"O" from the Angry Drunk Bureaucrat blog points out the opportunities for green economic development in the city. As you can see from my comments I have a problem with the centralized model of going green. I think we can begin to adopt green methods, particularly in public works/sanitation, by providing more incentives for creating a distributed model.
CP's Violet Law surveys the City of Pittsburgh's current situation, particularly in getting local businesses to recycle. The article discusses the difficulty in getting businesses to cooperate, and brings up the city's ultimate solution, begin fining people.
I'm reading Albert Laszlo Barabasi's Linked and he discusses scale-free networks (power laws, 80/20, long tail looking things), and star models (everything connects to one node). He doesn't discuss centralized or pyramidal models much, perhaps because they're man made constructs, think of Roman legions, twenty people commanded twenty people, who commanded twenty people, and so on down the line.
That's somewhat how recycling works in Pittsburgh. X number of trucks report to twelve stations, who report to public works. What if the 100,000 or so households and numerous businesses were given the option and incentive to deal with recycling in their own fashion?
Links:
A 1999 EPA publication Recycling Works: State and Local Solutions to Solid Waste Management Problems
Tags:
recycling