Andrew Lisy's Blog

I've noticed more and more lately that there seems to be an air-conditioning problem nearly everywhere I go. Businesses for some reason think that their customers want to be kept at a frosty 68 degrees while they shop. Office buildings think that the computers and inhabitants will melt if the temperature leaps beyond the 70 mark. At the offices I've worked at, it's typically so cold that people bring sweaters or fleeces to wear during the day! The Department of Energy says that HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) account for 40-60% of the energy use in buildings. Given that it's expensive, inefficient, environmentally harmful and just plain uncomfortable, why not just turn the thermostat up a few degrees!

In many states, New York included, there is a $0.05 deposit on aluminum cans. The deposit is designed to provide an economic incentive to people so that they recycle their cans instead of just throwing them in the garbage when they're finished. The program works beautifully; however, like many such programs, the way it works isn't necessarily the way you'd immediately picture such a system to function. People that buy the cans and pay the extra $0.05 are rarely the people that end up collecting the nickel when they're done with it -- for them, the deposit is just an added tax on cans that they are still going to throw away. Instead, the people that benefit are those who are able to collect cans out of the garbage and off the street and then turn them in for the deposit. The economic incentive turns an otherwise difficult task -- collecting and sorting a city's worth of cans from the garbage -- into a task done readily by people that otherwise may have few other work alternatives.

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