CONFESSIONS OF A RADICAL INDUSTRIALIST

Reviewed 12/21/2013

Confessions of a Radical Industrialist, by Ray C. Anderson

Access to this book courtesy of the
Mountain View, CA Public Library
CONFESSIONS OF A RADICAL INDUSTRIALIST
Profits, People, Purpose—Doing Business by Respecting the Earth
Ray C. Anderson
with Robin White
New York: St. Martin's Press, September 2009

Rating:

5.0

High

ISBN-13 978-0-312-54349-5
ISBN-10 0-312-54349-2 289pp. SC/GSI $?

Errata

Page xi: "...a financial meltdown seems to be underway."
  Missing space: S/B "under way".
Page 1: "Following Interface, in order of ranking, were Toyota, GE, BP, and DuPont."
  That any ranking of top sustainable companies could include BP! It is to curse.
Page 3: "Remember the Kyoto Protocol? They were designed to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by about 7 percent by 2012 here in the U.S."
  Number error: S/B "It was".
Page 31: "A recent study [...] showed that of 1,018 consumer products bearing 1,753 environmental claims, all but one was demonstrably false."
  Number error: S/B "all but one were".
Page 33: "Back in the 1980s Vittel, a mineral water company that is part of Nestlé Waters discovered pesticides and nitrates in the spring that fed their bottling plant."
  Missing comma: S/B "Nestlé Waters, discovered".
Page 36: "Clearly there's a broad awakening underway."
  Missing space: S/B "under way".
Page 37: "Right after I made that kickoff speech in 1994, one of my colleagues..."
  Date error: Page 35 says 1995. (I think 1994 is correct.)
Page 59: "But those savings come at the cost of creating new sources of air pollution, and results in the production of energy-intensive virgin materials."
  Number error: S/B "result in".
Page 66: "And if we discharge it faster than the earth can reabsorb it into the sunlight driven cycles of nature, it silently accumulates."
  Missing hyphen: S/B "the sunlight-driven cycles of nature".
Page 76: "Divestitures shrunk that number to 160. Today we are down to107."
  Missing space: S/B "down to 107".
Page 88: "Oil prospecting is underway in ever more remote regions of the world."
  Missing space: S/B "under way".
Page 90: "...reported in 'Solar Energy Converstion Toward 1 Terrawatt' (MRS Bulletin..."
  Typos: S/B "Solar energy Conversion Toward 1 Terawatt".
Page 90: "...(1 terawatt equals 1,000 gigawatts, and just 1 gigawatt is roughly the generating capacity of one thousand coal-fired power stations)."
  Capitalization and units of measure: S/B "Terawatt", "Gigawatts", and "1 Terawatt".
Page 92: "Another technology, concentrating solar arrays, uses sunlight that is directly focused by a parabolic mirror, to boil a working fluid—sometimes water, sometimes molten salt—to generate steam that drives a conventional turbine."
  Technical error: molten salt is not the working fluid, but a storage medium for excess heat collected during the day; it lets the boilers work at night.
Page 93: "Unlike oil, coal, gas, or nuclear power we know the cost of the fuel, sunlight and wind, is and will always be, exactly zero."
  Missing comma: S/B "wind, is, and will always be,". I could quibble with the "always be"; in the distance future, large-scale use of either wind or solar could bring costs we can't foresee today. And there's a dangling participle too.
Page 94: "...whereby HP will provide transistor technology to better focus sunlight on Xtreme's solar cells."
  Technical error: I think what this means is more efficient motor drives, possibly using switching transistors, to move the mirrors.
Page 99: "At peak sunlight, it generated 127 peak kilowatts of photovoltaic voltage connected to the directly to the California electric grid."
  Technical error: S/B "photovoltaic power".
Page 99: "At peak sunlight, it generated 127 peak kilowatts of photovoltaic voltage, connected to the directly to the California electric grid."
  Technical error: S/B "photovoltaic power".
Page 99: "At peak sunlight, it generated 127 peak kilowatts of photovoltaic voltage, connected to the directly to the California electric grid."
  Extra words: S/B "connected".
Page 118: "And, as I said, there are a lot of old carpets—those five billion pounds a year, just in the United States."
  This sentence is repeated at the start of the next paragraph, which is where it belongs.
Page 121: "Using Cool Blue™ technology, Interface Flooring Systems in the United States and Canada transform all their scrap into crumbs for recycling..."
  Number error: S/B "Interface Flooring Systems facilities" or "Interface Flooring Systems plants".
Page 122: "And recycling creates goodwill, attracts new customers..."
  Missing space: S/B "good will".
Page 123: "...about ten thousand cities and towns here in the United States had some kind of curbside recycling program underway."
  Missing space: S/B "under way".
Page 136: "It takes about 31,000 BTUs of energy to move a ton of freight by air."
  Vague: S/B "to move a ton of freight one mile".
Page 141: "...has to be analyzed very carefully for its net energy balance (Does it produce more than it uses?, as well as its effect on food prices."
  Missing right-paren: S/B "(Does it produce more than it uses?)".
Page 144: "As it turned out, the cars we were all driving was a big number, too."
  Number error: S/B "the energy used by the cars we were all driving".
Page 145: "And as it turned out, the other automaker's unwillingness to sell us clean vehicles was not all their fault."
  Misplaced apostrophe: S/B "the other automakers'".
Page 155: "A sad chapter closed; lessons, indelibly learned."
  Punctuation: S/B "closed, with lessons indelibly learned".
Page 159: "Wayne Gretsky, one of the greatest hockey players of all time, calls this, Skating to where the puck is going to be."
  If this what Gretsky actually said, it needs quotation marks. S/B " 'Skating to where the puck is going to be' " (without bounding spaces.) And I would drop the comma after "this".
Page 160: "Something else emerged, you might say this became a watershed event."
  Punctuation: S/B "emerged; you might say".
Page 175: "As Albert Einstein's observation haunts us: 'Problems cannot be solved by the same kind of thinking that created them.'"
  Extra word: S/B "Albert Einstein's observation haunts us:".
Page 192: "The Cuyahoga River doesn't catch fire anymore."
  Missing space: S/B "any more".
Page 193: "Let me offer a bit of historical perspective on the topic of that avowed enemy of commerce, government."
  Vocabulary: If government was an avowed enemy of commerce, commerce would be in trouble. (Think of Mao's China.) Probably S/B "alleged".
Page 204: "At the same time, the cause-and-effect connections [...] was being driven home..."
  Number error: S/B "were".
Page 228: "Isn't a few billion years of accumulated engineering wisdom—low temperature chemistry in water naturally powered, infinitely recyclable—worth paying some attention to?"
  Missing comma: S/B "low temperature chemistry in water, naturally powered, infinitely recyclable".
Page 229: "...if business and industry don't come aboard, it's over for Homosapiens."
  Style, missing space: S/B "Homo sapiens" (in italics).
Page 232: "* a center for biologically inspired design learning from Janine Benyus..."
  Missing comma: S/B "design, learning".
Page 232: "For Tech it meant a serious recycling program: institutionwide green purchasing..."
  Missing hyphen: S/B "institution-wide".
Page 237: "The Wharton School at the University of Penn has created..."
  Spelling: S/B "the University of Pennsylvania".
Page 239: "I believe their call from a scientist, to action will sound very, very familiar."
  Missing comma: S/B "their call, from a scientist, to action".
Page 240: "You can read the details that support each of those individual claims at www.christiansandclimate.org/learn/."
  Link changed: S/B "www.christiansandclimate.org/statement/".
Page 242: "Karen Armstrong [...] once asserted, "all the great traditions are saying the same thing in much the same way, despite their surface differences." They have in common," she says, "an emphasis on..."
  Missing quotation mark: S/B ""all the great traditions are saying the same thing in much the same way, despite their surface differences." "They". (Add a quotation mark preceding "They".)
Page 246: "It will end because the finite supply cannot meet the exploding demand for them at a price..."
  wording: S/B "these fuels".
Page 247: "The energy content of our carpets—the total number of BTUs required to make one square yard— is fell by 44 percent."
  Extra word: S/B "fell".
Page 247: "Our companywide waste elimination measures saved us..."
  Missing hyphen: S/B "company-wide".
Page 261: "The fundamental transformation of Interface is, I believe—and I hope will continue to be—a phenomenon of the first order of magnitude, and if providing ultimate meaning to its original creation."
  Clumsy: S/B "if so provide".
Page 263: "...and it even has an official name all its own: dematerialization through conscious design a concept with far-reaching implications for a voracious industrial system."
  Missing comma: S/B "conscious design, a concept with far-reaching implications".
Page 266: "...putting us on Jared Diamond's biological collision course with collapse."
  word order: S/B "collision course with biological collapse".
Page 281: "This whole book has been about that somethingnew..."
  Missing space: S/B "something new".
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