Photo: Stock Unlimited (1916164)

"Our whole retail model over the last 50 years has focused on keeping the industrial machine churning out items," said Ruben, who until 2007 had an up-close view as the head of sustainability at Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the king of mass-produced goods. "But if my friend already has shinguards that he's not using, I don't need to buy them for myself."
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...Instead of trying to shrink a product's environmental footprint from the production side by making it with less material, advocates — especially clothing and shoe companies — are trying to extend its usefulness on the consumer end.

Retailers such as Hello Rewind are selling goods and products reworked from discarded scraps. Textile makers are experimenting with longer-lasting fabrics. Some businesses are asking shoppers to scale back their buying.

"It fits perfectly with the new movement toward sustainability in the fashion industry," said British designer Orsola de Castro, whose From Somewhere brand is considered an eco-apparel pioneer. "Hyper production and the sheer availability of cheap clothing has made us forget the value of maintaining and repurposing clothes and textiles."

Image: Pixabay, Creative Commons CC0

"I feel we have become so desensitized to our surroundings," Kirschner said. "People walk over broken glass or a coffee cup or a potato chip bag and just keep going. I've reached a point where I'm no longer OK with that."
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On average, 100 photos are posted every day. "If 1 million people - which is a failure by social media standards - picked up one piece of trash per day, we could have a huge impact," he said.
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To Kathleen Russell, leader of Keep Dimond Clean, an Oakland neighborhood group that picks up 12,000 pounds of litter every year, Litterati is a step in the right direction: "The key that we were missing was the young people, and Litterati does that with social media."
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Because the Digital Landfill creates a record of how much litter a user has disposed of, Kirschner imagines that Litterati could be a tangible way for participants to track the impact they've had. It has already changed his family's purchasing habits. The Kirschners buy in bulk, avoid single-use packaging and are planning to bring reusable containers to restaurants for take-out.
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"If I were to turn (Litterati) off, 12,000 pieces of litter aren't on the ground, and I know two little kids who will never litter as long as they live," Kirschner said. "If that's the legacy of Litterati, then I'm OK with it. But I think there's an opportunity for it to be much more than that."

Image: Pixabay, Creative Commons CC0

Religious Views: Christian — but not in practice.

I’m a #Christian, and my online faith is radically different than the one I live in real life.

Hashtag Christianity isn’t necessarily bad, but it can cause self-righteousness and provide a false sense of spirituality. It has the danger of making us believe we’re living out our faith without really doing anything. 

It forces us to move at the speed of light as we constantly keep up with trending developments, unintentionally creating a spirituality that is superficial and easily distracted.

The online version of our faith is often unrealistically clear and concise and clean. If negative comments or links challenge our faith, we can delete them. If people disagree or attack our faith, we can block them. We curate and maintain a false version of ourselves, keeping up with an ideal that is fake and impossible to fulfill.

And did I see any of this coming? Not at all. But it has become so very clear to me that this is my calling.

When I was in my teens, struggling with, well, those teen things, I did manage somehow to remember to pray. And my prayer was this: God, please use me for goodness. I’d grown up in a home with a family member who lives with a severe mental illness, and so I’d seen, experienced, and known quite deeply my fair sure of pain, of deep suffering, of suffering individuals. And it took a toll on my heart. But God, doing the slow, steady work He’d been doing for years, heard that daily—sometimes hourly—prayer. I simply wanted to be a force of good, to be a facilitator of peace and love and non-suffering.

And with the Secret Agent L Project, I am just that. God absolutely, 100% answered my prayer. And what’s equally amazing is that I see God in the Secret Agent L Project so clearly. When I receive emails from individuals who want to become Affiliated Agents, I see God working in their hearts, calling them to extend kindness to people they don’t know and will probably never even meet. When I am the featured speaker at events around the city, I see God in the attentive faces of the members of the audience who want to listen and experience kindness. When people approach me after speaking engagements and tell me how inspired they are by the Project, I see God moving through them and turning their hearts toward continued goodness and love and service to others.

Postconsumers is an educational company helping to move society beyond addictive consumerism. We are consuming mindfully with an eye toward the satisfaction of enough. In other words, we advocate mindful consumption based on every person’s core values, rather than an endless quest for stuff driven by society. It’s up to each person to decide what’s right for him or her at any particular time. Whether postconsumers choose to be satisfied with a little or a lot, they are all wealthy in their contentment.

There’s nothing like celebrating the centrality of family, community, nature and meaning in all our lives, while reducing the pressures of materialism. It casts a whole new light on current economic upheavals and stress levels, to say the least. To say the most, it contributes not only to healthier people, but also to a healthier planet. It just doesn’t get any more mainstream than that.

... the original dolls confronted some of the most heated issues of their respective times. In the book A Lesson for Samantha, she wins an essay contest at her elite academy with a pro-manufacturing message, but after conversations with Nellie, her best friend from a destitute background who has younger siblings working in brutal factory jobs, Samantha reverses course and ends us giving a speech against child labor in factories at the award ceremony. Given the class divide, Samantha's speech presumably takes place in front of the very industrial barons responsible for those factory conditions. The book is a bravura effort at teaching young girls about class privilege, speaking truth to power, and engaging with controversial social policy, all based on empathetic encounters with people whose life experiences differ from her own.

A year's waste produced by Johnson's family.

"We wanted to live the American Dream: buy a big house, drive a big car," she recalls. "We rode that wave for a while, but having stuff didn't make us happier."
..."This is what I do," she says of the lifestyle that she outlines on her blog and in her book. "If it works for you, too, great. If not, that's fine. Figure out a system that works for you."

Indeed, so much of our everyday behavior is driven by the misconception that more is better. We celebrate our most important holidays by cooking twice as much food as we need, then scarfing it down. We work hard to get a promotion—then after getting it, start thinking about how to get the next one. We stay up all night tearing through “House of Cards” or the latest season of “Mad Men.”

What’s more, this same misconception about happiness leads many people to covet wealth and material things. Research suggests that more money can bring us more happiness, but only until we earn up to about $75,000/year. After that, there seems to be a negligible increase in happiness from making more money, meaning that many of us waste a lot of time pursuing a happiness we’ll never reach. Or worse, our single-minded pursuit of wealth stresses us out,compromises our values, and strains our relationships—without bringing that elusive boost in happiness.

We face, as a society, incredible challenges in the coming decades: balancing social justices like healthcare with a disappearing middle class to pay for it; competing in a global market; generating better energy solutions; ensuring clean water access for large populations; solving health issues that shorten life; moving our planet towards a more sustainable environment; creating organizations and systems of management more in harmony with the human spirit; and many more.

These are all issues that countless entrepreneurs and social enterprises are waking up and thinking about. And they have solutions rooted in critical problem solving and accelerated through software.

On the surface, they seem daunting. They don’t currently receive the limelight. And, sure, they might not pay as well as “making people click ads”. But in them is fertile soil that presents the opportunity for a higher purpose, an existence greater than big salaries and social status: the opportunity to use your talents to shape the world we ought to create. And one could even argue, the prospects for larger long-term gains.