Positive Power of Principled Profit
Volume 4, Number 6—February, 2007

Positive Power Spotlight: Pedal People

Can you believe it? A bicycle-powered trash hauling, recycling, and grocery delivery company? And in New England, no less, where the winters can be quite a challenge for any bicyclist, let alone one pulling a couple of hundred pounds of freight in a trailer.

I think this is sooo cool. I had the Pedal People co-founders (Ruthy Woodring and Alex Jarrett) as guests on my Principled Profit radio show a couple of weeks ago and I was flabbergasted when they told me they once hauled a greenhouse on two bicycle trailers!

Based in Northampton, Massachusetts, and providing hauling services (trash and recycling to the transfer station, groceries and compost to individual customers) in that immediate area, these folks don't even own a car. They bike in all kids of weather, using simple but effective weatherproofing gear.

Go look at the pictures on their gallery page, http://www.pedalpeople.com/index.php?page=12, and then read the "ten reasons" page, http://www.pedalpeople.com/index.php?page=14.

If ever there was a business that cried out to be widely replicated, this environmentally friendly hauling company gets my vote. Woodring told me that they know of only 11 other bicycle-powered freight companies in the U.S., but no other trash haulers.

So, if you'd like to start an environmentally benign business that keeps you in top physical shape, this is a model you can easily replicate; if it can be done in snowy New England, it can be done a lot of other places.

Another Recommended Book: Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E.F. Schumacher

Having sung the praises last month of a book that invited businesses to get bigger, it's only fair to put out the other perspective: that human-scale enterprises tend to be considerably more people-centered, to be involved in their communities, and to use resources in more appropriate ways.

During and after high school and college, I read a lot of these books: authors like Ralph Borsodi, Hazel Henderson, Earnest Callenbach, and of course, E.F. Schumacher. Schumacher's most famous work is Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered; he has also written several other books, including Good Works and A Guide for the Perplexed.

Published 34 years ago and still in print, Small Is Beautiful was one of the first calls for economic and environmental sustainability to reach a mass audience. In places, he is eerily prescient, as when he predicts a violent struggle over oil if our society fails to curb its addiction, and discusses the stupidity of the then-mainstream economic perspective that failed to account properly for resource depletion, and also failed to recognize the consequences of creating islands of great wealth in a sea of poverty.

In his own words: "they automatically endorse the ecological stupidity of industrial man and his love affair with the terrible simplicities of quantification."

I believe it was Schumacher who coined the phrase, "appropriate technology"; certainly his books explore the power of simple devices from machines to banking and currency systems to help lift up a local populace.

And while of course our perspectives have shifted over the many decades since this book first came to light, it is definitely worth revisiting every few years.

If you'd like to buy this book, please follow this link to buy from a BookSense independent bookseller:
http://www.booksense.com/index.jsp?affiliateId=FrugalFun