The Story Of Solutions
Rachel Bohnenberger
Professor Van Doorn
ENVS 150-002
30 January 2015
Critique Two In the first video, The Story of Solutions, the main focus was to shift attention from making more and more for the economy to making the economy better. It was described in the video that in order to make the economy better, we need to focus our attention on sustainability. One example given was banning plastic bags. Two methods were given on how to accomplish said task—the old method and the new method. The old method was to hand out gift cards to people after they recycled a certain amount of bags. While that method appeared to work in theory, in practice it achieved the opposite result. Giving out gift cards only encouraged people to go out and buy more and use more bags to get the reward. On the other hand, the new method is to encourage people to use more reusable bags and urge companies that produce the plastic bags to stop producing as many. The new theory works better than the old since people have an option other than a plastic bag to use, they are more likely to choose the reusable option so they do not end up with more plastic bags than they can count and no good way to dispose of them. Another example that was given was sharing resources. The main point of that example was if more people shared things like cars, tools, books, etc. there would not be as big of a demand for the resources needed to make those objects and by extension, there will be less of an impact on the Earth. Overall, the video offered different solutions to problems facing the economy and the environment and stated that if the solutions were followed through with, we would make the Earth more sustainable. In the second video, the speaker took more of an economical approach to sustainability. Similar to the first video, the main point was if we were able to make the Earth more sustainable through waste management and carbon footprint awareness, we would not only improve living conditions
Professor Van Doorn
ENVS 150-002
30 January 2015
Critique Two In the first video, The Story of Solutions, the main focus was to shift attention from making more and more for the economy to making the economy better. It was described in the video that in order to make the economy better, we need to focus our attention on sustainability. One example given was banning plastic bags. Two methods were given on how to accomplish said task—the old method and the new method. The old method was to hand out gift cards to people after they recycled a certain amount of bags. While that method appeared to work in theory, in practice it achieved the opposite result. Giving out gift cards only encouraged people to go out and buy more and use more bags to get the reward. On the other hand, the new method is to encourage people to use more reusable bags and urge companies that produce the plastic bags to stop producing as many. The new theory works better than the old since people have an option other than a plastic bag to use, they are more likely to choose the reusable option so they do not end up with more plastic bags than they can count and no good way to dispose of them. Another example that was given was sharing resources. The main point of that example was if more people shared things like cars, tools, books, etc. there would not be as big of a demand for the resources needed to make those objects and by extension, there will be less of an impact on the Earth. Overall, the video offered different solutions to problems facing the economy and the environment and stated that if the solutions were followed through with, we would make the Earth more sustainable. In the second video, the speaker took more of an economical approach to sustainability. Similar to the first video, the main point was if we were able to make the Earth more sustainable through waste management and carbon footprint awareness, we would not only improve living conditions