San Francisco, sempervirens
If there are no clouds an aerial view of San Francisco is spectacular. It is an amazing city clamped between a big sea and a big bay which are split by the Golden Gate bridge. The city has a regular pattern of avenues and streets. There is color, all over the place, like the green or yellow gold on the hills (depending on the season). The buildings seem to have colors too. BART (Bay Area Railway Transport) is finally ready and brings you to town. It is a special one. Everything is nicely built, no dirty parking lots in between dilapidated buildings. The earthquake of 1905 has done thorough work. After the quake, a lot has been rebuilt in a consistent way. It is the nice architecture of the beginning of the century, ‘American Jugendstil’. It is everywhere. It seduces you to walk, or take the tram, and enjoy the smell and the noise of its brakes and most of all the sound of its bell. You find yourself looking, looking and looking again. Both the early morning and late evening have a hazy atmosphere so unique to San Francisco. In and of itself it makes the trip worthwhile. In San Francisco several environmental conferences took place which were important to me. There is ISEE 1977, where I realized for the first time the necessity of the integration of EcoDesign into business. There is ISEE 2000 and 2002, where Stanford and Delft University presented their ideas about the value chain (chapter 5.1), recycling strategy (chapter 7.2) and environmentally weighted recycling quotes (QWERTY, see chapter 7.4). In 2006, the paper ‘What went wrong with the implementation of WEEE in Europe’ was presented in San Francisco as well; it had tremendous impact on both sides of the ocean. And then there was the famous meeting in San Francisco of the Electronic Industry Alliance about a voluntary initiative on take back and recycling in the USA. Held behind closed doors, it was very sensitive. I explained the experiences in Europe and made a pitch for a collective system with an Advanced Recycling Fee with an opt out clause for those products which can be treated more cheaply individually. There was almost an agreement, but not a total agreement. It was not good enough. Due to lack of agreement the industry also lost the initiative in the USA, and will have to pay dearly for this in the future.
国际会议
The 4th International Conference on Waste Management and Technology(第四届固体废物管理与技术国际会议)
北京
英文
335
2009-11-28（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）