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