Monday, August 29, 2011

Over the fence

In the localization world where I cut my professional teeth, one of the worst things you could do was "throw something over the fence," a practice akin to painting someone into the corner and then walking away, leaving them with figuring out how to get out. Management learned early on that the right thing--and the most advantageous--is to think ahead, involving everybody down the line as early as possible, to make everyone's life easier, and the product better in the end.

But throwing things over the fence plays out in our personal lives, as manufacturer's bundle things together in odd multiples (three smoke detectors in a package, really?), package them against flooding and raining toads (why does a micro-SD card need a macro hard clamshell?), and plan for obsolescence (repeat the steps above when the first one fails or is replaced by something new or better). That we have to deal with the waste stream is not their problem anymore. They've thrown it over the fence, and we as individuals and a society will have to deal with it.

It is not coincidental that as I read Ray Anderson's Confessions of a Radical Industrialist, I am reminded that "over the fence" and "away," as in places we throw things, simply do not exist. Shedding our own responsibilities simply places them on someone else's shoulders. Unless we can close the loop.

Long-time readers may recall the situation where French pigs were contaminated by tainted grapefruit rinds shipped from Brazil. That no one thought that sending kitchen scraps (albeit industrial) halfway across the globe while waste from French cuisines was likely landing in landfills points to someone not thinking. (I should point out though, that the Germans get the packaging challenge right: you can leave packaging with merchants, which means they put a lot of pressure on their suppliers to create less of it in the first place.)

And so, when we noticed that our neighbors had acquired a pair of chickens, we saw an opportunity: instead of putting those kitchen scraps into the municipal compost stream, we asked them if they thought their ladies might enjoy the carrot tops and apple cores. Indeed, they would, and could they give us a few eggs in return?

And so we have the happy solution of throwing a bowl of scraps from fixing supper over the fence--literally. And the hens don't think it's a problem at all. Quite the contrary, if their happy clucks are any indication.