Ramsey sustainability activities (Update 4)–May 2022

I continue to make efforts on the sustainability front, in multiple ways, some very small, but some more significant. One of the largest environmental/sustainability impacts I have made recently is a flight (and upcoming return) from Paris to Brisbane to attend an Australian chapter IGS conference event and make other client calls. I recognize my past history of lots of air travel as being a negative impact to a sustainable planet. It is my hope that the “good” value that I bring with my efforts on geosynthetics helps to balance this, but I feel that I need to make a more direct adjustment. I have looked through several on-line “flight impact” calculators and the results indicate my contribution to the flights emissions is roughly 14,585 Kg of CO₂ with an appropriate financial amount of 377 AUD. To that end, I have made a charitable contribution to an Australian organization for that amount. I state this not as boasting, but acknowledgement that I and we all, need to do a better job of understanding and accepting the broader costs and impacts of our actions – the singularly capitalist economic model does not seem to be doing this sufficiently well. The concept of EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility) Wikipedia link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_producer_responsibility should guide individuals as well as manufacturers. I am trying to “walk the walk” as well as “talk the talk”.