Recent Posts:
Are Fire Retardants Endocrine Disruptors?
Over the weekend Nicholas Kristof’s column in the New York Times opened a new front investigating endocrine disruptors. He referred to an investigative series on fire retardants by the Chicago Tribune. Plowing through this takes time, but the gist is that the...
Scientific Cleaning in the Built Environment
By Bobby Moddrell, Manager of Training and Compliance, Custodial Services, University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin is a big place, twelve million square feet to keep clean in a big variety of buildings. For the past decade, we’ve cleaned using...
The Age of Connectivity
Besides our complex environmental challenges, businesses are entering a new Age of Connectivity. The technology of connection, while baffling at times, is easier to foresee than the human changes they might entail. The engineers of network growth are ebullient indeed....
Food Packaging You Can Eat
No estimate of how much food is wasted is precise, but the EPA says that 14% of landfill waste is food scraps. Waste of food packaging (contrasted with food scraps) is hard to classify, but one can assume that much of the plastic and glass in a landfill is food...
Social Trust
Social trust is confidence that others we meet will not try to harm or cheat us, and that they will at least try to do what they say. To live well using a lot less, new business models have to increase resource sharing, which presumes more social trust than most of us...
Antibiotic-Resistant Microbes
This political as well as scientific issue has hung around for more than 50 years. About 80% of all antibiotics in the United States are fed to animals as disease prophylactics and as a growth stimulant. Recent developments promise to revive this dispute. Antibiotics...
Compression Circles in Your Company
If you've been following the amazing articles on this website I think you will agree that that any organization can do many things to reduce waste, cut cost, and improve the effectiveness of their organization. Investigating Compression Thinking has no downside except...
Building Microbiomes?
Leading edge research in the Built Environment is exploring the distribution of microbes found inside buildings. Many researchers have investigated other contaminants, but not microbes. Because we spend 90 percent of our time in buildings, the Built Environment has a...
Cutting Through Complexity
A Yogi Berra definition of complexity: “If I understand it, it’s simple; if not, it’s complicated.” So how do we make things seem simple? Increasing complexity seems inevitable, so can we distinguish between useful complexity and wasteful complexity? Big History...
Servant Leadership and Vigorous Learning
Every work organization is a learning organization to some extent, or it’s no longer alive, so we’re really talking about invigorating their learning processes. You’ll find a lot about the Vigorous Learning Company on our web site. There’s enough to it to keep anyone...
Getting Our Act Together
We had a board meeting on February 18. Like everyone, we had to work to avoid being sucked into the mire of finance and legalities, and concentrate on how to promote our mission. We did make a little progress. If you have not visited our reworked web page, please...
Spectrum Crunch
CNN is running a series on the impending shortage of spectrum to carry the increasing demands of smart phones. Without action, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) anticipates the shortfall to be serious by 2014. Fast growth in phone traffic presages the issues...
Indoor Air Environments
Indoor environments have opportunities to use Compression Thinking. Indoors is where we live, where the EPA estimates that we spend 90% of our time – not counting time in vehicles. Inside most buildings, air is more polluted than outside.Hazards are serious enough...
Water Treatment
Will Rogers once advised audiences to “drink upstream from the herd.” That usually worked in a thinly populated world. Running water and soil percolation remediated low bioloads. Heavy metal contaminants weren’t as widely distributed. Today we have to help nature deal...
Compression Institute Activity
The Institute holds its first live board meeting on February 18, reviewing where we are going and how fast. We’re well aware of the uphill nature of our mission. Afterward, we intend to begin revving up activity to report regularly. In the meantime: Check out our...
Reinventing Business
The challenge of the Compression Institute is to find adventurers willing to reinvent some basic concepts of business, for real – by actually doing. In effect, they would “put to sea” not in big cruise ships, but in little boats closer to reality. That's what we're...
District Energy
One of the oldest ways to save energy is district energy, formerly district heating. Many old cities, campuses, and other big building complexes used district heating, often as steam piped from an on-site boiler house or as turbine steam from a community electrical...
Biomes and Biodiversity
Other than “cute” animals going extinct, biodiversity gets little public attention. Preserving biodiversity is essential for many reasons that sum up to life itself being unable to exist without it (yawn). Publicized studies cover macro-diversity we can see, but...
The Missing Link
We issue environmental blurbs like many of our posts because those leading a normal life can’t keep up with the state of the earth. Full time environmentalists can’t keep up either. Compression refers to squeezing human consumption back within the limits of a finite...
Our Dropping Energy Yields
Energy return on energy invested (EROEI) is well known, but not widely practiced. Applied to an oil well, EROEI is the ratio of energy represented in crude oil at a wellhead divided by the energy used to drill the well and pump up the oil. Estimating this ratio for a...