| Design and Dematerialization
Sascha Kranendonk, Table of Contents: * * * * * * * * * I agree that sex can be a motivate for environmentalism, but she
forgot to mention an important reason why.
Have any of you heard of the studies by the Joint Commission of the Great Lakes? This is a commission of both US and Canadian experts who try to find solutions for the pollution of the Great Lakes region. When presenting last year's report, the senator in charge started his speech by saying: Dear ladies and gentlemen, specifically gentlemen, I have some very bad news for you: You are only half as much a man as your grandfather used to be. One of the
results of the study was that sperm counts had come down by about 50% in the last 50 years, and a main reason seemed to be pollution, especially pollution by radiation and organochlorines. If this tendency persists linearly, this would mean that the US male will have become sterile by the year 2040.
About the same time, another study came out which looked at the effect of pesticide pollution, also chlorine-based, on wildlife in Florida. The reduced penis size of alligators made the headlines of many newspapers. But other reproductive defects were found, such as only partly descended testes of panthers and strange malformations in oysters.
A recent study printed in the Scientific American of October `95, by Deborah Davis and Leon Bradlow, has indicated a number of specific organochlorines which are found to possibly be responsible for such reproductive defects, but also for the development of breast cancer.
Some of them we all know, like DDT, but how many of you are aware that many plastic bottles contain Nonylphenol, a softener which leaches out into fluids readily at room temperature? At the same time, we are surprised when confronted with the latest statistics on cancer in the US: one out of every three people develops cancer! Do we really have to wait for the next 200 studies which will prove 100% that these substances are carcinogenic and cause infertility, before we take them off the market? * * * Therefore, my call to you is to avoid suspect substances in your designs -- organochlorines, among others. You might argue that you often are not informed of the constitution of the materials you use, which is a real problem. Therefore, I also call on you to support environmental groups and demand more disclosure from your materials suppliers on product contents and processes. At the same time, you might be doing yourself or your client a big favour, because product liability laws are becoming more and more strict. Who wants to be confronted with damage claims or take-back requirements for highly toxic, non-recyclable substances in products? * * * The resource problem is really quite terrifying. I'll start by giving some examples. Let's take a simple and non-toxic product like orange juice. When you look at the life-cycle analysis of orange juice, you find that to get a litre of orange juice on our breakfast table, it takes almost 22 litre of water, mainly for washing and dilution. It takes another 0,4 litre of fuel for the concentration process, for transportation in a deep-freeze ship from
Brazil to Rotterdam and about a square meter of land.
This is still very harmless. But when you look at what this means for a country like Germany, where we are Olympic orange juice drinkers at 20 litres per head per year, just behind the Americans, we get into figures like 57 billion litres of water. If put into cubic, 1-litre tetrapacks, you could circle the world 100 times and use an area 3 times the size of our own fruit-growing area. If everybody in the world drank this much of this type of orange juice, you would need an area half as large as Germany for orange production.
Of course, orange juice remains a relatively harmless product, especially the Brazilian kind we drink here in Europe. In the US, it is estimated that 958 litres of water per litter of orange juice are needed, mainly for irrigation purposes, as well as 2 litres of fuel per litter of orange juice for tractors, water-pumping, pesticide spraying and occasional use of the electric heaters to safe part of the harvest from frost.
Looking at transport, or, in other words, CO2 intensity of goods, most of you have heard about the Dutch potatoes going to Italy to be washed and cut and then to Belgium to be pre-fried and packed and then again to all of Europe to be sold. But even the most common product, like strawberry yoghurt, which was
analysed by a colleague of mine, Steffani Boge, is a world traveller. The different ingredients of a strawberry yoghurt travel some 8000 km within Europe: strawberries from Poland, aluminium lids from Austria, cultures from Hamburg and so forth. She calculated that by sourcing some of the ingredients locally, a factor 4 transportation reduction could easily be achieved.
The problem is that transportation is still subsidised directly and indirectly, which makes it more economical to import the
ingredients from far away. However, draft legislation is being prepared in several countries which would internalise these costs back into the price of transportation. Also, campaigns on food-miles being organised by organisations like Greenpeace, SAFE and AKB will increase awareness of this problem with the general consumer. For designers, it will therefore become important to take considerations of local supply into account.
The problem is that the way we live in the Northern industrialised countries is very resource-intensive, indeed. The yoghurts and orange juices are nothing. A PC consumes as much energy as one household manufactures in a year. If you would purchase the most avant-garde, energy-saving refrigerator, it would save its content in coal in just one year! But it is a prototype model, which doesn't sell because energy is so cheap. At the Wuppertal Institute, research is being done on the resource intensity of products and we've estimated that each German consumes 50 tons of resources annually, when you include the pre-processes for the production of the products used.
That makes about 4000 million tons for the entire country. Human beings are changing the surface of the earth faster than geology ever did. We are badly destabilizing a precarious balance, developed over 4 billion years of evolution.
* * * The often heard argument that the main problem for the environment is population growth in developing countries is clearly false. On the contrary, we, the industrialised world, are responsible for almost 80% of resource depletion. In other words, for the environment, it's better that 20 Filipinos are born than one German.
Take the example of CO2 emissions. Were all the world to emit as much CO2 as an average German, we would have 67 billion tons, and since the earth can only absorb 13 billion tons a year (in today's oceans and green plants), that means we would need 5 planets earth to absorb all this CO2. * * * Even the Dutch, who are good dike builders, would be surprised.
Or we go back to the times when Italy was not just politically, but also physically divided as it was 2 million years ago: a chain of islands.
One thing is certain: the relative stable climatic conditions which we have today will be destabilized. Which insurance company will pay for the houses and properties lost if Italy were really to take on the shape it had 2 million years ago?
In 1992, just one hurricane, the famous Hurricane Andrew,
cost insurance companies 15 billion US$, which has meant bankruptcy for 6 insurance companies. Since then the climate has only gotten rougher. Insurance costs because of storm damage were up to 50 billion US$ in 1994.
The IPCC (Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change) studies the possibility of climate change. Their conservative advice is that we absolutely need a reduction of CO2 emission by 50% world wide. Reality is different, though. The world energy council predicts a doubling of energy consumption in the coming 40 years, and thus a near-doubling of CO2 emissions.
We need to cut global CO2 emissions by half. Almost 80% of these emission are emitted by industrialised countries. We
cannot expect developing countries to halve their energy use. Therefore, we need to reduce even more than half in industrialised countries, somewhere between a factor of 4 and 20 in the coming 10 to 40 years.
* * * There is a lot more to gain from investing in efficiency. Resource efficiency is the business opportunity of the 21st century. Why? Because with the deterioration of the environment, the central question in politics and business will become: how can we optimise the well-being which we produce from one unit of natural resources?
* * * * * * Best of all: the building has no heating installation! This tour de force is achieved by good insulation, by heat-exchangers where the outgoing air heats up the incoming air, but especially by using `super windows'.
Super windows insulate as well as 12 sheets of glass, but are much thinner. By using heavy gas and a very thin metal foil inside, they let about 70% of the daylight and warmth in, but do not let any heat flow out.
Building the Rocky Mountain institute with all these special features was cheaper than a traditional building, because of the savings in ductwork and furnaces.
Several more "normal" energy-autonomous houses have since been built in the US, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Germany. Most of the beginner's flaws of these low or zero-energy houses have now been cleared and the people who live in such houses say they would not like to change, ever again. One of the big advantages of zero-energy houses is that they are oases of tranquillity, since the good insulation hardly lets any noise from outside penetrate to the interior, and there is also no noise from gurgling central heating and boilers.
* * * Furthermore, cars produce emissions like monoxides, lead and ozone which are bad for our health. The noise they make causes stress-related illnesses.
The good news is that we don't need our cars anymore. Today's cars are dinosaurs. When you drive a car, you do not just move your body, some 60 kilos, but up to 1 ton of steel and plastics. Another 12 to 20 tons were moved, mined and processed to produce this 1 ton of mass in the first place.
Of the petrol you put into your car, only 1% is really used to move your body. The rest is lost in inefficiency and in carrying around this 1-ton carcass.
Amory Lovins came up with an idea to fully redesign the car by using a combination of a ultra-light strategy and a new hybrid engine. The hybrid electric engine uses petrol or natural gas but has an electric counterpart which takes back 70% of the brake energy. This hybrid engine already brings down energy use by 30-50%. Furthermore, the ultra-light strategy can save another 50% in fuel.
Ten engineers at General Motors built a 4 person ultra-light proto-type car weighing only 400 kg, in less than 100 days, using moulds and carbon fibres, a similar technique surfers use to build their boards in a garage.
A 4-person prototype car by Swiss company Esoro which combined the two strategies resulted in a car which uses less than 2 litres per 100 Km, thus improving by a factor 6 on existing cars. Concepts are ready for cars which can drive from Moscow to Lisbon on one tank.
But the best news is that such cars bring a higher quality of life, in the words of Amory Lovins: When a hypercar drives right by me at a 100 Km/hr there is not a hair on my head which moves and the only thing you hear is a slight `sssss'. * * * Calculate your data cradle-to-cradle.
Increase the service intensity of the process/product/service.
Maximise the substitution of non-renewable by renewables.
Try to reduce the energy intensity per service unit by a factor 10 compared to reference product.
Do the same with land use.
Minimise or eliminate the use and emission of dangerous substances in the product, both in manufacturing and disposal.
Optimise durable goods for longevity: this means modular, upgrading possibility, multi-functional and multi-use.
Optimise non-durable goods for easy recycling.
Optimise high-turnover goods (e.g. food) for low transport intensity.
Optimise everything within a the larger system.
* * * I believe the factor 4 approach makes ecology suddenly very exciting. I hope I have been able to pass some of this excitement on to you. The only down side of a factor 4 is that factor 4 products might be so incredible that everybody will want to buy a factor 20 more of them. This will not help the environmental crisis. Therefore, we have to go beyond product innovation to social innovation. For example, car sharing is a social innovation which allows us to improve the resource use of private mobility by a factor 10, or even more!
I would like to conclude with a quote of Will Rogers in this spirit:
Too many people buy things they don't need to impress people they don't like. |
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url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION editor@doorsofperception.com |