Claude Fussler (Speech at the Doors of Perception 3 Conference)

Table of Contents:
Summary
Introduction
The Problem
The Young
Sustainable Development
Eco-Efficiency
How do We Make it Happen?
Dematerialisation
Energy Use
Toxic Dispersion, Multi-Functionality and other Main Principles
Conclusion

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Summary
Claude Füssler is vice-president of DOW Chemical Europe for marketing and the environment, and is on the Business Council for Sustainable Development. His attempts to create longer-term awareness in the business community, in order to find a way out of the current eco-crisis, inform his speech. Focusing first on the meaning of `natural' from an engineering point of view, Mr. Füssler explains his view of the meaning of sustainable development. He calls it a triple balance of behaviours: business, the environment and consumers. Sustainable consumption and marketing play as important a role as efficiency in design and production. Füssler then describes a thirty-year strategy towards sustainable development: concentration on the entire function and context of products, rather than products themselves. We must take into account the entire life-cycle, impact and significance of a product for users and the environment; reduce energy use and toxic dispersion; further dematerialisation and multi-functionality. He gives examples of projects that are helping to accomplish this strategy, which he offers as a brainstorming tool for designers.

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Introduction
I hope to show you that in business, we are trying to be part of the solution. One weakness of business is that we are very short-term-oriented, looking no further than price fluctuations and the next quarter, for example. What I am trying to do inside my company and inside the business community is to make my colleagues aware of the longer term, which is certainly going to bring revolutionary changes.

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The Problem
Industry is creating a lot of problems. This has emerged from the post-war era: the motto was growth, growth, growth. Growth without limits that was the creed of a successful baby-boomer. They are fifty now. Their houses are empty or full, as the case may be, and we sometimes think that their hands are empty. Today, there is doubt about the dynamics and limits of growth.

In business, a change is taking place. We are `getting back to natural'. But what does natural mean from an engineering point of view? It represents the mass balance of human beings. On the one hand, we have the natural mass balance, that is to say: we need about six tons of food and air per year to live. However if you look at modern people in Switzerland, to give one example which is probably roughly the same as in Holland, you see that we put through about eighty nine tons of materials per capita to provide heat, move around, live in our houses, schools, bridges, buy our antiques and our cars; this includes an enormous amount of water to clean everything we touch, everything we eat and ourselves. About sixty tons of contaminated water is produced and must be processed.

This is certainly unsustainable. This is the lifestyle of about one billion people of the earth.

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The Young
Among the youngest generation, doubts about material growth are very much evident in their symbols of identity, their clothes and their attitudes. They are starting to express a different attitude to life -- a caring attitude and one of unity. They express a wish to travel and to meet others and if not physically, then through Internet. And you see teenagers becoming the most influential people with respect to computers. It is actually our teenagers who are teaching us in business how to use PCs. And parents who actually work well with their teenagers are often the most fluent in PC use. This is a real force and might even be a source of the revolution, if only through sheer demographics. There will be two billion teenagers by the turn of the millennium. With all that curiosity, energy, interconnection, we could make things change more rapidly than we think and actually more rapidly than in many existing prognoses. Much depends on how this large mass of teenagers evidences its energy and attitudes.

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Sustainable Development
What is the best way to define sustainable development for our kinds of professions, where we either make or design stuff or things? I think the best approach is to try to think that we will contribute to the quality of life in the long term by making materials and services, which we produce and distribute in an ecological and careful manner. But it is very important that the consumer consume them in a sustainable way as well.

Their needs to be a triple balance of behaviours: on the part of business, the environment and the consumer. And this is where the problem emerges with renewed emphasis.

I stated that the eighty-nine-tons-per-year lifestyle is only shared by about one billion people. It is physically impossible for five or six billion people to have this type of lifestyle. We are already pumping enough solid fuel out of the earth to sustain that lifestyle. That is our source of energy. And we are already claiming about 40% of what is growing every year, vegetable or animal. Humankind is already claiming it or destroying it, one way or another, and putting a lot of pollution into the atmosphere and the water. And the one thing that can be predicted today with certainty, because genetically it is already programmed for the next twenty-five years, is that we are going to add several more billions to the population. This new group of consumers may be interesting for business, but it is very dangerous for the natural economy of the planet, as well as for the social economy.

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Eco-Efficiency
There will be no boundaries to information or to mobility. And there will be poor in the city, as well as people who overconsume. We need to find a way out. 30 years is a reasonable term for us to do so, in my view. In this group of business counsels for sustainable development, we have nicknamed this way out eco-efficiency. This has a special meaning. In business, we want to be economically efficient. We want to create more value and get a better price out of the goods and services we provide than what it costs us to make them. But at the same time, we need to be ecologically efficient, that is, to take the environment into account from the invention and the design of the products and processes all the way through distribution, consumption and disposal. This journey towards eco-efficiency has to be fast and systematic over the next 25 years. This is going to enable the other part of the equation, which is allowing sustainable consumption and marketing.

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How do We Make it Happen?
How do we make it happen?

I have never seen a product that just sits still while we use it year in, year out. The customer always wants an improvement. Either in the service that came with the product or in the quality, price and formulation of the product itself. Products are constantly changing. There is no such thing as an eternal product. We propose looking not only at a product as such, but at its life cycle. We need to understand where the raw materials come from, how the product is made and consumed and what happens when it is disposed of. We need to look at the function of a product. We should not look at the litre of paint, but at its ability to cover a square meter of wall in a certain manner within a certain aesthetics. We need to look at cars in the context of mobility and interfacing people. We need to understand the systems in which we are involved. Of course, some limitations have to be introduced in order to keep the amount of data manageable. You have to decide which pieces of data you can influence when you make a design change.

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Dematerialisation
The first thing to do is dematerialise. This means not only the products themselves, but the processes that went into making them. I started as an engineer in a plant making plastics which are sold in granules. The granules are put in bags which in turn are put on pallets which are then covered with a plastic film that holds the whole thing together. In my time, for every pallet, we used to use fifteen hundred grams of film, which we then tightened by sending the pallet through an oven that heated it up and shrunk it. This required a great deal of energy, time and material. Today, with the development of thin, stretchable films, made possible by our increasing ability to engineer polymers, we experimentally can already wrap exactly the same pallet with about 300 grams of film; commercially it is done with 500 because people want a bit more security. This is an enormous factor of improvement in mass and function, as well as energy, because we no longer use the shrink ovens. The polymer is designed to be stretched. Thus, technically, over a period of 15 years, dematerialisation is possible. This is only a reassurance of what it is possible for us to do. It alone will not change the fate of the planet. That will take many other things. But the presence of the goal means a step towards it will be taken.

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Energy Use
The next big factor is energy use, not only in making the product but in using it and disposing of it. Energy is spent in transportation and in our homes. In general, 35% of the energy consumed at home or in the office is used for lighting and heating. Even though we are a chemical company, we are getting involved in other things, further `down stream'. One example is what we call the blue house, which is 30% more energy-efficient than the best environmental standard. It is more eco-efficient, but at the same time, it costs no more than a normal house. I have seen many beautiful houses at zero energy full of gadgets; it is nice when you can bury half of your house in a sunny hillside, but you don't always have one. So it is very difficult to design cheap, energy-efficient homes. The blue house has a special structure and derives its name from the blue foam used in it. There are no heat bridges, which is where heat tends to escape. And at the same time, its light weight allows very innovative, small foundations. Another thing is that you now can put inside and outside what you like to live with. Natural textiles inside, bricks outside. The internal structure is the important thing.

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Toxic Dispersion, Multi-Functionality and other Main Principles
The third point is toxic dispersion. We have to be careful about the way nature operates. If you put mercury, cadmium, or a pesticide which doesn't degrade fast enough at one end of a life cycle, it is going to travel through a chain and ultimately hit critical elements in our food chain. This may be a bacteria or a mushroom, but it is going to disturb ecological security. We used to make our foams with CFC, but we have changed to ECFs to avoid the ozone depletion effect. But it is still not good enough: we are now moving to CO2. CO2 may have negative connotations, but it is CO2 borrowed from nature and put back into it -- not additional CO2. It is the same thing the plants do. Of course, it takes a technological investment, but the point I am trying to make is that when you start to set those goals, you can achieve them.

Recycling packaging is familiar by now to everyone. There is now going to be a new wave of recycling: recycling of liquids. In Germany, the garages where you service your BMW and your Peugeot now offer to take back the brake fluid and anti-freeze, which then find their way back to the cars. This creates a system in which the same molecule composes at least 80% of the volume, going through several life cycles. We have actually created a company called Save Chem, which is going into the leasing of chemicals. This company is providing full service: taking back chemicals and recycling them. Some people who are in the material business are moving into the environmental business and complete life cycle care.

Synthetic chemistry has taken over because it is faster and more efficient. But when you look very carefully at life cycles, you start to be interested in some natural materials, in pharmaceuticals, but also in detergents and fibres. We have created a small joint-venture, where we use recycled paper and a natural fibre to make a covering for use in your garden, instead of those black plastic films. In industrial verticulture, a lot of material is used and you cannot easily recycle it because it is full of earth. You should not burn it, so the farmer feels guilty and a bit helpless and actually spends a lot of time and money taking care of the black plastic. This material can compost naturally after a certain time. You can have a 3-month, 4-month or 6-month composting time. Here we have a combination of various kinds of chemical know-how, but at the same time there is a natural fibre that does the job.

You can do a lot of interesting things in electronics. Electronic devices are getting smaller and smaller. You notice that with phones. When you make electronics smaller and smaller, you pack a lot of electrical components into a very small volume and you have to be very careful that you insulate them; if not, they start to interfere with each other. Plastic is a wonderful insulator. But at the same time, you put so much power in such a small space that you get a lot of heat. But plastic is a terrible heat conductor. By designing a special ceramic, aluminium nitrite, you can actually make plastic insulating but heat-conductive. You can then take a lot of cooling equipment out of laptop computers, even the little fans, because of these fantastic new insulating properties.

That is why I am talking about putting two functions in one piece of material. In the end, we have to look at all the main principles involved: mass, energy, toxic dispersion, recycling, closing the loop, using natural material, substituting natural materials, as well as using a natural cycle and multi-functionality. It is a very simple set of points. We want to train all of our product designers in this because we do want to design molecules and products to move towards sustainability.

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Conclusion
But the question is: how big a move? An engineer should not just be proud of a 10% improvement. In many of our functions, we have to talk about a much larger improvement over a period of 25 years. This is the challenge.

Maybe by dematerialising, you can get more wealth, services and quality of life to many more people and only have one hard core of material. In a way, it is imperative to do so. And that is going to mean a lot of technology and a lot of design. We have to get together in a kind of closed systems where we use machines and materials in a smart way and information technology to try to create this spaceship economy other people have been talking about for 20 years.

It must be done -- it can be done. And if something must be done and can be done, somebody is going to figure it out. So as a business person, you have to be very attentive. It is also a matter of corporate survival. Someone might figure out that you don't need a big room full of computers and air conditioning and what have you, but can pack everything into small, efficient machines. The same thing is true of dematerialisation and energy efficiency. Those who don't figure out where energy needs to go will lose out. You have to understand the system, not just the product. That is where creativity comes from. And you have to know where you are today. You can use these main points to help define the boundaries of your current system. And involve customers, people you never talk to, maybe also kids. Develop as many options as you can, because you have to try to get out towards the boundary. This scheme of principles is a brainstorming tool. You need 100 good ideas for one commercial success. But this is a process you have to go into and if you want to translate it back into sustainability -- and that is our challenge -- we will need to focus on value, because you cannot do this without being able to reward the people who accomplish this. But at the same time, we are going to be able to supply the materials and the services which should make it possible to regain the balance I mentioned earlier. We are out of balance, but I think we know quite clearly how to start restoring the balance through both ecological security and the way we use materials.

And we must not forget a third key thing -- that we need to provide more quality of life. At the end of the day, that is what business is all about.