The Connection

We watch a child playing a video game. The child is totally engrossed in a device which is pumping out images in response to a feverish pressing of tiny buttons. We muse, we reflect for a second, then we turn back to the artefacts and illusions of our own lives. We live in a bigger video game, a game which has car parks and supermarkets, rooms and gardens, televisions and shows, people and presents.

It’s too easy. We go to the shop or supermarket and we buy stuff. We order things online via beautifully crafted web pages. We drive along thick highways at great speed in air conditioned cars and trucks. We don’t interact with the natural world as much as our predecessors and ancestors. When was the last time you went for a walk in the woods?

Terracopia values the natural world very highly. We regard biomass as the engine of the planet. Using energy provided by the sun, our biomass creates food and materials and it nurtures systems which give us oxygen and water. It is a vast and delicate machine.

As we plunder our biomass, we destroy the machine that sustains life on earth. However we don’t see the machine any more and it is remote from our daily lives. We don’t realise how our purchasing decisions affect biomass, because we are not connected to it any more. We live in our box of artefacts and illusions, comfortable and insulated. How does Terracopia restore the connection? How does Terracopia promote communication between the biomass engine and the people who buy things?

Firstly we use science and data to communicate the reduction in the earth’s abundance caused by the life cycle of anything that is purchased. When we started this project, we were quite daunted by the notion of channelling all the data connected with the provision of all products and services. However, the deeper we go, the more we find out just how much data is being provided on a continuously expanding basis. Life Cycle Assessments and the associated Life Cycle Inventories are driving the organisation of huge amounts of great data, which Terracopia can process. We have a concept called BAD – Best Available Data, so that if we don’t have a specific item of data, we can always find a near equivalent to use until something better comes along.

So Terracopia takes all the impacts associated with the life cycle of a product, service or activity and generates a single number which is the consolidated environmental price. The next stage is to communicate this number to the buyer.

The single most sought after piece of information concerning a purchase, is the price. No other piece of information is accessed as much as the price: it is written on the product, advertised, bar coded, talked about and categorised. Terracopia will use this same information channel because it is the best. The ADV (Abundance Depletion Value) will be right next to the price.

These two links: customer to product, product to planet, are the best chance we have of connecting with the environmental impacts that we cause.

To see what Terracopia does for consumers, click the left hand button below; for providers the right hand button; and for the Big Ideas have a look at what is behind the central button.

Headlines

  • Copper

    There is enough copper to last us another 88 years at current rates of consumption and recycling.

  • Oil

    Taking into account both discovered and undiscovered oil, there will be enough to last for another 26,500 days at our current rate of consumption. Oil cannot be recycled, once it is burned.

  • Atmospheric Carbon

    Atmospheric Carbon and other Greenhouse Gasses are compromising the earth’s ability to cool itself, causing mean surface temperatures to rise. The accumulation of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere is trapping 0.12% of incoming solar radiation.

  • Atlantic Mackerel

    Although North Sea Cod is still in crisis (biomass is one third of its 1964 level), Atlantic Mackerel staged a great recovery in recent decades. Prior to the collapse of Atlantic Mackerel stocks in 1976, the peak biomass had been 1.7 million tonnes in 1972. In 2004, after severe measures had been implemented by the US Government, stocks had bounced back to 2.3 million tonnes. If we know, we can act.

  • Biodiversity

    Biomass is the engine of the earth, converting the sun's energy into food, materials and sub systems to sustain life and circulate nutrients. Mankind is eroding this engine at an alarming rate and dispensing with known and unknown bits of it, without heed to how the function of the engine is affected.