mehack

Last year at a Boston Ignite, I gave a five-minute talk entitled "Broken Hearts: How Valentine's Day causes global warming".  Partially tongue in cheek, but also as a critique of consumerism and globalization.

The numbers are massive!  Something like 190 million Valentine's Day cards are sent (think of the paper and trees!) and 8 billion Necco hearts are eaten — all in all, around $650 million dollars are spent on gifts.  That's a lot of gifts, and those gifts need resources, need to be manufactured, need to be shipped, need to be delivered, and some of them, ultimately, go in the trash.  The moral of my story: don't buy your loved one a present.  There are intangibles that your loved one would (probably) like more — like having you put down your iPhone and talking to him or her for an hour, like receiving a back rub, or something else — use your creativity.  You don't have to spend money to show your love.

My two favorite slides tell the story of a teddy bear (as well as its WattzOn energy consumption label representing it's embodied energy).    The fibers in the teddy bear are probably made from a synthetic material that comes from oil.  That oil comes, probably, is drilled out of the Middle East.  It needs to be shipped in barrels over to China where its spun into those synthetic fibers.  Those fibers are made into fabric, assembled, and stuffed.  That's just one bear.  Then, just imagine, a huge container of those bears being loaded up and shipped — probably across the Pacific — in a massive boat to a port on the west coast of the United States.  Those containers are unloaded, and then put on trucks and trains to be delivered all over the United States.  And finally, those bears finally make it to a shelf to be picked up, or arrive at a warehouse so it can be Fedex-ed to you.  Whew.  That's a lot of resources, time, fuel, etc.

(And yes, this is the basis of a piece I'm working on entitled "re:sources" — I've already teased a small part of it here before).