Green (Ecological) Industries

For energy production: wind, geothermal, tidal, biomass, solar, and hydro power. They aren't necessarily environmentally friendly as they all take up a lot of space, or involve damning rivers, etc. There is always an impact to everything, just ask Newton.

For manufacturing, a heavy emphasis on recycling to reduce the amount of mining that must be done. Going back and mining old land fills. Plastics might be cheaper if you're not burning most of the petroleum from which they are made.

Things made of glass or ceramics are fairly environmentally friendly.

Solar, gas from sewerage, wave power, tidal pull.

How about...

each home or building sending all sewage and some green rubbish to a methane digester which then provided gas for the house to heat and cook with?

Think about things like small industries to wash and sterilise the glass bottles and jars used to sell milk and fruit and other foods and drinks.

Think about green transport like lots of bikes and their manufacture, electric cars, trains and buses.

Think of paper making using plant materials. Cloth made from plant materials and animal fibres in factories using water power looms.

Think small all the time. Each community has its own electricity, each house would make its own power, etc. don't go for large factories as they are not environmentally friendly.

Do some research on the hemp industry. I don't know why we aren't already utilising this incredible material!

Hemp grows very fast and is very hardy, with no need for pesticides or fertilisers. The seed is incredibly nutritious and contains more protein, vitamins and minerals than the highly acclaimed soya bean. The oil is also incredibly good for you - high in omega3 and all those other things we seek in a health food. The oil can be used to make plastics, fuels, paints, etc. The fibre makes excellent paper and clothes and so on. In fact, hemp's extremely durable fibre is supposed to last longer than cotton, improving with each wash instead of deteriorating, and it has anti-bacterial and anti-fungal properties too. And an acre of hemp can produce four times the amount of paper than an acre of trees.

In short, the stuff can be used to make ANYTHING, from cellophane to TNT, foodstuffs to building materials, beauty products to paint. Henry Ford even made a car out of hemp, which ran on hemp!

Why aren't we growing more of the stuff??

One more thing:

It's not a 'technology', but personally, I think the key to a 'green' society is living more locally and re-establishing a sense of community in our local areas. The biggest ecological evils surround international transportation. If we were happy to build self-sufficient communities who cared for each other and farmed all their needs - as far as possible - in their own locale, the world would be a much healthier place, ecologically, politically and socially. That's the way we used to survive, after all. It's only in the last couple of hundred years things have gotten a bit crazy!

MelancholyMan said:

Because it is illegal. Hemp is a controlled substance.

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Industrial hemp is not the same as the psychoactive cannabis strain. Ignorance is the only reason it was made a controlled substance. You can grow it with a licence, and the industry is growing, but not nearly fast enough.

Actually...

it was the cotton growers lobbying which had hemp banned.

Everything will be denser. We'd live in megastructures, where people can live and work and do everything in one place, more or less. Lots of things that are impractical now (like many forms of recycling) would become practical if only transportation costs were lower.

Recycling would take backseat to re-use in any case. At times I've wondered how much energy might be saved if there were a government mandate that all food products must be sold in reusable, standard sized glass or plastic jars. There'd be a set number of sizes, and the only thing the manufacturer would put on it is a label. There are lots of products that you can get a deposit for returning a bottle, but to mandate that for every product would make a difference, I think.

Don't forget Fusion Power.

and Genetically engineered microbes. These are the wave of the future. Forget plant based fuels-they aren't worth it and can never be. You can program an algae to produce deisel fuel. You can program them to produce starch, cellulose, proteins, fats, whatever. All far more efficiently than growing crops and raising animals. Real food will someday be a luxury.

For years I've been carrying around the idea of a future society basically mining our garbage dumps - digging out all tons of the useful stuff we've thrown away and reusing it. All the plastics especially - maybe recycling, although brings up the issue of the power needed to do that, or maybe just cleaning it up and using it. Depends maybe on how good a shape society is otherwise at that point.

I'm not sure how practical it would really be, but I like the idea of digging for petroleum once to make the plastics and then, digging it up again out of the garbage dumps.

MelancholyMan said:

What are some 'green' technologies that should be in it?

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You've gotten some good answers to that question, so I just want to point out that it's not just the technologies that will be different; it's also the normal habits of everyday life. Go to your local food co-op, for example: you'll see bins of bulk products (granola, shampoo, dish soap, what have you), and people bring their own containers to fill up from those bins, paying by weight. Having entirely new packaging every time you need more shampoo, granola, whatever is hugely wasteful; letting customers simply refill old containers means you don't have any packaging to recycle in the first place. We already have systems like that, so I would imagine futuristic green societies would too.

If you brainstorm, you could come up with more examples like that. What would people DO in a green society? They'd walk and bicycle more; they would either live on small farms, raising their own food (veggies, eggs, even meat), or they'd live in mixed-use neighborhoods where you could do everything--live, shop, work, go to school--within walking or biking distance (and one green society would probably feature both those kinds of lifestyles); etc. etc.

There are also small "technologies" that green-oriented people already use, so it would seem odd if somehow this didn't make it to a green future: yogurt and ice-cream makers that let people make their own; solar ovens, which are basically microwave-oven-sized greenhouses for cooking food with the sun's rays; roof gardens, which provide both food and insulation (warmer in winter/cooler in summer); composting toilets (instead of water toilets); and so on. The current issue of Ode magazine has an article on a family that lives like this; you might be interested in seeing all their little adaptations.

This is all so cool! A place where people talk about things like this instead of fight about it. Did I die and go to heaven?

What about the economy? Ours is based on people buying things so it has to keep growing all the time to come up with new things to sell the same people that bought the old ones. And commercials on TV are all about making you feel fat, or unloved, or ugly so you will go out and buy these products that will make you skinny and beautiful. A green economy would have to run differently than that but I don't know how.

Not much to add, but Ideagirl's post made me think of hanging clothes on a line instead of using a dryer.

In architecture school, I had a guy tell us how much energy would be saved if people gave up toast and ate bread as bread. I don't remember how much, but it was huge.

stuckupmyownera said:

Do some research on the hemp industry. I don't know why we aren't already utilising this incredible material!

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Wow! That was quite an education. I just googled it and it seems there are a few states trying to move the hemp industry forward. I wish the feds could get their heads out of their behinds and see the value of something like this.

ideagirl said:

yogurt and ice-cream makers that let people make their own;

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Is this really greener? Aren't these some economies of scale in making things in larger quantities? Like because once you've heated up a really large amount of milk, it will cool slower than a little bit?

Of course if you take this as far as the toast example, the greenest thing would be just drinking the milk as is.

vixey said:

Not much to add, but Ideagirl's post made me think of hanging clothes on a line instead of using a dryer.

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Ooo, clotheslines. This is great, because it would be such a perfect visual image.

And...

forget money. People would barter, swap and trade using a kind of credit system. E.g. In the early 19th C in the UK families with a pig would share the pork with those neighbours who helped feed the pig. Women who helped deliver a new baby and look after the family could count on reciprocal treatment when their baby was due.

pdr said:

forget money. People would barter, swap and trade using a kind of credit system. E.g. In the early 19th C in the UK families with a pig would share the pork with those neighbours who helped feed the pig. Women who helped deliver a new baby and look after the family could count on reciprocal treatment when their baby was due.

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This happened more recently here during the Depression. My father-in-law's father was a country doctor in PA in the '30's and was often paid with eggs, handiwork, chickens, etc.

Sorry, MM - saw this and had to post. (Hey- It's almost seven and I've just finished a cocktail...)

wombat said:

Is this really greener? Aren't these some economies of scale in making things in larger quantities?

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It's greener in the sense that it uses far less energy and packaging (or no packaging at all, if we're talking a family that lives on a farm and has its own cows/sheep/goats, or neighbors with cows/sheep/goats whose milk they sell or trade to other neighbors). There may be economies of scale from making things in larger quantities, but from a green perspective, those economies of scale are far outweighed by the cost (in energy and resources) of packaging and transportation (which, in the case of yogurt/ice cream, is not just the cost of taking the stuff from source to store and then from store to home, but also the cost of keeping the stuff refrigerated during the trip from source to store).

This reminds me--in a green society, I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of bartering going on, creating a parallel economy in addition to the "money" economy. Like, if I have a bunch of fruit trees and you have a bunch of chickens, we might trade fruit for eggs. (And remember, apples are one of the things--potatoes are another--that keep in perfect condition for months, if you put them in a cool place like a root cellar; so we could be trading apples for eggs all year long, not just in apple season.)

And for that matter, if I have an apple orchard and you're a lawyer, there again, we might trade instead of having me pay cash for your services. The rural economy worked like this until surprisingly recently; I know I've read about people in the 1930s who worked as doctors and were paid in chickens and such.
<ETA: Oh, Vixey already said exactly that! >

stuckupmyownera said:

Henry Ford even made a car out of hemp, which ran on hemp!

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What was Henry Ford smoking when he made a car that ran on hemp?