre-fabricated panels used to construct the buildings were developed at Bath university.