How Do We Make Humanities Material Usage Sustainable?
As a designer of products, I am concerned with creating value for users, but this value comes at an environmental cost. Since observing and understanding macro effects such as never before seen planetary temeprature rises, we now know that, design decisions can have far reaching and detremental effects. With this knowledge, we have an opportunity to explicitly design for the results we want, and the ethical imperitive to do so. One question worth considering is how do we, as designers, provide value while ensuring humanaties material usage sustainable?
The Blue Marble by the crew of Apollo 17 (1972) [1]
Most design for sustainability articles do not address the root cause of our issues with sustainability, setteling insted for surgesting small incremental improvments. I decided to think top down and see if I could identify more systematic changes that could be made to the way the design of all things is undertaken. My approach to this question is to break it down into a number of more specific research objectives that might offer some insight.
Identify the problems with humanities current material usage.
Understand the requirements for sustainable material usage.
Propose solutions to ensure future material usage is sustainable.
As our planet is a discrete object, it is obvious that there is a finite amount of material on the Earth and so the material available to use must also be limited. It follows therefore that for a given material usage per person, there will be a maximum population level the Earth can support. However, it is also clear that we have not yet reached this limit, materials are still available to people, plants, animals and natural processes, though the distribution is far from even and local depletions are a problem today.
To better understand problem with our current material usage, it is useful to understand the context materials exist in on Earth. All natural materials on Earth, remain on Earth and are continuously being processed into different states by a wide verity of natural processes. Think of the plant lifecycle, then imagine if the plant was eaten by an animal, entering its cycle, then imagine that animal died and became fossilised in a rock, then eroded by water. When combined together, a material can flow through all these natural cycles. This can take a long time, cover a wide geographic area, and is complex, incorporating many different possible states and processes while continuously adapting. Humanities activities have been changing these natural lifecycles in two key ways:
We introduce new processes, and so material states, into the natural lifecycles. An example is the extraction and refining of natural oil to produce plastics that are used extensively in consumer products. Materials that would have gone from one natural step to another now go through many more material states in between. Once materials are returned, their changed state may compound this effect; Plastics take thousands of years to degrade in a natural environment.
We change the rates of existing natural processes. Massive deforestation has removed an eco-system that was a significant material processor in the natural lifecycle, responsible for turning CO2 into O2 through photosynthesis and locking up millions of tons of carbon in plant matter.
By identifying our impact as a change in the rate of natural material processing cycles it becomes clear that any sustainability problems can be described as an uneven material distribution at both different stages of the cycle (temporally) and in different geographic locations (spatially). This is the root cause of a number of problems:
Total depletion of resources at any stage of the lifecycle could ultimately cause the cycle to stop. Many of these resources, food and fresh water for instance, are critical for life and humanity do not have a technological alternative to the natural lifecycles that currently process materials to renew the supplies of these critical resources.
Before this, local breakdowns in the cycle can occur as a result of significant changes in the spatial distribution of resources, causing the lifecycle to stop in select geographic areas making them uninhabitable.
The spatial and temporal locations where a material abundance is gathering can also see detrimental effects. Material in landfills can poison a local environment and gasses emitted by internal combustion engines are causing the Earth’s atmosphere to warm for instance.
Conversely, sustainable material usage can be defined as avoiding significantly uneven distribution of materials. Having identified this, it is possible to begin thinking about solutions.
It is clear that to avoid the problems highlighted, any change to the natural material lifecycles needs to keep the rate of material processing even. The only exceptions to this requirement would be solutions that do not aim to achieve sustainability within Earth’s natural cycles. Colonising other planets would increase the material resources available to humanity to infinity or conversely, decreasing the material requirements of humanity to be negligible through replacing humanity with a computer simulation would negate potential depletion of resources. These solutions will not be explored further as they do not aim to achieve sustainability on Earth. While they are worthy endevours, to use them as a justification for ignoring the hard problem infront of us would be determental to progress.
“The original northern hemisphere hockey stick graph of Mann, Bradley & Hughes 1999, smoothed curve shown in blue with its uncertainty range in light blue, overlaid with green dots showing the 30-year global average of the PAGES 2k Consortium 2013 reconstruction. The red curve shows measured global mean temperature, according to HadCRUT4 data from 1850 to 2013.” [2]
The obvious question is at what point for any given set of changes do things become unbalanced? Any changes could then be measured to ensure they are kept below the criteria laid out by this definition. However, due to the complexity of these natural cycles, they are not fully understood. Predicting impacts on material distribution is very difficult and no single, agreed objective measure of this exists. It is for this reason that most solutions today focus on measuring reduction in human impact on natural cycles in a relative way, comparing our impact against that of previous years. Despite this, there has been a scientific consensus for many years now that humanities activities are resulting in detrimental effects to the planet, looking at the hockey-stick curve of global temperature increase for example makes it clear that our actions are unsustainable.
Given this lack of understanding it is sensible to attempt to preserve the existing natural cycles by preserving the natural eco-systems that process material and ensure materials remain available to them. Simply reducing our material usage will make progress towards this goal, though it should be noted that reuse and recycling do not ultimately address the problem of uneven material distribution. The common phrase ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’ was created in priority order!
In their book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, William McDonough and Michael Braungart propose an amendment to reuse and recycling, dividing materials into one of two separate nutrient cycles, either biological or technical. The idea being to either make our use of materials fully compatible with returning to the environment (in an acceptable timeframe) or, for those materials too refined such as metals, to keep them separated from the natural cycle entirely and continuously re-utilized as high quality materials for new products [3].
“Cradle to Cradle is a design paradigm based on the idea of nutrient management, which enables product materials to be upcycled again and again. Materials are categorized as either “biological nutrients” or “technical nutrients”. Biological nutrients are biodegradable and will easily re-enter water and soil whereas technical nutrients will continually circulate as pure and valuable materials within closed-loop industrial cycles.” [4]
An impact assessment (often known as a lifecycle assessment – check out openLCA) of the average person’s life is useful to establish the relative impact solutions might have. In order from largest environmental impact to least these are often stated as (different methodologies do result in slight changes but this is generally right):
Having children
Driving a car
Air travel
Eating a meat diet
Energy usage
Consumption of products
Clearly the impact of product design decisions are important, its in the top 6! To quantify and so optomise the impact of these decisions, LCA can provide more detail to product designers; for products where LCA indicates the production phase of the product has a greater detrimental impact, reducing their creation and use is most impactful; for products where LCA indicates the usage phase of a product is most problematic, reducing their creation and use is again most impactful, this is followed by technological improvements to reduce the impact of use and rapid replacement.
The functional requirements for any sustainable product design based solution can therefore be stated as:
Material must remain available to the natural cycles.
The rate of material processing must remain even to avoid the detrimental effects.
Preserve the existing natural cycles by preserving natural eco-systems.
Any solution to maintain an even distribution of materials both spatially and temporally can only be valid for a given lifestyle and population size.
For products where LCA indicates the production phase of the product has a greater detrimental impact, reducing their creation and use is most impactful. For products where LCA indicates the usage phase of a product is most problematic, reducing their creation and use is again most impactful, this is followed by technological improvements to reduce the impact of use and rapid replacement.
Having defined the problem and identified top level requirements for workable solutions, solutions can begin to be identified. These can be usefully categorised by the functional requirement that they predominately address.
Material must remain available to the natural cycles, rather than continuing to extract it as we grow, we need to be much more efficient with the resources we already have.
use technology to be more efficient with what we have
e.g. leveraging machine learning to identify disease in crops early, increasing yield while reducing pesticide use (Check out ecoation.com).
limit material extraction from the natural environment
e.g. regulating mining, fishing and deforestation
The rate of material processing must remain even to avoid the detrimental effects.
speed up parts of the cycle we have made artificially slow
e.g. truly biodegradable plastics or use of natural materialskeep any artificially refined materials in a separate ‘technical’ lifecycle (ideal recycling)
e.g. reusing glass bottles and recycling plastic
Preserve the existing natural cycles by preserving natural eco-systems.
protect natural environments from manmade impact
e.g. closing tourist sites and designating national parksclean up & reverse damage that has already been done
e.g. beach clean-up and tree plantingwhere impacts continue, create sustainable schemes to reduce & limit it
e.g. managed forests for harvesting wood
Any solution to maintain an even distribution of materials both spatially and temporally can only be valid for a given lifestyle and population size.
change individuals lifestyles to reduce per capita resource usage
e.g. stop eating meat and live in apartments or tiny homes
limit human population to a sustainable number
e.g. China’s one child policy
For products where LCA indicates the usage phase of a product is most problematic, reducing their use is again most impactful, this is followed by technological improvements to reduce the impact of use.
reduce usage
e.g. more public transportreduce impact of usage
e.g. electric cars
For products where LCA indicates the creation phase of a product is most problematic, again limiting creatino is best and finding alternatives second.
limit new production
e.g. truly repairable and upgardable products or product sharing schemesfind alternatives
e.g. clean energy
To compare these solution proposals in terms of their relative effectiveness, context and specific details of the product design objectives would be required. Any one solution could be implemented in a wide number of different ways by different people, companies, or governments; for instance, top down through taxes or legislation or bottom up through exerting social pressure with educational programs, or at the design, production, use or post-life phase of a products lifecycle.
In my own career in R&D, I am trying to consider these issues in every decision I make. One that I have already made is to move out of the consumer electronics industry. I am now working with Ecoation [5], an agritech start-up trying to increase crop yield while reducing pesticide and resource (including energy and land) use, to try and make some small contribution to feeding the world for all while remaining within the finite limits provided to us by our planet.