Are we into Ecoganda?

I found this symposium (which I could only hope to attend) on propaganda and it got me thinking about the sustainability talk that is all around me. Believe you me, it's popular.

It's here and here (of note in the video link on this site, the attendees were "young, affluent and educated." Their words, not mine). And I'm both confounded by and caught between the economy, ecology and culture that is associated with going green. Some days I think I should just let this story unfold. Let people (12 000 attendees at last year's Epic event) learn more and see what they actually do with this new knowledge. Can too much knowledge be detrimental? Are we okay to just keep consuming more as long as it fits into a sustainable container? And are we really pushing the sustainability conversation deeper? Or simply wider? I'm not trying to preach anything here. Just confessing that I'm befuddled in the fog of my process to discover how design might speak differently to these issues. Industrial design can challenge the actual product. How can a communication designer affect and challenge the actual message?

I read in the Vancouver Sun a few weeks back that only 25% of apartment dwellers recycle. Not actually sure where that stat originates from but it at least caught my attention. As an apartment dweller myself, I realize the difficulty that can arise in recycling or composting by virtue of one's space or location. This leads me to think about a project that could improve this statistic. Can composting become "clean and cool"? Or must it remain as something perceived as troublesome and for people who live in homes? I want to research this further.

UPDATE

Here are a few nuggets I tracked down for larger scale composting notions (considering that Vancouver doesn't have a citywide agenda on this). They come from outside Canada but apparently our worms are doing some work in other parts of the world.

Hotel in South Africa

Industrial Size Compost

A non-worm version

This series of videos made my night. I started here:

but you'll quickly see this science teacher takes the viewer through the story of how it all ends in a packaged version. Climate change was never discussed so clearly.