Enterprise Models to Change the World

These are the companion notes for my presentation to London Zeitgeist Day 2019, “A Transitionary Enterprise” later today, which is a follow-up to my presentation last year.

This will cover a brief update on my previous talk, look at some practical models for systems that we can build now to meet our basic needs sustainably, then at the kind of social/organisational and financial models that can serve as a stable structure to such projects.

The general idea being to find some paths for positive action in a global situation that currently looks extremely bleak, so more focus on the ‘good news’ than last year.

Part 0: What’s happening in Energy?

There are a wide range of contending solutions for energy storage (and generation of course) that were not mentioned in the free book Our Renewable Future because they have not yet been proven to be practical at the large scale needed for our electricity grids and industry.

Examples that have been tried include:

Flywheels – very good at balancing fast changes and keeping Alternating Current synchronised, but have low energy density.

Compressed air storage – similarly has a low energy density, but a few sites have saved on costs of constructing tanks by building them into large existing underground caverns, which obviously don’t show up often where you want them to, much like sites for pumped-hydroelectric storage.

There are of course many more such technologies, and we do need a diverse mosaic of them wherever locally practical, in order to relieve some demand on lithium deposits and rivers that could be dammed. However, if we want to meet the kinds of demands of our global energy grid, whether we use very intermittent renewable power or overly stable nuclear power in the short run, we will need some ‘better value’ systems to both manage changes in electricity demand and fuel machines such as tractors that are too energy intensive to use batteries.

It appears that electro-chemical batteries can’t get much better for energy density, no matter how much we innovate, due to the physical limits of what elements we have to work with.

One of the top contenders for balancing our grid at the moment is Cryogenic Energy Storage, i.e. compressing air so far that it becomes liquefied, and takes up nearly 1000 times less space.

This has had great improvements in efficiency recently, by using insulated hot and cold sinks that capture and save the large amounts of heat transferred in compression and expansion processes.

From powerpulse.net

Currently CES is most practical for grid balancing due to the low cost of the simple mechanical systems involved, making it easily scalable.

There have been motors developed in the past fuelled by liquid nitrogen, as it is far easier to transport than hydrogen, however its energy density per weight is lower than that of modern lithium batteries.

There is a better renewable fuel solution available however, better even than ‘E-Diesel’ on air pollution and production efficiency.

That is Ammonia. Not traditionally thought of as a fuel, it acts as a stable storage medium for Hydrogen, which on its own needs to be stored at dangerously high pressures and leaks out of any tank it is placed into, due to being comprised of the smallest molecule known.

From Nitrogen+Syngas Magazine, via ammoniaindustry.com

Due to ammonia’s existing use in production of artificial nitrogen fertilisers for conventional agriculture, there is a full-scale transport infrastructure available to use with it, and so there is also very active development on to make its renewable production more efficient. Currently the industry is almost entirely supplied by hydrogen separated from natural gas, so there is support for it to become renewable whether it is used as a fuel or not, due to that demand from agriculture.

The simplest way we can store energy has been around for a long time, and can be supported by anybody at a home level, but is currently being eroded by installation of new gas ‘combi’ boilers. That is hot water storage. Every insulated hot water tank serves as a small buffer against shocks in energy supply, which can be extremely important in winters of temperate countries.

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers published a report on energy storage in 2014, highlighting this problem.

Drawing your attention again to Peter Hadfield’s Youtube channel, where he has posted some excellent videos explaining the science behind global warming and climate change too clear up many misguided criticisms online.

Over the new year Peter posted a couple of videos trying to convince conservatives of why they shouldn’t shy away from climate science based on some party-line of the moment. The video’s argument is based on previous support from conservatives, notably Margaret Thatcher, who was the first politician to champion the cause of addressing climate change on the world stage, and the large number of business opportunities.

Unfortunately Peter began the video by stating that what followed was opinion, and did not pay his usual attention to the rigour of checking scientific sources, which I can understand as the climate is closer to his field of geology, however I see it as a bit of a cop-out and lost learning opportunity.

Some of the bad ideas spread as a result:
Peter gave a couple of examples of energy storage technologies that showed up in Science Magazine -

• Aluminium-Graphene batteries were shown to have an excellent lifetime, but a low energy density that puts them in a class between typical rechargeable batteries and super-capacitors
• This may be good for a small device charged often, but is of no use to bulk storage or heavy industry, especially since graphene production is nowhere near fast enough to meet such a demand.
• Ammonia fuel cells were shown to improve on energy efficiency for that fuel production, but with a great decrease in production speed. LINK
• So a lot of energy and materials would need to be spent on making these, giving a poor measure of energy stored on energy invested.

Peter hand-waves such problems as simply taking more development, ignoring physical limits and the scale of our energy needs that I highlighted last year. I sincerely hope that enough viewers will point him to Without Hot Air or Our Renewable Future for him to take notice.

ORF Fig.3.1; US final energy consumption by fuel.

Close to the global average - We still need to increase our renewable power generation by 5 times in order to meet our electricity needs, and 5 times again to meet our fuel-needs, assuming no growth in overall demand, for a total increase of 25 times our current renewable supply. If we use an inefficient way of producing ammonia, that may be doubled again to 50 times.
It is vital that we reduce our consumption otherwise we will need to use even more fossil fuels to build these technologies, when we only have low-quality reserves left.

Since the video is aimed at conservatives, it's understandable that the only alternative given to a false dichotomy of popular irrational left or right-wing viewpoints is a less absurd conservative approach, however it is still disappointing to hear Peter's apparent ignorance to any other arguments out there.

Fortunately there are already some very practical plans for transitioning our economy into a more stable one using renewable energy that happen to come from relatively left-wing positions (if non-traditional, libertarian ones).

One that covers a high-level economic viewpoint is explained in the book “Enough Is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources” by Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill.
Published in 2013, this was based on the findings of their Steady State Economy Conference in Leeds back in 2010, and does an excellent job of putting Ecological Economics into simple terms.

This is a number 1 book to gift to someone involved in business, government or third sector organisations who needs to understand how not only is continual economic growth unsustainable, but that we can build an economy that prospers without growing.

For a more practical guide to grass-roots methods in developing such an economy, you can do little better than “The Transition Companion: Making your community more resilient in uncertain times” by Rob Hopkins.

You don’t need to be technically-minded to have a big impact on this transition however, as shown in an excellent example towards the end of Enough Is Enough, about some action research supported by the Population Media Center:

Albert Bandura, a widely cited psychologist, has demonstrated that mass-media role models can be powerful teachers of attitudes and behavior. As the characters in PMC’s soap operas deal with the consequences of their decisions regarding sex—exposure to sexually transmitted disease, treatment of wives and daughters, and pregnancy—the audience gets to live vicariously and absorb some take-home lessons. Audiences cringe as “bad-guy” characters make dubious decisions and their lives spiral out of control. But the truly influential characters are those who overcome obstacles and uncertainties to make positive changes in their lives.

Some of the plots are heartwarming, but not nearly as heartwarming as the results. For example, PMC broadcast 257 episodes of the radio drama Yeken Kignit (Looking over One’s Daily Life) in Ethiopia between 2002 and 2004. An independent study, which surveyed both listeners and non-listeners before and after the program aired, found:

• Nearly half of Ethiopia’s population tuned into Yeken Kignit regularly.

• The fertility rate fell from 5.4 to 4.3 children per woman.

• Demand for contraceptives increased by 157 percent.

• Listeners were five times more likely than non-listeners to know three or more methods of family planning.

• There was a 50 percent increase in communication between mothers and their children about sexuality issues.

Source given - William Ryerson, “The Effectiveness of Entertainment Mass Media in Changing Behavior” (Population Media Center)

The difference was not just numerical though, as highlighted in PMC’s report:

The outpouring of emotion in Ethiopia, in response to PMC’s programs, has been overwhelming. Ethiopia’s news media have run almost a hundred stories on the soap opera phenomenon PMC created. From all over the country – and even beyond the borders of Ethiopia – 15,000 letters have poured in to PMC’s office in Addis Ababa.

…

A letter from a listener discusses how the program has made her daughter safer from abduction:

“The story of Wubalem reflects clearly the harmful traditional practices in our country such as abduction and sexual violence. These practices have prevented us from sending our girls to school. We were afraid that they would be abducted. Our first child was married at the age of 14 after she was abducted. We were worrying for years as we thought that our second child would face a similar fate. The radio drama focusing on abduction and sexual violence that you have presented and the discussions conducted on these topics have aroused considerable popular indignation. The people have now strongly condemned such inhuman traditional practices. Unlike in the past, special punitive measures have been taken by community people against offenders involved in such crimes. As a result, we have no worry in sending our girls to school. Our children go to school safely and return unharmed. Please keep the program on the air.”

So with great respect to the artists who make a positive difference to the world, here’s something for the entrepreneurs and techies such as myself.

Part 1: System Models for Sustainability

How we build renewable/circular economies of energy, food, goods production, housing and funding to lead the way into a sustainable society.

Energy:

First of all, surplus renewable energy (e.g. wind) doesn’t need to only be used for the electricity grid.

Some industrial sectors that use lots of energy can be transitioned to on-demand production...

The aforementioned fuel cells can produce ammonia for fertiliser production and other uses.

Water electrolysis can do much more than just produce hydrogen:

Using salt-water creates two useful chemical by-products: chlorine and lye.

These outputs can be used as building blocks in many chemical processes, such as producing hypochlorite, the backbone of our clean water supply (as a calcium salt) and basic household cleaning (as a sodium salt), never mind the use of lye in producing soap, and there are many more possible energy conversion processes that you can use. Just don't take your chemistry advice from Tyler Durden.

Food:

Here are some examples of key technologies in a circular economy of food:

Bio-Gas Digesters take agricultural waste in, such as weeds and stalks, which would otherwise release methane into the atmosphere while they slowly break down, and instead put it into a tank seeded with gut bacteria, where the methane can be captured, and the end product is an organic fertiliser in liquid and slurry form.

Those outputs could make a great input to a Hydroponic system, where plants are grown without soil as a medium, resulting in great water savings and lower pollution by having no run-off.

Finally, Fungiculture has been shown to work with some industrial food wastes, as I’ll describe shortly.

Here’s how a system that links up these systems with more well-known aspects of a local food economy could work:

A great aspect of this system is that you can start anywhere and build out across the web in what’s called a “vertically integrated” industry in typical linear-economic language.

Circular Fungiculture:

One good case study for this is the Green Grow initiative started in the north of Scotland, where delicious oyster mushrooms are being grown on spent grains from distilleries and coffee shops, in shipping containers kept warm by low-level waste heat from those related processes.
The remaining mycelium (the fungal equivalent of a plant's root structure) is used as an additive to compost heaps:

The mushrooms have been sold to local restaurants and made into vegan ready-meals for sale on their crowdfunding page.

One of the best things about the scalability of mushroom cultivation versus greenhouse growing is that mushrooms don't need sunlight in order to grow, so they can sit happily at the very bottom of a 'vertical farming' installation.


Automated Small-Scale Agriculture:

Next is the FarmBot project, which could solve the gap between the low marginal cost of intensive field-based mono-crop agriculture (which unfortunately attracts pest and disease problems), and the resilience and pest-resistance of diverse small-scale food gardening (which has a high labour cost).

To do this they have designed a farming robot that fits over a raised bed, which they developed in a quite reliable strategy of making the designs open-source like the RepRap project, but only after selling enough kits to early adopters to get their business started on stable grounds.

Basic kits cost $3500 at the time of writing, and they calculated that its pay-back period vs buying veg: about 5 years for their standard model, or evenless for a larger raised bed.

That sounds like a big cost, however they have recently introduced payment plans.

Systems such as these could be excellent if expanded further in size.

Oil-Free Tractors and Grain-Free Happy Eggs:

Then for field and orchard agriculture to grow the few things that you can’t get into a hydroponics basin or a raised bed, there is also a great improved composting & soil-tilling system that was described by the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia a few years back.

Geoff Lawton first went to visit Vermont Compost to learn about their amazing system that produced chicken eggs without any grain input, while providing a high standard of living to the chickens, where unlike typical ‘free range’ egg production the males were not culled, nor were the chickens even fenced in, as shown in this article & video.

I would embed the video, but it has been restricted on Vimeo to only play on their blog, so please do go and watch it. Just don't mind the overly-dramatic intro music. 😝

Afterwards Geoff and the PRIA then put together and tested a system that did this on a smaller scale for individual farms, while moving the chickens along in a mobile run known as a ‘chicken tractor’, as they turn the soil in their natural bug-foraging behaviour, without the high fuel cost of a tractor and causing less damage than a plough, although moving at a snail-pace more suitable to a wind-powered Strandbeest.

Geoff's "Chicken Tractor on Steroids" driving compost heaps across a field.

Restoring the Wilds:

Finally, for the great task of restoring our desertified lands destroyed by conventional farming practices, there is a great example of a group who have created a quite odd circular economy of supportive processes.

Earth for Life run wellbeing and wildlife skills courses in north-east Scotland, taking groups on woodland excursions to learn craft skills, wildlife identification, and appreciation of forestry, while restoring landscapes, clearing invasive species and supporting participants well-being through immersion in nature.

Recycling Gadgets:

As for a materials and production economy, here is a more structured look at a model that I alluded to last year on recycling materials into the start of a localised resource-based economy as a microcosm:

Some organisations do this up and down the country, and wherever there isn’t an electronics recycling firm, there is money to be made.

You’re unlikely to find a niche by now except in developing countries, however this provides options for extending the model into local economy.

The parts on casting injection moulding plates are hypothetical, and something that I’ve been planning to work on locally for several years, but have been sidetracked by so many other projects and problems, that it might not come to fruition until next year along with the connected plastic recycling system.

Hackerspace-Library-Café Complex:

Meanwhile, local workshops/fab-labs/hackerspaces/makerspaces can use those resources from a recycling enterprise in creative ways.

Repair Cafés keep devices working and in circulation, libraries and sharing schemes save on consumption, and all of these can draw donations or membership fees to financially sustain themselves, a great synergistic model of building local resilience being proven across the world, but certainly quite technical to set up.

Co-Housing:

As proven everywhere that a serious approach is taken to housing a group efficiently, such as in hotels, student dorms, ships and military bases, the best way to meet basic needs of things like laundry and cooking is not to give every living unit its own fully-fitted kitchen & laundry, but to invest in high-quality shared facilities. This of course works best when the neighbours have some shared goals or values that tie them together, as with some examples above, or employees of a company.

Photo from the German research vessel POLARSTERN via Wikimedia Commons

The housing market here is increasingly difficult for young people to get into, and minimalist living is a rising trend in the west.
This creates demand for more of this type of accommodation, but the absurd land & housing prices also make it difficult to get into the business as a developer. So, better ways to approach this may be through lobbying for changes in building standards and land law reform, so that we can have co-housing at a comfortable scale that supports local communities, unlike so many failed high-rise projects.

Enough is Enough puts forward a case for businesses to have to buy permits in order to use natural resources or pollute, to be paid to the rest of society as a dividend, rather than buying permanent monopolies on parcels of land, but that is too much of a tangent to go on here.

Economies of Scale Example - Tesla Motors:

Paradoxically, it costs a lot more to start a business if you want to sell something cheaply, due to the investment to set up manufacturing.
For producing some things, such as microprocessors, the basic investment is so high that centralised production makes sense, especially with the product being so light.
Without that automation, new products come with a far higher price, due to labour costs, and when companies are pushed to grow so far that they over-invest, then they try to create demand for their products with advertisements.

When that doesn't work, and they claim to be “too big to fail”, they beg for government bail-outs.

This is why Tesla Motors often received misguided criticism for starting by selling luxury cars to wealthy early adopters.
However, Elon Musk had set out a "Master Plan" in 2006 to:

1. Build a low-volume sports car, which would by necessity be expensive.
2. Use that money to build an affordable car
3. Use that money to build an even more affordable car
4. While doing the above, also provide zero-emission electric power generation options.

and as noted in his 2016 update:

The reason we had to start off with step 1 was that it was all I could afford to do with what I made from PayPal. I thought our chances of success were so low that I didn't want to risk anyone's funds in the beginning but my own. The list of successful car company startups is short. As of 2016, the number of American car companies that haven't gone bankrupt is a grand total of two: Ford and Tesla. Starting a car company is idiotic and an electric car company is idiocy squared.

(Emphasis added.) Thankfully, Tesla doesn't seem to be going down the self-destructive path of seeking ever greater sales growth, mentioning in that update that once their self-driving tech is mature enough, they will pivot from the paradigm from selling cars for ownership to maintaining a fleet for car-sharing. Being a shareholder-owned company that could face rebellion from investors, time will tell whether this intent succeeds.

Part 2: Sustainable Organisations

Dan & Rob ask in Enough is Enough, how can we keep industries at a scale that’s just right?

EiE Figure 14.1: Tending towards a Steady State Economy

Without growing to that Goldilocks scale, economies don’t meet their citizens’ needs.
This unfortunately generates the fallacious economic argument that (global) economic growth improves the lives of the poor because "a rising tide lifts all boats", which isn't much help if you don't have a boat.

Dan & Rob argue that, with wealth divides only becoming greater with economic growth, and following research from Wilkinson & Pickett showing how inequality is destroying societal health, we would be better served to focus on improving equality within and between societies, than suicidally trying to increase all production.

Without soft limits to growth, we wreck the planet and reach the hard limits of non-renewable resource quantity & reserve quality.
So we need organisational structures that aim for the goal (high standard of living), not just one means of achieving it (economic growth).

Old and New Means of Trade:
In media pointing out how fractional-reserve banking leads to an inflationary spiral unless accompanied by economic growth, we've often heard a myth that money lending only occurred in history after currency was invented.

In his book “Debt: The First 5000 Years”, David Graeber explores how our modern systems of money and credit came about. He first explains the myth of barter, a nonsensical idea that thousands of years ago people regularly traded different types of objects directly with each other, such as an ox for several chickens or robes.

David shows a progression in anthropology from hunter-gatherer gift economies to agricultural town-scale credit systems.

In gift economies, people help their family members out of loyalty and need, without an expectation of being paid back, as they knew each other closely and have an interdependent relationship, nevertheless gaining social status/credit for altruistic behaviour.
When such existing societies were visited by European explorers, they even found the idea of trade offensive, as to immediately give something back in exchange for a gift offered is to reject a friendship - to say that you might as well never see the person again.

When humanity formed into large static communities based around agriculture, they necessarily involved interactions with strangers, and so formalised IOU systems were set up in order to establish trust, where people who did not know each other as closely would mark tally sticks in units of grain.

Money and markets appeared not separately from government, but when forced upon communities by empires; a fact that causes great discomfort to some right-libertarians.
For a simple example, requiring coins minted with a monarch's head as a tax, while issuing those coins as payment to soldiers in order to ensure that citizens would fall in line to feed a standing army.

David gives some historical examples of this such as the Madagascan people being forced to pay for the costs of having been invaded and 'civilised' by the French empire, nevertheless doing their best to resist attempts to drop a consumer culture upon them:

The colonial government was were also quite explicit (at least in their own internal policy documents), about the need to make sure that peasants had at least some money of their own left over, and to ensure that they became accustomed to the minor luxuries—parasols, lipstick, cookies—available at the Chinese shops. It was crucial that they develop new tastes, habits, and expectations; that they lay the foundations of a consumer demand that would endure long after the conquerors had left, and keep Madagascar forever tied to France.

Most people are not stupid, and most Malagasy understood exactly what their conquerors were trying to do to them. Some were determined to resist. More than sixty years after the invasion, a French anthropologist, Gerard Althabe, was able to observe villages on the east coast of the island whose inhabitants would dutifully show up at the coffee plantations to earn the money for their poll tax, and then, having paid it, studiously ignore the wares for sale at the local shops and instead turn over any remaining money to lineage elders, who would then use it to buy cattle for sacrifice to their ancestors.

Cited as: "On the tax, Jacob 1987; for the Betsimisaraka village study, Althabe 1968; for analogous Malagasy case studies, Fremigacci 1976, Rainibe 1982, Schlemmer 1983, Feeley-Harnik 1991. For colonial tax policy in Africa more generally, Forstater 2005, 2006."

As for barter, the only places we tend to see that are in very perverse and controlled circumstances, such as within prisons, between feuding groups, into countries affected by trade embargoes, or perhaps dysfunctional families competing to see who can give the best christmas gift.

Another great book that puts an aspect of money into clear wording is “Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition” by Charles Eisenstein.
The title's beginning may sound like it tends to the metaphysical, but Charles actually advances a very practical and moral argument for why credit or debt on its own is not our problem, as its core concepts tie our social bonds, but the way that monetary debt has interest applied to it causes all manner of social harm through usury.
He argues for negative interest, which is a very useful tool for stabilising a de-growing economy, as it discourages the hoarding of credit. However, such a system lends itself far better to digital currencies than coin/paper currencies, where it was referred to as demurrage currency, an awkward but nevertheless successful system (in terms of encouraging economic activity).

Thankfully, this interesting tangent leads to a modern solution...

A shop accepting the Brixton Pound local currency digitally. Image via surtr.

Local Currencies, LETS and Time Banking:

Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) are a reputation-based trading system that bridges the gap between gift economies for friends & family or neighbourly favours, and international currencies for trade with distant strangers.
It fits well at the scale of a single town, enabling trust between people who don't know each other well but are part of a larger community, and lubricating the local economy with credit, so that resources are not imported or exported so much.
Not only is it an excellent tool for encouraging industry at a sustainable scale, but it enables local control over interest rates, and a negative interest rate that slowly tends all balances to zero can be a mathematical way of expressing debt forgiveness, basic income, social dividend, or an initial alternative to charity for those who have fallen on hard times.

One way that LETS systems are protected from abuse is with an initial credit limit that expands with use, preventing someone from simply taking from a community without giving anything back.
However, they can still result in inequality if some types of goods or services are in higher demand compared to supply than others, and so people charge more for them. This is remedied somewhat by a negative interest rate, but other social checks & balances are needed along the way.

Ideally we want to get past this to a place where our needs are so readily met by infrastructure at a sustainable scale that a gift economy can extend to everyone we know, without having to worry about formal credit systems, which is utopian by current standards.
Enough is Enough supported having many local currencies to respond to local issues and support sustainable economics, rather than the authoritarian push for one global currency, what with the failure of the Euro experiment to suit individual regional needs and all the damage it has done to southern European states.

Now, we sometimes hear assertions from quite dull politicians that they believe "profit is not a dirty word", but by the very utterance of this denial, they are admitting that they are aware that it has become a dirty word, but they don't understand why.

Many people may understand the term profit to mean charging more for something than it cost you in time, energy and materials, but in a business sense this is just a return on investment. A 'Not-For-Profit' company can charge more for something than it cost to make, so long as they reinvest that extra money, pay staff with it or send it to good use in a charity.
Arguments may arise here over whether increasing the pay of some or all workers is a good use of extra money, or you might wonder if it's wise for a cooperative to buy an expensive new kitchen appliance to benefit all staff in their office, but the real organisational difference of "profit" here is over how that decision is made...


Shareholder-Owned/Publicly-Traded Corporations
A for-profit corporation is quite a different beast to your typical small trader's private company. People who hold shares in such a corporation have votes on its strategic direction in proportion to their investment, and receive dividend money skimmed from the company's positive return even without contributing anything to the process.
From Enough is Enough:

Henry Ford had a plan for improving social conditions that famously ran up against the profit mandate in 1918. Ford had declared that he wanted “to employ still more men; to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest number of people, to help them build up their lives and their homes,” instead of paying increased profits to shareholders. However, a court order forced the Ford Company to issue a special dividend to shareholders rather than reinvest the money as Henry Ford wanted.

Cited to: Matthew Doeringer, “Fostering Social Enterprise: A Historical and International Analysis,” Duke Journal of Comparative & International Law 20, no. 2 (2010): 304

Shareholders, large and small. Photo by Dunpharlain

Unfortunately, their competition for higher share prices and bigger market share also drives constant growth, leading to the aforementioned "too-big-to-fail" collapse.

The main advantage that they have in a market is also this sheer cut-throat pursuit of profit regardless of social impact, right up to committing major crimes so long as it's legal or they can get away with it.
Whether it's Texaco/Chevron dumping toxic waste in Ecuador while it's a banana republic under the thumb of the US, then fighting bitterly for years to avoid paying for it when their government changes, or any of the big food companies marketing addictive and unhealthy snacks to children, or Coca-Cola and Nestlé in particular bottling groundwater in regions with drinking water shortages, or the first-world-problem of companies like Electronic Arts putting elements of gambling with real-world money into their video games marketed at children to the point that it creates a crisis - they push what they can get away with every year until the law cracks down, and then carry on anyway claiming no guilt.


Registered Charities:
Normally thought of as the default opposite option if you want to make a positive difference in the world, and they are often recommended for Transition Town initiatives, but charities aren't without their faults.
To set one up in the UK, a group must first register a limited company and then apply for charitable status. This can be a complex process if you don't have experience with it, and means that you are subject to both company law and charity law.
Some advantages are tax exemptions, and how a mandated rotation of board members keeps talent fresh.
As disadvantages:

• their trading activities are restricted,
• sometimes got around by having a trading subsidiary (which takes yet more time to set up), but they generally tend to be dependent on grants and donations,
• rotation of board members can exhaust a pool of talented people after some years, depending on the constitution's terms,
• the usual requirement of an all-volunteer board for strategic decisions means that paid managers have less input and decisions are made slowly,
• they can be tricky to set up, with a constitution to write
• and with a minimum size of having:
• A Chairman
• A Secretary
• A Treasurer
• and other spare trustees
• and their accounts must be independently assessed and publicly reported every year.

This can seem very daunting to a small group, however there can be some systems to lower these requirements a bit:

Scotland created an organisational form called a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation (SCIO), which relaxes some rules such as paying for an accountant to check the annual accounts, while simplifying the two set-up steps of forming a company and gaining charitable status, into one step that bakes the status into the type of organisation.

More countries are following suit with this simplified charity form, but then there are also other legal options arising...

Public-Benefit Corporations (CIC/GmbH/B.Corp/L3C):
While 'Social Enterprise' isn't a legal status, just a way of operating, benefit corps tend to be a highly suitable hybrid structure to use, and relatively new.
For example the UK's Community Interest Company designation, like any other private company, can be a one-man-band, keeping tight control over operations, but with a registered interest in benefiting the public.
They take far fewer people to set up, however, they don't get charitable tax advantages and can't be a politically-motivated organisation or take part in lobbying.


Cooperatives:
Co-ops are one of the most diverse categories of enterprise, which can be set up to be owned or managed by their employees, customers, or other types of members.

Their democratic nature leans them towards stability and sensible decision-making, avoiding overly risky and harmful actions while still remaining competitive.
For example, twice as many co-ops survive their first 5 years of operation as compared to other types of business, and at the start of the 2008 financial crisis, cooperative banks made up around a third of European lending, and expanded while other lenders cut back, yet by the end of the crisis they only accounted for 8% of losses.
They tend to keep to a sustainable scale, and when broader co-operation is needed they federate with secondary cooperatives of which the members are other cooperatives. Staying small may be seen as a weakness to insane growth economists, but in our new economy it is a great strength.

Community Supported Agriculture:
In addition to the community-funded renewable energy schemes that I mentioned last year, a particular type of co-operative that deserves mentioning here is CSA, commonly known as a 'vegetable box scheme', whereby members subscribe to local farms, getting some decision-making power in what gets grown, and receiving a regular delivery of local seasonal food.

A weekly offering from Kate Edwards' farm in Iowa, by USDA

The benefits are great and varied -

• Saving yourself time, energy and wasteful packaging costs that would otherwise be spent at a supermarket,
• Making a huge difference to your environmental footprint by reducing the distance that most of your food travels,
• and supporting the sustainability of local farms, where it might otherwise be difficult to set up a pest-resistant diverse growing program when the prevailing culture pushes them towards monoculture cash crops.

One of the challenges with these schemes, as I have heard from local CSA farmers, can simply be many over-worked folk's lack of knowledge and confidence in cooking.
For example, for many people where I live, their culinary knowledge extends to stovies or beans on toast, and I have been asked by someone else at a supermarket checkout before what I was going to do with an aubergine that was amongst my pile of vegetables and junk food, so I gave them some tips on tasty omelettes and curries (never mind moussaka). I don't mean that in any elitist way, it's just a sad shame that many people never got an opportunity or encouragement to learn how to cook good food.


Guides to setting up:
There are yet more organisational options, and I haven't enough time to do them justice here, but thankfully other people have already spent much time producing in-depth guides to setting up these kinds of organisations.
Your best bet for guidance would be to contact your local equivalent to our 'Third Sector Interface' or 'Business Gateway' shops for face-to-face advice, or equivalent of Companies House or the charity regulator OSCR.
You can find many videos online explaining these issues, but in other countries you should ideally go to a local organisation to make sure that you get any nuances of local law right.


In case there's anyone left who I haven't offended yet:

Comparing the usual green-living rhetoric with more effective measures: having one fewer child has 73 times more impact on your carbon footprint than eating a plant-based diet - via Lund University.

While there is truth in this, that parents in industrialised nations have a huge effect on global resource use per child that they have, this kind of persuasive approach may inflame xenophobic conflicts across the world.
Thanks to news of islamic migrants seeking to out-breed christians, whether reflective of reality or not, a growing white nationalist crowd, who have seen their insane opposites, have been spreading memes of 'whites' being 'replaced'.
These groups have thus seen encouragement of family planning in Europe as 'genocidal', and their ostracism from society has lead directly to the Christchurch mosque shooting, as detailed in Brenton Tarrant's own stale-meme filled manifesto.
To any of those nutters, unfortunately his violent action will likely just intensify those sentiments among muslims, even if they were a small minority before.
As the Demographic Transition theory has shown, deaths encourage birth rates, where war-torn countries have some of the highest birth rates, as those who are left over-compensate for the loss of their kin.
More recent research in this field is suggesting that the cross-generational spread of cultures and religions that promote high fertility, could result in an evolutionary pressure encouraging those cultures.
Like it or not, the 'developed' world is the main problem when it comes to consumption levels, but they are the last people who should be criticised on having children, with below-replacement birth rates.

Some of the best things a concerned citizen can do at this point to promote sustainability, are to support groups that are building hospitals, schools and supporting women's rights in high-birthrate countries, and beating those fertility-promoting religions such as catholicism and islam through education and child protection.
While some of you might expect free education to eventually give rise to an enlightened culture that responsibly handles family planning, this doesn't have enough effect where parents involved in insular cults and religious sects indoctrinate their children and restrict their exposure to other viewpoints. Where their practices are damaging to the whole of society, this needs to be recognised for the child abuse that it is.