Login
A delusional Marjorie Taylor Greene insisted over the weekend that the GOP "erase from history" Donald Trump's two impeachments that he accrued during his one-term presidency.
"President Trump's political impeachments led by Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff and the Democrats were so egregious that they must be erased from history," the Georgia Congressquack shrieked at a Trump rally in South Carolina as her hot, bored MAGA fans looked away and chatted with others in the crowd. — Read the rest
Pamela J. Haney is the president of Moraine Valley Community College in Palos Hills, Illinois. She took office on July 1.
Moraine Valley Community College enrolls more than 10,500 students, according to the most recent data reported by the U.S. Department of Education. African Americans make up 10 percent of the student body.
“It is an honor and privilege to be named as Moraine Valley’s president,” Dr. Haney said. “I’m following in the footsteps of a highly respected and committed leader from whom I’ve learned so much. As I begin my presidency, I promise to build on the college’s excellent foundation while advancing student success, innovation, community engagement, and mission-driven priorities.”
Since 2012, Dr. Haney has been serving as vice president for academic affairs at the college. Prior to coming to Moraine Valley in 2009, Dr. Haney served as program administrator and assistant professor of communication arts at Defiance College in Ohio. She also taught as an assistant professor of speech communication at Norfolk State University in Virginia.
Dr. Haney holds a bachelor’s degree in mass communication and a master’s degree in speech communication, both from Norfolk State University. She earned a doctorate in interpersonal communication from Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.
Sifting through the aftermath of a disastrous blaze. The romance that launched a thousand Supreme Court opinions. A poetic ode to a simple life, well lived. Tracing the arc of food writing. And examining the hidden costs of a particularly sensitive surgical procedure. Our favorites of the week, pulled from all of our editors’ picks.
Megan Greenwell | Wired | June 27, 2023 | 7,987 words
Megan Greenwell’s piece does what the best longform features do: It mesmerizes you with an opening so powerful and a story so compelling that you deliberately read it slowly, just to make it last. This piece—about a devastating fire at a branch of the National Archives and Records Administration that happened to contain records belonging to Greenwell’s grandfather—is nearly 8,000 words long, but the prose is so sharp and cinematic that you’ll wish it was longer. “The National Personnel Records Center fire burned out of control for two days before firefighters were able to begin putting it out,” she writes. “Photos show the roof ablaze, a nearly 5-acre field of flame. The steel beams that had once held up the glass walls jut at unnatural angles, like so many broken legs.” Even were it not set against a backdrop of the U.S. government, this would be a fascinating mystery: What or who started the fire and how do workers attempt to uncover precious facts from seriously damaged files? Did Greenwell’s grandfather’s records survive the blaze? Be sure to take it slow and let this story smolder. I’m certainly glad I did. —KS
Kerry Howley | New York | June 21, 2023 | 7,555 words
My husband sent me this story while I was reporting in Idaho last week, with a message that said, “Isn’t this by that writer you like?” The answer, reader, is yes. Kerry Howley’s 2022 story about anti-abortion activist Marjorie Dannenfelser was rightly named a finalist for a National Magazine Award—one of several nominations Howley’s work has received in the last several years—and I suspect this piece about Clarence and Ginni Thomas will be in the running for many, many honors. Whereas with Dannenfelser, Howley was shedding light on a powerful person who isn’t a household name, here she tackles two of the better-known political (yes, SCOTUS justices are political) figures in America. She does it without access to them, instead surveying pre-existing material on the Thomases with remarkable facility, mustering everything she needs, and nothing she doesn’t, to tell the story of their marriage. Take the seemingly mundane detail of Ginni telling a bunch of right-wing youth that her favorite charm on a bracelet Clarence gave her is a pixie because, to her husband, she is “kind of a pixie…kind of a troublemaker,” which Howley convincingly positions as a metaphor for the havoc Ginni has wreaked on American democracy. Consider this brilliantly constructed sentence: “They take, together, lavish trips funded by an activist billionaire and fail, together, to report the gift.” And that’s just in the first section! This piece is one for the ages in both substance and style. I mean, damn. —SD
Jeremy B. Jones | The Bitter Southerner | June 6, 2023 | 1,580 words
I have never before picked an obituary for our Top 5, but Jeremy B. Jones’ ode to his grandfather deserves recognition. At just over 1500 words, it’s not a particularly long piece, but it’s a particularly poetic one, and is enough to get to know—and respect—Jones’ Papaw. Ray Harrell lived a simple life on a little bit of land in Fruitland, North Carolina. To many, it would not be enough; for Harrell, it was plenty. After all, as Jones writes, he had “a reliable tractor and a fiery woman.” It was a good life because he appreciated what he had, was contented with his lot. Jones notes that these quiet lives often slip past unnoticed, “yet those are the lives in our skin, guiding us from breakfast to bed. They’re the lives that have made us, that keep the world turning.” A small essay about a simple life that I found hugely moving. —CW
Marian Bull | n+1 | June 15, 2023 | 3,978 words
In reviewing Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires, Marian Bull looks at how infusing recipes with introspection and experience begat the cooking memoir. What I loved about about this piece—besides spurring me to pick up Small Fires, which also appeared in our recent feature “Meals for One”—is that while Bull surveys chef memoirs, she hails Johnson’s book as one for the home cook, the self-trained enthusiast. “Johnson has inverted this form by writing a memoir of a recipe, rather than a ‘memoir’ with recipes,” she writes. Johnson looks at cooking as translation and recipes as a form of performance, which is comforting for someone like me who views a recipe as a guide: “The unpredictable ‘I that cooks,’ who resists the recipe again and again, generates new translations.” How inspiring and affirming to be invited to take a seat at this generous table where nothing is lost and everything is gained in translation. —KS
Ava Kofman | ProPublica and The New Yorker | June 26, 2023 | 8,601 words
It’s easy to think that “men trying to upgrade their dongs” is a journalism cheat code of sorts. Having written about them myself many years ago, I can assure you that it’s not. Pitfalls abound. Tone is everything. Jokes are easy; reserve is hard. (So is avoiding double entendres.) Yet, Ava Kofman manages to thread every needle in her stunning examination of the state of penile-enlargement procedures, which focuses primarily on issues surrounding the popular Penuma implant. She writes compassionately about the patients, not dismissing the complex psychological situations that led them to pursue surgery. She writes unblinkingly about the doctor who popularized the procedure, and whose practice seems at times to operate with all the care of a 30-minute oil change joint—and about the surgeon who “was doing such brisk business repairing Penuma complications that he’d relocated his practice from Philadelphia to an office down the street.” And speaking of unblinking, I dare you not to wince as she plays fly on the wall during an implantation; you may never hear the phrase “inside out” the same way again. This story may have drawn you in with its imagined salaciousness, but it delivers something far better: truth. —PR
What piece did our readers love most this week? One that makes clear that the kids are not all right.
Joseph Cox | Vice | June 20, 2023 | 2,111 words
Those looking for dirty deeds to be done seem to be going no further than the Comm, a series of Discord communities in which people order violence, including commissioning robberies for bitcoin, and organizing swats against vulnerable people for perceived slights and insults. For Vice, Joseph Cox infiltrated this vile, testosterone-fueled world of crime. —KS
I first met Gina Chung at a going-away party for a mutual writer friend. In a warm back room, during the final days of summer, I wedged myself into a small circle and caught the final bits of something Chung said. She paused to clue me into their conversation. I was struck by her kindness and easy generosity, the way she openly shared her writing routine and practices with a group of old friends and new acquaintances. Months later, I heard about her debut novel, Sea Change (Vintage). The book sucked me into its effervescent, marbled world and ultimately buoyed my spirit, just like its author had at that summer party.
Sea Change follows Ro, an Asian American woman who is floating into her thirties on her own. Partly struggling, partly aimless, Ro is estranged from her mother, and grieving her father, who disappeared on a sea exhibition a decade earlier. Ro’s only companion is a Giant Pacific octopus, Dolores, the last remaining link to her father. As Dolores is about to be sold to a private investor, Ro has to reframe her understanding of past and present to make sense of her new world. Chung’s prose bubbles with delectable humor and metaphors, burrows into hard truths, and sets out to explore uncharted emotional ranges.
Chung is the recipient of the 2021 Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellowship and a number of literary awards, including a 2023 Pushcart Prize. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Catapult, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and the Rumpus, among others. She has a forthcoming short story collection, Green Frog (Vintage, 2024).
I spoke with Chung about Sea Change over Zoom a few weeks before her book launch. We talked about the role of silence and the unsaid in Asian American families, humor’s proximity to grief, subverting conventionality in character tropes, and how to take care of oneself in service of one’s art.
***
The Rumpus: I noticed that a lot of your work, Sea Change and a number of your short stories, often features the natural world. What drew you to ocean life and sea creatures as subjects and counterpoints to the characters in your novel?
Gina Chung: I’ve always loved writing about the natural world and thinking about animals that live in different ecosystems than us because it reminds me that we as human beings are also animals. I think we often forget that about ourselves; it’s really easy for us to see ourselves as being somehow apart from or above nature when in actuality we are very much a part of it. Whereas humans can and often do lie about what we need, animals can’t hide or be dishonest about their needs. Thinking about animals and what they need to survive and thrive inspires me as a writer to also try to be more honest on the page.
Rumpus: Within the characters’ environment, money is an oceanic force, capitalism as much a precondition to existence in the novel as it is in current modern life. With our protagonist, Ro, it seems there are few things that she can do in opposition to these forces, but she actively defies, withdraws from, and avoids this system in her own ways. Can withdrawal and avoidance be a form of agency?
Chung: In a lot of ways, withdrawing from or avoiding a decision can seem like a way to surrender one’s agency in a situation, but at the same time—my therapist and I always talk about this—not making a choice is still kind of making a choice as well. For Ro, avoidance is a huge part of how she navigates her day-to-day life because she’s been hurt and carries a lot of pain. That makes her feel afraid to engage directly with things that might hurt her or that she might be in disagreement with. When it comes to the impending sale of Dolores, it is one area where, even if she’s not consciously doing anything to fight back against the sale, she feels a direct kind of no in response. I wanted that to be an inciting incident for the book, too, because it gets her to understand how much this octopus means to her and how much she stands to lose if she were to lose this one point of connection.
Rumpus: This inciting incident also pits her against her best friend, Yoonhee. I was fascinated by their relationship. They grew up together with similar backgrounds but end up in very different positions at the aquarium and have different levels of motivation to rise the ranks. Why was it important for you to juxtapose their ambition and upward mobility?
Chung: I loved the idea of, as you said, pitting them a little bit against each other with this development that happens in their workplace. I wanted Yoonhee to feel like a character who has genuinely been a part of Ro’s life for a long time. They’ve seen each other through different ups and downs and phases of life since childhood. I’m always fascinated by the topic of friendship, in particular, old friendship. What does it mean to have old friends who have been with you for many years and who have been witness to all the different past selves that you’ve inhabited? It’s such a gift, but it can also be such a challenge because when you are friends with someone for that long, you both start to feel a little bit of ownership over past versions of one another. People change and grow over time. Friends can grow apart. They can also come back together.
I wanted Yoonhee to feel a bit like a foil to Ro but be a real person herself, too, as someone who has such a completely different outlook in life. She’s someone who is pretty straightforward, knows what she wants, and doesn’t hesitate to go after it. Just because she tends to be more conventional doesn’t mean that she’s a flat or two-dimensional character. I also wanted to examine what happens in a person’s life when they get to a certain age and feel like, “Oh, my gosh! Everyone is leaving me behind.” Because they’re so close, Ro can’t help but look at Yoonhee and feel, even if she doesn’t necessarily want the same things that Yoonhee wants, that she should want them and that she’s nowhere near getting them.
Rumpus: Craft-wise, how do you write someone who might fall into some of these tropes but also honor their individuality?
Chung: One thing I wanted was to have them interacting and bickering over small things—the way you do with siblings, old friends, or anyone you’ve known for years—and just see the ways in which they are both able to call each other out. That’s what really felt like the core of Yoonhee to me, this person who deeply cares about her friend. Sometimes there’s no other way of expressing it than, “Why are you this way?” in this exasperated but also deeply loving way. I also wanted to show, with the flashback sections of earlier versions of themselves, how vulnerable Yoonhee is. Just because she seems to have her life together doesn’t mean she doesn’t experience pain or doubt or fear.
Rumpus: Through flashbacks, the book alternates a lot between the past and present. How did you kind of conceive of this structure? I felt very taken care of as a reader to get into the story in this way.
Chung: I’m so glad to hear that. I love an alternating structure in a book, and there are so many books that do this amazingly well. One that was particularly close to my heart at the time of writing was Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things, which is also a later-in-life coming-of-age story, against a backdrop of family dysfunction that shows how she’s gotten to this point in her life. In that book, those scenes from the main character’s childhood and upbringing really helped me as a reader anchor the choices she was making in the present day. I wanted to do something similar with Ro: give the reader a vivid picture of not only who this person is today and how she is navigating the world but also what has led her to this point, including her parents’ choices. In those past sections, I especially wanted to excavate who Ro’s father was, since he’s not around in the present day of the novel. I wanted to give the reader a chance to get to know who he was and what he meant to Ro.
Rumpus: As you mentioned, the men in Ro’s life, her father and also her ex-boyfriend, are a bit more phantom than flesh. They are bigger figures in her head through her memories than they are in the present. They exist through their absences. What did you want to portray about absences and the stories we conjure about the people who are no longer in our lives?
Chung: You’re so right in saying that a person’s absence, once they’re no longer in our lives, can almost become stronger than their presence was back when they were around. There’s a kind of danger in that, since the person who is mourning might get caught up in imagining that things were better than they actually were with that person. Maybe they think that in losing that person, they’ve lost some irretrievable part of themselves too. With Ro, the book starts off with her having gone through this breakup with her boyfriend, who is leaving her for a privately funded mission to colonize Mars. As anyone who has ever been through a breakup knows, the things that you didn’t quite appreciate about that person when you were together seem to come back in full relief when they’re no longer in your life. That’s what she’s going through, in the process of mourning that relationship, and also the loss of her father, who was hugely influential in how she sees the world. Her father introduced her to this love for animals that they both share, and he encouraged her to be curious about the world. His absence is so clearly felt throughout her later adulthood. I wanted to show just how searing that kind of loss can be and how in the process of mourning someone, whether it’s because you broke up with them or because they’re literally gone and you will never be able to connect with them again, the mourning is never linear. Of course, it’s not that we shouldn’t remember or grieve the ones we’ve lost, but I wanted to explore what can happen if you get too caught up in that mourning.
Rumpus: I feel like silence, too, is more of a presence than an absence, in the way it pervades relationships between family, friends, and romantic partners in the novel. Silence feels particularly pertinent in my own Asian American community, especially in how it persists in the first generation and is continuing to manifest in other ways in future generations. What roles did you hope for silence to inhabit for the characters in the book?
Chung: I feel that so deeply. The silences of ancestors, the silences of our parents and grandparents, as well as the silences that we inherit as children of immigrants. It’s hard to ask folks about the past because there’s a lot of pain within those memories. It’s definitely something that I’ve noticed a lot in my own family. In many Asian and Asian American families, there’s an acute awareness of what it would cost for the other person to relive their story just by telling it. That’s something I’m always thinking about and living with. I don’t want to perpetuate the trope of the silent, sad Asian American family either, but I do think that silence exists for a good reason, and a lot of those reasons are bound up in pain and trauma. With Ro, I think we see it most with her mother because she and her mother have never been able to talk about things like her father’s disappearance. They’ve never really been able to process what they’ve both experienced and been through. In writing Ro, I wanted to investigate what it would be like to grow up with that silence and not even know how to broach it with your mom, your friends, or even yourself. Ro doesn’t have the language to name any of the feelings that she’s grown up experiencing.
Rumpus: One of my favorite passages in the novel is: “I used to wonder if we would take better care of our bodies if our skin was transparent, if every little thing we did and said and ate was observable. If every hurtful or careless thing we ever said to one another manifested itself visually in the body.” It’s interesting how everyone has their own version or perception of self-care, especially when we consider the juxtaposition between what we think we need and what others think we need. Could we talk about your intention with writing about self-care?
Chung: Ro is not very good at taking care of herself throughout most of the book. I think taking care of yourself—and I mean real care, not just the commodified ideas of self-care that we’re all sold nowadays—is actually very difficult, and it’s a practice. As someone who also struggles at times to take care of myself, I wanted to explore a character who has never really learned how to do this, and this is something I feel like I haven’t really seen much of in contemporary literature when it comes to portrayals of Asian American women and women of color. There is a sort of larger cultural moment right now around what I’ve seen some people refer to as “the disaster woman trope,” but I feel like those characters are almost always white women, and their meltdowns are still usually played for laughs. But I wanted to show what it would look like to have a character who is so afraid of everyone leaving her behind that she can’t help but leave herself in all these ways, whether it’s by drinking way too much and driving home afterward or avoiding important conversations with the people in her life that she loves. I wanted to show all the small and big ways that we as humans abandon ourselves when we’ve been abandoned many times before.
At the same time, I did notice throughout the course of writing the novel that whenever I put Ro in the position of having to take care of someone else, she was actually not bad at it, much to her surprise. It’s sometimes hard and uncomfortable for her, but she’s able to stay present in those moments in ways that she can’t always be for herself. I wanted to show how she is able to learn how to do those things and, in time, show up for herself too.
Rumpus: As someone who balances full-time employment with writing, do you have self-care practices that help you continue creating art?
Chung: I’m very used to thinking of myself as a brain in a jar. I don’t always remember to consider my bodily needs, especially when things get really busy or when I’m in the middle of an engrossing project. I’ve had to remind myself over the years to slow down when I need to and to take care of the container through which I experience the world.
My main tip is to listen to your body as much as you can. Take breaks and sleep when you need to. I’m someone who can easily ignore all my body’s warning signs and just keep going until the point of exhaustion. It’s just not worth it most of the time. There’s no need to flagellate yourself in the name of your art, and the wellspring of your creativity can’t be replenished if you don’t rest, no matter how guilty you might feel for not getting down a certain number of words per day. I’m still learning how to be gentle with myself in doing this. Now, whenever I feel like all the creativity is gone and I’ve lost it for good, I’ve at least learned to believe that’s not true. It’s my lizard brain panicking. I know it will come back. The only way you can care for your art is to care for yourself.
Rumpus: I laughed throughout the book, sometimes out loud, but it surprised me because some of my laughter was near moments of strife or grief. To what extent does humor and absurdity color your understanding of grief? How can humor be a tool in explaining grief, if at all?
Chung: Humor is so important to me, both as a writer and as a human being. Humor oftentimes hinges around this element of surprise. There’s this idea that writing about grief or difficult experiences can’t be funny or that it’s one note. So much of life isn’t like that, though. There have been times in my life where I’m going through heavy situations, but that doesn’t mean I don’t laugh if I see something surprising or ridiculous. Even in moments of my own despondency, I sometimes laugh at myself because of how dramatic I know I’m being. I think it’s important to be able to do that because otherwise life can be overwhelmingly difficult, and having those moments where you’re either laughing at yourself or at the situation is healthy and also lifesaving in a way. In terms of writing, I think funny scenes can sharpen the emotional quality of the sad ones, and vice versa. It’s like in cooking, where you have complementary but contrasting flavors, they heighten each other.
***
Author photo by S.M. Sukardi
A discussion featuring Yakov Feygin, Daniela Gabor, Ho-fung Hung, Thea Riofrancos, and Quinn Slobodian.
Relying on the private sector to decarbonize is a recipe for abandoning workers.
Ecological crisis, rural deindustrialization, and real estate speculation have created conditions in which the far right thrives.
Orans are sacred lands in the Thar Desert that are are being developed for wind energy projects. Nisha Paliwal argues that while wind energy is considered sustainable, it is experienced as violent extractivism by nearby village communities.
The post The Problem with Wind Farming on Rajasthan’s Sacred Lands appeared first on Edge Effects.
Phillip D. Jones was appointed vice president for institutional effectiveness and strategic planning at Hampton University in Virginia. He has been serving as the mayor of Newport News, Virginia.
Jones is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in history. He holds a master of public policy degree from the Harvard Kennedy School and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Karla C. Lewis has been named the associate director of state and community relations at the SERVE Center of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Prior to this role, she focused on evaluations of Early College high school projects, student support services, and STEM initiatives at the university.
Dr. Lewis is a graduate of the University of Chicago, where she majored in sociology. She holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in educational policy studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Andrea Simpson will serve as chief information security officer at Howard University in Washington, D.C. She was the chief information security officer at the Federal Communications Commission.
Simpson holds a master’s degree in information systems and telecommunications from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Camacia Smith-Ross has been appointed chief of staff at Southern University New Orleans. She is the former dean of the School of Education at Louisiana College in Pineville. Earlier in her career, Dr. Smith-Ross was an assistant professor of education at Southern University.
Dr. Smith-Ross is a graduate of Southern University in Baton Rouge, where she majored in elementary education. She holds a master’s degree in urban education and leadership from the University of New Orleans and an educational doctorate in organizational leadership from Nova Southeastern University.
Zenobia Lane was named vice president for human resources at Santa Clara University in California. She has been serving in the role on an interim basis. Before joining the staff at Santa Clara University, Lane held human resources leadership roles in Pennsylvania at Saint Joseph’s University and at Swarthmore College.
Lane earned a bachelor’s degree in industrial and organizational psychology from West Chester University in Pennsylvania and a master’s degree in human resources management from Walden University.
Troublemaker inks seems to be be everywhere lately – new dealers in the United States and the addition of several new inks as well. I’m showing off a couple of these new inks here – Butterfly Dream and Polar Lights.
Troublemaker packages their ink in 60mL dark plastic bottles. I have found some variation in price, but you can find it at Vanness for $24 (for shimmer inks) or $16.50 (for non shimmer inks).
Now for the inks themselves!
The base ink color for Butterfly Dream is an avocado green of medium saturation while Polar Lights is a dark purple-grey. Each ink shows some shading but nothing dramatic. I’ve seen a touch of sheen in each as well.
The two inks really stand out when the light is at the right angle. Butterfly Dream has a blue/purple shimmer and Polar Lights has a turquoise or green shimmer.
Polar Lights is a darker ink than Robert Oster Sterling Silver, but the two are close.
Polar Lights on Midori MD paper:
Midori MD paper at a different angle:
Polar Lights on Cosmo Air Light 83gsm paper:
Cosmo Air Light paper at a different angle:
And Tomoe River (52gsm TR7) paper:
Tomoe River paper at a different angle:
Butterfly Dream is my favorite of these two inks and is incredibly close to KWZ’s Prairie Green (Galen Leather exclusive ink). Prairie Green has lots of gold shimmer, however, while Butterfly Dream is a blue/purple.
Butterfly Dream on Tomoe River (52gsm TR7) paper:
Tomoe River paper at a different angle:
Butterfly Dream on Midori MD paper:
Midori MD paper at a different angle:
Butterfly Dream on Cosmo Air Light 83gsm paper:
And Cosmo Air Light paper at a different angle:
I have kept a pen (a TWSBI Go pen, medium nib) inked with Butterfly Dream for the past two weeks with no sign of blockage or slow ink flow so far. TWSBIs are a favorite of mine with sparkle inks since the feed has a slightly wider channel than other pen feeds.
What is your take on the new Troublemaker inks? Will these be on your to-buy list?
DISCLAIMER: The items included in this review were purchased by me for the purpose of review. Please see the About page for more details.
The post Ink Review: Troublemaker 2022 New Inks appeared first on The Well-Appointed Desk.
Steering humanity out of the climate crisis demands action in a very literal way. Boots on the ground, people rolling up sleeves and getting hands dirty retrofitting existing infrastructure, such as poorly insulated houses, type stuff. The goal is to re-make our built environment to be energy efficient and drive down carbon emissions ASAP. So we really need lots and lots more skilled tradespeople — fast. Aka, the kind of multifaceted, hands-on skills that technologists haven’t figured out how to automate yet.
Fixing this problem absolutely, therefore, demands human beings. Lots and lots of people to come in, eager and willing to learn new stuff, and take up green retrofitting jobs. So it’s a job discovery problem. And a training/upskilling/reskilling problem. Which means digital technology can of course help. And this is where a U.K. edtech startup founded last year, called greenworkx, is angling to step in — with a new spot of supportive construction: A digital pathway designed to boost the flow of skilled workers into green jobs.
The London-based team, which has just closed a £600k pre-seed funding round, describes what’s it’s building as “the go-to talent portal for green jobs”. The app soft launched towards the start of the year, after the co-founders formally incorporated the startup in mid June last year. The early stage funding round was led by Mangrove Capital Partners, with participation from Ada Ventures, and a number of angel investors in the climate and edtech sectors, including the CEOs of Multiverse (Euan Blair), MyTutor (Bertie Hubbard) and Octopus Electric Vehicles (Fiona Howarth).
Commenting in a statement, Nikolas Krawinkel, partner at Mangrove, heralded the opportunity of the looming “green industrial revolution”, writing: “We’re on the cusp of a green industrial revolution, which will require a huge rethink of our education and training systems. The greenworkx team have a deep understanding of digital-first learning methodologies and we’re excited to work with them to take on this profoundly important challenge.”
“The urgent ramp-up needed in the green workforce is a unique opportunity to build a fairer, more equitable future by bringing millions into a rapidly-growing sector of huge social and environmental importance,” added Matt Penneycard, founding partner at Ada Ventures, in another supporting statement. “We’re incredibly excited about the double impact that greenworkx can have in empowering people to access well-paid, future-ready jobs, whilst simultaneously directly driving the net-zero revolution to address the climate crisis.”
The startup’s vision is to build a platform and digital tools to drive awareness and accelerate the uptake of green jobs, using techniques like bite-sized learning and algorithmic matching of jobseekers to connect them with relevant opportunities to help build and power up the green economy.
Co-founders Mat Ilic and Richard Ng bring backgrounds in public policy work and education and edtech to bear on this skills funnel challenge.
Ilic, the policy guy, says he was inspired to tackle the people side and the green jobs challenge as he was reading John Doerr’s book, Speed and Scale — which is literally subtitled an “action plan for solving our climate crisis now”. “It was the first time that net zero felt like a manageable problem,” he tells TechCrunch, saying the book helped him realize “how significant people are” — especially “the people we need to bring about the transition, not just people to make lifestyle changes” — and so the “loose idea was was born then and there”.
Ng, who started his career as a maths teacher before moving into edtech and, latterly, training software engineers at U.K. tech apprenticeship startup Multiverse, says he’d felt pretty settled in that career — until he got speaking to Ilic and also got the green jobs itch.
“He was explaining to me this problem that in order to reach Net Zero we need to deploy all this green infrastructure… and I remember being really shocked by this because I thought wow, this is obviously a huge problem, which is really high stakes, really time urgent, and yet when I think about skills and future work so often it’s purely about ‘oh we need to code’,” he says in a video call with TechCrunch, offering a tacit critique of the full-throttle focus on ‘learn to code’ of the past (many) years. (Code, after all, may well end up being automated by powerful technologies like generative AI — even as we’re still in desperate need of double glazers, plumbers, electricians etc etc.)
There are also of course plenty of people for whom learning to code is never going to be the right fit. And Ng says he realized there’s an unfolding opportunity for all sorts of workers to thrive in green jobs as demand for these more hands-on, people-facing skills keeps growing — as well as being excited by the chance to build out the kind of support for vocational training and learning that the U.K.’s traditional educational system has not been geared toward.
“We need people to work with data, that’s very necessary, and there’s a bunch of people working on that now. But I was like this is also super, super important and really, really underserved,” he says. “Coding, unfortunately, is phenomenally inaccessible for a bunch of people… [Whereas] these jobs… are really, really meaningful, they’re pretty well paid and they’re actually very accessible as well. And so, for me, it was also about making sure that as we think about this really important challenge Net Zero we’re also using that as an opportunity to make sure we have this bright future of work which is hopefully much more inclusive and accessible to the communities which I care a lot about.”
The scale of the retrofit challenge means the skills supply problem is vast indeed. Ilic cites a statistic suggesting at least 30 million roles will be needed globally by the end of the decade — and half a million in the U.K. alone, just for domestic energy retrofitting. (And the startup’s stated mission is to get 10 million people into green jobs over 10 years.)
While the challenge is global the U.K. certainly has some of the worst insulated homes in Europe, making that element a particularly acute local problem. Solutions can also be interdependent, too — since, for example, poorly insulated homes aren’t a good fit for low carbon heat pumps — which means tackling drafty buildings is really a prerequisite for speeding up the decarbonization of U.K. housing stock.
“We’re talking about half a million different professions and trades needed in already an existing skills shortage in construction — and that’s before we start talking about the other aspect of this, which is the existing workers who need to be reskilled in what’s basically the biggest reallocation of capital and the means of production since the Industrial Revolution,” says Ilic, adding: “And no one seems to be talking about it with the level of urgency and emergency and scale that is needed — and more fundamentally, we’re here because we believe it’s eminently solvable. And that’s what’s so practical about the way that we’re looking at this challenge.”
Some other startups are talking about it, of course. Denmark-based Lun, for example, recently bagged seed funding to build software tools to encourage more tradespeople to focus on installing heat pumps, instead of taking on less climate friendly jobs. While US-based BlocPower has already been beavering away for almost a decade with a residential retrofit-as-service platform focused on low-income communities. But it’s fair to say the scale of the change needed across our societies is so absolute — so root and branch — that it’ll need a tsunami of startups tackling as many bits and pieces as possible if we’re to drive the necessary system flip at the blistering pace now required to avoid even worse heating and weather extremes (not to mention the risk of runaway climate change).
Greenworkx’s app is soft launched at this stage — with a handful (around 40) of green skills seekers signed up to a (free) introductory retrofit course they’re offering.
Early users are more of a mix than the team’s expected target youth demographic (i.e. 16-24-year-old school and college leavers who did not follow the academic higher education route to university) — with Ng noting other profiles of interest include immigrants in their mid thirties to forties seeking a career switch into more stable work. Another early user he mentions was a former nurse — a women in her late fifties who could no longer continue working in a patient-facing role (owing to developing allergies) but who was looking for another job that allows her to keep serving her community and retrofitting social housing fit the bill for her. (“It’s a way to basically continue serving her community.”)
To locate their first users they’ve been partnering with organizations and charities that are focused on employability. But as they seek to scale up they plan to expand the pool of jobseekers via digital marketing on social media and tapping up the sorts of influencers who might resonant with key targets. They’re also planning a possible green jobs travelling roadshow to take their message of climate opportunity around the country in an electric bus.
The early product is still quite a manual experience, per the co-founders, as the team has been focused on understanding learner profiles and needs so they can better tailor the platform experience. But the goal is, ultimately, to automate the process of matching jobseekers to green skills opportunities to be able to scale the platform and its outputs.
“We’ve had our first proactive inbound from a small company this week looking for energy assessors and retrofit assessors,” notes Ilic. “So it’s been really interesting to see that. And in terms of where we focus attention on the job side, so really a lot of investment is going into decarbonizing social housing at the moment — housing associations, local authorities and smaller energy efficiency or construction companies are all looking for these sort of energy efficiency professionals or trades. So some of that is them reaching out to us some of it is us working with them. So we’re pretty confident that for this kind of batch of people that we’re taking through — both the understanding retrofit courses as well as some partnerships that are more focused on domestic energy assessment or retrofit advice — we should be able to get our first job outcomes and then explore how it goes from there.”
For larger energy companies and construction firms the first focus is likely to be on upskilling an existing workforce, rather than trying to hire scores of new workers. So the startup is thinking how it might best support those goals. They’re also still figuring out how much training content they might offer themselves — vs working with partners and/or employers to provide it. But the overarching goal is to find ways to support as many people as possible to think about a career switch, skills upgrade or first leap into green jobs.
“We’re a b2b proposition. And the ultimate goal is to create value by giving people the talent they couldn’t otherwise reach — so filling roles,” says Ilic. “But I think we’re exploring a range of different steps in between, including actually having that curriculum and training proposition to support reskilling existing workers, because if we’re building a high quality digital curriculum for connecting people to these jobs from a standing start, actually it’s also relevant for people that are learning about low carbon heating technologies in their current jobs. So both reskilling and recruitment are going to be part of our value proposition.”
“We are starting supply side. We want to build a tool that will matter so much to learners that they will obsess about,” he adds. “They would be prepared to pay for it even though we’d never want to charge them for it because we want to create a frictionless route for them to be able to access these roles. Because that’s partly in our collective interest — as I said, we’re looking at servicing the labour demand — but, yeah, we feel that the business side will become kind of apparent as things unfold; as you see the kind of exponential growth, say the consumer demand for solar among other things, so that’s what we’re planning.”
This report was updated to correct a citation by Ilic: The projection is for 30M retrofit jobs being needed globally before the end of the decade, not in the U.K. — there the projection is for half a million roles being required by 2030
UK’s greenworkx takes aim at the domestic retrofit skills challenge by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Relationships end all the time and in all sorts of ways: over text, in person, via ghosting, and if you’re a lesbian, sometimes over the course of about 27 years. For many people, when they breakup, that’s the definitive end—they want no further contact with their former partner. For plenty of others, though, a breakup is not an end so much as a change. The ex was an important person in their lives, and they’d like them to remain that way. But how?
Transitioning to friendship post-breakup has been a contentious topic for ages. And it’s been made more complicated by the bevy of ways, both electronic and IRL, that we now stay in touch with people. How do you avoid the pitfalls, sloppy hookups, or drunken arguments that can often accompany said transition to friendship? How do you know when to set boundaries, and when to keep that person close? In this piece, I’ll explore, with the help of a professional therapist, the nuances of going from romance to friend, the tools you’ll need, and how to know when cutting your losses is the best route to take.
Taking space is the most necessary and least followed advice (even by me—a relationship advice columnist). But in order to transition from a romantic to platonic relationship, you absolutely need space and time to heal. This will look a little different for every couple—sometimes kids are involved, or pets, or shared cars or living spaces, which makes things extra tricky. Still, the more emotional, physical, and online space you can take (see my post-breakup guide to social media for more on that last one), the faster and less painful the process will be, even if it feels at first like you will actually die if you don’t talk to your ex every day. (You won’t.)
Avry Todd, a licensed clinical social worker and therapist to both individuals and couples in the Bay Area, reminds us that closure requires work just as relationships do. “All relationships have a beginning, a middle, and an end,” they said. “This is true of short term acquaintances and life-long partnerships. We need to put work into the ending just like we do the beginning and the middle.”
With my last relationship, we were living together when we broke up, so it wasn’t as easy as just cutting her out of my life. (Not that I wanted to.) Taking space within the constraints of our shared living space meant separate sleeping situations, nights at friends’ houses, and a few solo weekend trips where I could cry in peace—and in a hot tub. When you’re freshly transitioning out of a relationship, it’s important to find ways to carve alone time for yourself, including in online spaces, and to remember that all feelings are impermanent. It’s cliché but it’s true: This too shall pass.
Transitioning relationships often brings up a lot of feelings of fear, doubt, anxiety, and attachment issues, and it’s important to acknowledge those feelings, but also not be controlled by them. So, if your ex starts to feel distant, try to ground yourself by remembering that it's likely not because they don't care about you, but rather simply because their role in your life is shifting in a necessary way.
And what if your ex is resistant to taking space? This is where setting firm boundaries becomes super important, along with knowing what your limits are and being able to communicate them. When talking to a reluctant ex, acknowledge their fears and also remember that NOT setting boundaries leads to resentment and discomfort, which are going to negatively impact your relationship going forward. I’ve also found that setting a time to check-in can help assuage an ex’s abandonment fears. So, for instance, commit to taking space for 30 days. At the end of that time allotment, you can briefly check in and assess whether you need more space or if you need it in a different way.
Todd notes working on being good exes – even friends – is important, especially for those for whom “being in queer community by virtue pretty much guarantees running into those whom our hearts still hold some charge for.”
So how do you know if you’re ready to be pals again with the person who stomped on your heart? As VICE writer and adept friend-to-her-exes Susan Mittwoch puts it: “If you get a text from an unknown number, like the optician or your drug dealer, and automatically panic that it's your ex, it's too soon. If you are stalking your ex on Instagram and can objectively and calmly turn to your colleague and say that her new hair looks shitty, then it is time.”
I can add to this: If you’re feeling horny, alone, depressed or just looking for the dopamine hit that comes from injecting a bit of drama into your life – you are absolutely not ready. If your first message draft to them rehashes old arguments or is way too self-aggrandizing (“missed me lol??”), you are not ready. But if you are ready, go for something friendly but not too personal. I like Mittwoch’s line: “Saw this article on sea anemones, thought you'd like it. How are things?"
Once you feel enough time and space have passed—I’m not going to put a precise number on it, but will say when thoughts of your ex don’t give you a heart-sickness, rage, or feelings of vengeance, you’re on your way to healing!—the next step to think about is why you want to be friends with this person. A 2017 study in the journal Personal Relationships identified four main reasons why people maintain friendships with exes: security (emotional support, advice, trust), practicality (shared possessions or finances), civility, and unresolved romantic desires.
Unsurprisingly, the relationships of those who tried to be friends because of unresolved romantic desires and civility did not end well. But, staying friends because of security and practical reasons led to more positive outcomes. So, think long and hard about why you want to be close to this person. If your motives are, shall we say, less than ideal, you probably need more time to heal or perhaps you’re not meant to continue your relationship
Now that you’ve taken the necessary time, tediously self-reflected on your motivations, and feel that you’re ready to see your ex again—what should you actually do? (Or more precisely, NOT do?) The answer will obviously depend on your personal circumstance, but here are some general tips. Avoid drinking/drugs, both of which may likely cause you to end up fighting or fucking. Seeing them during the day, and in public, will also curb the fight-or-fuck impulse.
Meet in neutral territory—no restaurants you frequented together or parks you made out in, or any place that has emotional resonance. What’s the least erotic place you can think of? Daytime karaoke at TGIFridays? The toilet paper aisle at the grocery store? Meet there. (I’m only half joking.)
If you share similar social circles, group hangs are low-stakes way of trialling your burgeoning friendship. A chill picnic with a bunch of friends who can sweep you into another conversation if it starts getting a bit too intense? Ideal. A birthday dinner where you and your ex are not the centre of attention, and have to behave nicely to avoid spoiling someone else’s day? Perfect.
Me and my ex found neutral territory at the gym, which was a place we could spend time together that did not lead to fights. Plus, exerting ourselves helped burn some of the rage we were no doubt feeling toward each other because we didn’t take the necessary space to heal! But, hey, baby steps.
There are times, of course, when you are trying NOT to see your ex—perhaps, hypothetically, when they see you at the grocery store while wearing stained sweatpants, a Winnie the Pooh sweatshirt, and with a cart full of Pedialyte and Us weeklies. In these cases, Todd suggests practicing mindfulness. “If it's someone whom you're sitting with big emotions around, using mindfulness to inform our next action or non-action takes the pressure off the need to react. After taking a moment, then you can consider whether you want to smile and say hello, or just keep dancing with your friends, or have a quick cry in the bathroom. Sometimes it's all three of those options, or more.”
You might need to run away. You know what? That’s okay, too. Todd says,“I try to be honest with myself about what I need and reject any internalized or externalized expectations.”
As you spend a little time with your ex, you’ll probably find that old wounds can and do surface. That’s okay! You’re human. The most important thing you can do is be aware of those ick feelings when they happen so you can avoid them next time. For instance, if he uses a pet name, or she is texting you 37 times a day, or talking about new people you’re dating feels as if you’ve been flayed and then let loose upon a fire ant colony, notice! And build a boundary around it.
Setting a boundary doesn’t mean things will stay this way forever. But it is being honest and realistic about where you are right now. You can always check in at a later date, and revise accordingly. If you make that clear while hashing things out with your ex, it may make the whole process easier.
Todd advises that we attempt to rebuild a connection with explicit intentionality. “Take your time, try to resist expectations of the other person(s) you may have once had while in relationship with them, and stay connected to your efforts to individuate.”
Boundaries are also very helpful markers when deciding whether maintaining the friendship is ultimately going to be healthy for you. An ex who steamrolls over your boundaries is not going to be a very good friend, and it’s important to notice that. Another thing to ask yourself: Does spending time with your ex make you feel shitty? Relationship researchers at the Gottman Institute note that a “healthy” relationship has five positive interactions to every negative one. We aren’t always our highest, most evolved selves when our hearts are broken, but generally speaking, your interactions should be pretty positive. If they aren’t, then that’s something to pay attention to.
For More Stories Like This, Sign Up for Our Newsletter
That said, the biggest sign that you shouldn’t stay friends is simply: You don’t want to. You don’t need some long explanation, a therapist’s approval, or a particularly compelling tarot card reading to back you up. You only need the awareness that being friends with this person is not something you want or feel able to do.
That being said, do allow for some screw-ups. They’ll happen! It doesn’t mean you’re doomed or that you can’t “really” be friends. It likely means, as step number one advised, that you need more time to figure out how to be with this person in a way that feels good to both of you. Remember, also, that no relationship, even strictly platonic ones, are without their struggles. Revel in your extraordinary humanness, practice your boundary-making, and you’ll be well on your way to building a friendship that lasts.
This article was updated for clarity. It was originally published on April 3, 2019.
Black women worldwide value their hair. From afros to wigs, braids, and blowouts, Black women have used hair to symbolize their gendered racial identity. Indeed, Madam C.J. Walker, the first Black woman millionaire in the U.S., highlights the significance of hair to Black women as a form of labor and enterprise. In this blog post, I present five crucial insights anchored in Black feminist thought regarding Black hair.
“Black beauty: Shade, hair, and anti-racist aesthetics,” by Shirley Anne Tate, Professor and Canada Research Chair Tier 1 in Feminist and Intersectionality at the Sociology Department, University of Alberta, Canada, is a commonly cited paper in Black hair studies. In the essay, Tate investigates the performance and instability of black beauty through an examination of conservations amongst mixed race Black women. Historically, natural Black beauty has been associated with textured hair and darker skin, which is then further associated with antiracism, whereas hair straightening is viewed as an artificial attempt to resemble white or Eurocentric beauty standards.
Since they are often perceived as having more European physical traits, mixed race Black women have historically been put in a complicated position in the hierarchy of feminine and racialized beauty ideals. This leads in a persistent experience of othering and difference, as Rachael Malonson experienced though in backlash for her election to Miss Black University of Texas in 2017.
Tate explains that the way mixed race Black women grapple with the normalized racialized aesthetics of Black beauty exposes how physical signifiers have political meaning that reinforce the boundaries of what constitutes Black beauty. Rather than attempting to comply to specific aesthetics, some reinterpret what defines Black beauty in diverse ways, illustrating how the performance of racialized beauty aesthetics is fluid yet indeterminable.
Good or bad; authentic versus inauthentic; natural versus straightened. In a 2009 Women’s Studies article, Cheryl Thompson, Assistant Professor in Performance at The Creative School, Toronto Metropolitan University, discusses how these opposing hair perspectives affect Black women’s sense of self. Thompson overviews the history of Black hair to illuminate how slavery, emancipation, and Black social movements constitute key political contexts that affect how Black people style their hair.
Beauty standards for Black women are shaped not just by white society, but also by members of their own community. Because of the cultural association of straightened, long hair with feminine beauty, Black women are pressured to alter their naturally kinky hair to conform to these expectations. Further, in their everyday life, they must manage how these standards justify prejudice and discrimination; for example, workplace hairstyle standards may impede their economic mobility in the long run. For these reasons, Thompson explains that we can’t depoliticize Black hair because of how western values affect Black people’s lived experiences.
Black women have a complex and nuanced relationship to beauty, hair, and embodiment. In western society, black hair has become politicized and hyper-scrutinized, with longstanding hegemonic standards of beauty privileging straighter hair and looser curl patterns as “good hair.” In “Rooted: On Black women, beauty, hair, and embodiment,” Kristin Denise Rowe, Assistant Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, examines the ways hair is tied to their embodied experiences for many Black women.
According to Rowe, the natural hair movement, which has gained momentum in recent years, offers a vehicle for Black women to reclaim embodied agency and interiority, in the face of misogynoir. Through this movement, Black women have created a space to rearitculate standards of beauty and to affirm their natural hair textures. However, the beauty industry has also commodified and commercialized Black women’s growing emphasis on their natural hair, with a predicted worth of over $13 billion
Overall, Rowe’s essay provides a comprehensive examination of the history, politics, and dynamic relationships to beauty culture for Black women in relation to their hair. Additionally, it acknowledges the importance of Black women’s experiences and narratives to expand and complicate ideas of beauty that shape the unique relationship of women of color to beauty culture. By understanding the complex constellation of interlocking factors that inform how Black women experience and conceptualize beauty, we can reveal what Rowe calls the intimacies, (re)negotiations, (re)articulations, and radical possibilities of Black women’s embodiment and the potentiality of “beauty” as a construct.
From precolonial Africa to the present, Black women’s hair has had political importance. Throughout the history of the Americas, Europeans used hair to demonstrate political authority over the Other. In her 2022 Sociology Compass essay “Historicizing black hair politics: A framework for contextualizing race politics,” Sylviane Ngandu-Kalenga Greensword, a Postdoctoral Fellow at Texas Christian University’s (TCU) Race and Reconciliation Initiative (RRI), explores these dynamics. Greensword discusses the intersectionality of race and gender in the political oppression of Black hair, as well as resistance to this oppression. The essay also explains that Black hair culture has progressed from enslavement and colonialism to globalization and decolonization, yet Black women still suffer hair discrimination and policies that privilege white hair practices.
Black women have long used West and Central African practices of hairstyling and ornamentation to resist these injustices. For example,in the 1780s, then-Governor Miró issued the “Edict of Good Government,” which forced women of color to either cover their hair with a handkerchief or comb it flat or face incarceration. In response, Black women began to wear “tignons,” elegant turbans that emphasized their textured hair rather than concealed it.
The tignon laws exemplify the weaponization of hair in order to control, hypersexualize, and defeminize Black women, denying them any claim to womanhood, femininity, or piety. As a form of political resistance, Black people praise their hair as beautiful, redefining normative standards of human value. Black people make a political statement about this (de)valuation through the time, money, energy, and care dedicated to their bodies via hairstyling.
Hair is an important part of Black women’s identities. However, for decades, the categorization of Black hair diversity into good and bad hair has been a source of disagreement. Eurocentric societies value long, straight, and silky as good, while they consider tightly coiled and kinky bad. In her 2011 Howard Journal of Communications piece, “Hair as Race: Why ‘‘Good Hair’’ May Be Bad for Black Females,” Cynthia L. Robinson, Black Studies Department Head and Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, unpacks this “hair hierarchy.”
Robinson argues that the concept of good and bad hair is based in the color complex, which refers to some Black people’s self-hatred and disdain for their Blackness. This complex is the product of years of enslavement and a lack of collective African identity, which causes Black people to discount physical attributes that reveal African heritage, notably skin color and hair texture. Rated on a scale of good to bad, good hair communicates European, Native American, or Asian trace ancestry through wavy or straight texture, and is likely to be long. In contrast, society categorizes tightly coiled, thicker, short hair that plainly reveals African heritage as bad. Thus, Black women have had to develop their own beauty standards that are particular to their hair textures, allowing for more creative range in popular Black hairstyles.
The dichotomy of good and bad hair is still a challenge for Black women. As Robinson explains, hair valuations are harmful to Black women because they elevate white beauty standards while undervaluing Black women’s hair textures. These labels also reflect the color complex and Eurocentric beauty ideals that have devalued Black women’s natural hair textures. Therefore, we must reject these harmful aesthetic standards and embrace the uniqueness of Black hair in order to move forward.
The post Black Hair: Black Feminist Perspectives appeared first on Blackfeminisms.com.
Article tags
Nick Cave is embarking on a solo North American tour this fall. He will be joined by Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood.
— Read the restCave's solo tour begins in Asheville, North Carolina on September 19th and features shows at Washington, D.C.'s Lincoln Theatre, Chicago's Auditorium Theatre, Austin's Moody Center, and New York's Kings and Beacon Theatres before wrapping up with a two-night stand at Los Angeles' Orpheum Theatre on October 27th and 28th.
Ana and I were chatting last night and we’ve noticed something about a lot of the limited edition, 2023 pens. Let me add a few photos…
Did I miss the green for 2023 memo? There are a few interesting finds that aren’t green. For instance the Limited Edition Carousel from Ferris Wheel Press ($90 via Jenni Bick) is rosy. The new TWSBI Eco is Persian Green ($32.99 via Pen Boutique), but it’s definitely got more blue in it. And Lamy, well, they’ve just decided to reissue previous colors on different bodies.
So what do you think? Is green giving you good vibes for this year? Are there other limited edition pens you’re digging in other colors?
The post It’s not easy being green. appeared first on The Well-Appointed Desk.
The European Commission has laid out another piece of its Circular Economy Action Plan today — adopting a proposal to set common EU rules which are intended to make it easier for consumers to get faulty products repaired.
The “right to repair” measures are aimed at reducing e-waste by preventing repairable products from being prematurely junked.
A Commission proposal last year set out to expand the bloc’s ecodesign rules. The right to repair rules are designed to build on that. The EU wants the full sweep of policies to promote longer tech product lifespans to boost sustainability and work toward its headline goal of being carbon neutral by 2050. (Aka the European Green Deal.)
Goods for which EU reparability requirements currently exist include household washing machines and washer-dryers, dishwashers, refrigerating appliances, electronic displays, vacuum cleaners, and servers and data storage. But mobile phones, cordless phones and tablets are slated to soon be added to the list — once respective ecodesign reparability requirements are adopted by the bloc’s lawmakers. So the consumer electronics industry is certainly in the frame.
A right to repair for consumer kit including mobiles and tablets was floated by the Commission back in 2020 — when the EU’s executive said electronics and ICT would be a priority for the expansion of the Ecodesign Directive to help tackle the growing scourge of e-waste.
Today’s package of measures propose a supportive framework to wrap around specific reparability requirements and encourage the development of the necessary services.
“Over the last decades, replacement has often been prioritised over repair whenever products become defective and insufficient incentives have been given to consumers to repair their goods when the legal guarantee expires. The proposal will make it easier and more cost-effective for consumers to repair as opposed to replace goods,” the Commission wrote in a press release. “Additionally, more demand will translate into a boost to the repair sector while incentivising producers and sellers to develop more sustainable business models.”
The proposed measures include a new consumer right to repair both for products that are under guarantee and those no longer covered by a legal guarantee.
“Today’s proposal will ensure that more products are repaired within the legal guarantee, and that consumers have easier and cheaper options to repair products that are technically repairable (such as vacuum cleaners, or soon, tablets and smartphones) when the legal guarantee has expired or when the good is not functional anymore as a result of wear and tear,” the Commission suggested.
For covered tech products still under warranty, sellers will be required to offer repair except when it is more expensive than replacement. While, beyond the legal guarantee, the Commission said EU consumers will get a new set of rights and tools to “make ‘repair’ an easy and accessible option”.
Here’s a summary of the main measures in the Commission proposal:
Additionally today, the Commission announced measures targeting ‘greenwashing’ — via a Green Claims Directive — proposing common criteria for environmental claims by product manufacturers in a bid to combat the flood of misleading marketing that’s sprung up to feed off consumer concerns about climate change.
The bloc is already on the way to making USB-C a common charger standard after lawmakers backed a proposal to further shrink mobile e-waste last year.
Speaking during a press conference to announce the dual proposals — both of which will need the backing of the European Parliament and Council before they can be adopted as EU law — the bloc’s justice and environmental commissioners, Didier Reynders and Virginijus Sinkevičius, said the measures are intended to work together to drive sustainability.
“This proposal is the latest in a series of measures to make the ‘right to repair’ a reality,” said Reynders. “First, we needed to ensure that there were more and more repairable products on the market. This is what we did with the proposal for a Regulation on eco-design, or eco-design of sustainable products… Secondly, it was also important to enable consumers to make sustainable choices based on reliable information.
“This is what we wanted to improve with the proposal “Empowering consumers for the green transition”, also adopted in March 2022. And finally, with the proposal for a Green Claims Directive… Our proposal is the last piece of the puzzle to ensure access to repair in the after-sales phase. To make repair easier, more accessible, and more attractive.”
The repair proposal aims to empower EU consumers to ask for a free repair of a faulty product when it’s under warranty (so up to two years after purchase) — which must be provided by the manufacturer if it’s less or the same cost as a full replacement.
In the case of goods that break down out of warranty, Reynders said the goal is to make it cheaper and easier for consumers to obtain a repair. A Commission Q&A on the plan suggests there will be an obligation on manufacturers to repair a product for 5-10 years after purchase (depending on the type of product) — unless a repair is technically impossible.
“The rule will be clear: The producer will no longer be able to refuse to repair your washing machine, unless repairing it is technically impossible. In other words, the producers will be obliged to look into the repair options,” he suggested. “This obligation will apply to goods that are repairable by design in the EU. Such as a washing machine, dishwasher or TV and soon also smartphones or tablets.
“This obligation will apply to the goods that are directly covered by any repairability requirements under EU law, such as the rules on Ecodesign. And we will continue to add more product groups to this list in the future, as we want Ecodesign products to become the norm. You can therefore notice the strong interconnection between today’s proposal and the Ecodesign proposal.”
“Producers will also have to inform consumers about this obligation and availability of their repair services so that consumers know about their rights,” Reynders added. “The producers will therefore be obliged to repair a product, even if the consumers caused the damage themselves. For this reason, producers can charge a price for repair.”
Per Reynders, the only scenario where a manufacturer will be exempt from the obligation to repair is when repair is impossible — such as when the goods are damaged in a way that makes repair technically unfeasible.
He said the proposal aims to open the door to the development of the repair sector — since consumers will not be obliged to go only to the manufacturer for a repair.
“They will also be able to turn to independent repairers and find other repair services that better meet their needs or offer more attractive options,” he added. “We are therefore removing the obstacles that still deter too many consumers from having repairs done. The obligations and solutions we are presenting with this text will help to reverse this trend.”
A Q&A at the end of the briefing raised questions about the cost of repair — with a member of the press pointing out that cost frequently puts consumers off from trying to repair an item vs buying a new one. On this, Reynders said last year’s Eco Design proposal will be key — suggesting that, over time, it will drive down the cost of repairs by requiring manufacturers to bake repairability and sustainability into product design.
“It means that it’s possible to really cut significantly the cost of repair,” he said. “If a product is designed to be repairable, if there’s access to different parts, components, if you can open up a device. Because often — in the sound sector for example, audio equipment, it is not possible to actually open up a device — you can’t actually get inside it yourself. So the Eco Design approach should simplify things there.”
On greenwashing, the EU’s proposal aims to introduce “minimum requirements” for businesses that make voluntary environmental claims — in the areas of substantiation, communication, and verification.
“Companies will have to ensure the reliability of their voluntary environmental claims, and communicate their claims in a transparent way. Their claims will need to be checked by an independent verifier against the requirements of the Directive. The verifier will then issue a certificate of compliance recognised across the EU,” the Commission said in a Q&A on the Directive.
“By putting in place this common set of rules within the EU internal market, the proposal will give a competitive advantage to companies who make a genuine effort to develop environment-friendly products, services and organisational practices, and lessen their impact on the environment,” it also suggested, adding that it expects the directive to reduce the risk of legal fragmentation of the single market and save costs for businesses that have their claims certified by an accredited verifier — as well as boosting the credibility of European industries abroad.
“If you make a claim as a company, you will need to be able to prove that claim,” said Sinkevičius, speaking during today’s press conference. “So you will have to show that it’s based on science. And that it is reliable. You will have to be specific and you will need to submit your claim for checks by accredited verifiers to ensure it complies with the new directive — and of course you will need to communicate this information in a manner that’s clear and transparent.
“Taken together, these actions should prevent misleading claims from reaching consumers. They will also make life easier for consumers protection authorities once the claim appears on the market.”
Additional measures in the Commission proposal aim to rein in the proliferation of eco labels that have sprung up touting eye-catching green claims to reel in environmentally conscious consumers. “There are around 230 environmental labels on the EU market and no wonder that consumers are confused,” added Sinkevičius. “This proliferation also hinders sustainable business operating across borders and fragments our single market.
“Under new rules we will only allow new public schemes that work at the EU level. We have to mobilise the resources. We have to work together on reliable EU labels — such as the EU Eco label — and if companies want to bring in new private scheme it will need to be better than the ones that are already in place. So there should be a place for labels that show exceptional performance on environmental sustainability but only in well justified cases.”
The proposal comes armed with “teeth”, per the commissioner — who said Member State agencies will be empowered to set “dissuasive” penalties for dyed-in-the-wool greenwashers.
During the Q&A, he was asked whether carbon offsets would be banned under the Green Claims Directive given many such schemes have been found to be worthless, at best. (And given offsetting does not actually reduce carbon emissions — whereas massive reductions in CO2 are absolutely required if humanity is to avoid climate disaster.)
Sinkevičius said the proposal would not ban carbon offsetting claims altogether. But he said “full” information would have to be provided to consumers to stand up the claims being made and also provided to an independent verifier to check such projects are delivering as claimed.
Europe tools up for the repairable future by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Green Li-ion says its battery recycling machines are the “size of a small house,” so it’s no wonder the Singapore-based startup needed to top up on funds. It’d only raised about $15 million ahead of its latest cash infusion.
This week, Green Li-ion announced a $20.5 million “pre-Series B” round led by climate-tech investor TRIREC. The startup said other investors, including SOSV and Equinor Ventures (the VC arm of the Norway-owned fossil fuel giant), also chipped in.
The deal boosts Green Li-ion’s post-money valuation to $187 million after just three years, chief executive Leon Farrant told TechCrunch. The startup’s logo is (you guessed it!) a green lion.
The new cash will help the startup scale production of its recycling tech, which the firm says can process “100% of all used lithium batteries” and pop out precursor cathode active material that’ll eventually go into fresh lithium-ion batteries.
Lithium is in high demand and mining the metal wreaks havoc on the environment, making recycling tech a crucial tool in lowering the footprint of things like electric cars and storage for renewable energy.
Image Credits: Green Li-ion
Green Li-ion doesn’t recycle batteries itself; it licenses its tech to battery makers and recyclers, including Aleon and TES (which is owned by SK, the South Korea-based fossil fuel giant). Green Li-ion aims to crank out 50 recycling units per year via two factories — one in Houston, Texas and another in Singapore.
As for that “pre-Series B,” Farrant said the startup has split its Series B into two parts, which encompasses the raise announced this week and another in about nine months. “Due to our relatively low levels of fund raising to date,” the founder added, the startup “needed to draw a line in the sand and establish a valuation increase for the larger portion of the raise.”
Rawr? Green Li-ion recharges with $20.5M to scale its recycling tech by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch
FreshRSS