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  • “Houston, we have a problem.” (Holiday homework for product designers on spaceship Earth)

    by Lorne Craig on December 19, 2008
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    Here we are, floating blissfully through our Universe, as the Christmas Star begins its annual glow overhead. Suddenly, warning lights begin to flash on the dashboard of Spaceship Earth, and a disembodied mechanical female voice bleats its irritatingly calm countdown of doom “… Warning…. Waste disposal systems on overload. Bulkhead breech imminent ….” Soon, we realize, our living quarters will be filled with the toxic discharge of our very existence.

    At least, that’s how Christmas morning looks sometimes, as I sit nursing a 10 a.m. rum and eggnog and contemplate the pile of wrapping, plastic, casings, blister-paks, Styrofoam, styrene and miscellaneous jetsam that festoon our living room. Surely there must be a better way. People smart enough to send their fellow primates to the moon and back should be able to conquer this problem. I have heard it said that humanity functions best when faced with imminent doom, so I propose a solution that came straight from one of NASA’s greatest dramas – Apollo 13.

    For those of you who don’t remember the incident, (or the film), three crew members were stuck in a malfunctioning capsule, halfway back to earth, with limited oxygen supply and a wrecked CO2 scrubber. If they couldn’t find a way to fix it with the parts they had on hand (no nearby Home Depot, really) they would literally suffocate in their own emissions. Back on Earth, NASA grabbed an exact duplicate of every piece of tubing, wiring, duct tape and usable component available to the astronauts on board and dumped the pile on a table in front of their best engineers. “Gentlemen, invent a way to put a square peg in a round hole. Rapidly.” The technicians responded, inventing from the detritus a lifesaving CO2 filter.

    So here is my Holiday Challenge to the packaging and product designers of the world. On Christmas day, pile up every piece of paper, cardboard, plastic, twist-tie and ribbon on the living room floor in front of you. Grab a sketchpad and a double dose of your intoxicant of choice and see what you can make out of it. Then reverse-engineer your creations into value-added components for next year’s Christmas rush. (If such a thing still exists). Turn holiday trash into treasure. Please.

    You are our best and brightest. The fate of all our fellow astronauts lies in your hands.

    Godspeed.
     

    Image credit: Lorne Craig

  • In a world gone ‘green crazy’, how can you tell who’s telling the sustainable truth?

    by Linda Chipperfield on December 12, 2008

    Green Seal Laureate Program

    More and more companies are recognizing the marketing benefits of ‘being green’ – or at least of claiming to be so. It will come as no surprise to those who read this site, but some of those claims are less than honest.

    That’s why Green Seal is asking for input on a recognition program called “Green Seal Laureate” (working title). The program will provide a guide to continuous improvement and identify companies that are committed to sustained environmental leadership. It will provide a path to honesty and credibility when companies proclaim their commitment to sustainability.

    The Laureate Program will focus on a company’s major environmental impacts and promote the environmental certification of products where recognized green standards exist. It will utilize life cycle analysis to evaluate impacts from products, including material sourcing, manufacturing, packaging, consumer use, and end-of-life.

    In addition, the program will look beyond products alone, to the company's impacts related to corporate governance, operations and supply chain.

    By going through this rigorous and thorough process, companies will be identified as environmentally responsible and will enjoy the benefits of Green Seal recognition:

    • Our credibility and lack of conflict-of-interest helps protect companies from the charge of "greenwashing" by backing up sustainability claims through a third party.
    • Recognized companies will be featured on greenseal.org, an often-referenced site that currently receives over 1.5 million hits per month.
    • Green Seal's expert staff is often called upon to participate in conferences and panels on current green issues. Recognized companies and certified products will be featured in these presentations.

    The Green Seal Laureate Program will be tiered to inspire leadership. It will recognize and reward accomplishments and encourage continuous improvement:

    Entry Level:
    This will be the entry level for most companies that have made some progress and are ahead of many of their sector peers. Green Seal will conduct a company-wide LCA and provide a summary of impacts. The applicant will demonstrate that changes have been made and set goals for silver level recognition.

    Advanced Level:
    This advanced level recognition is for companies that have achieved some innovative reductions in their key environmental impacts and have developed and are acting upon a deeper life cycle understanding of their products' impacts.

    Top Tier:
    This top tier is for the outstanding leaders and innovators in their sector who have achieved deep reductions in their environmental impacts.

    Recognition in the Green Seal Laureate Program will send a clear message to customers, employees and stakeholders that the company cares about improving the health and welfare of people and the planet.

    We welcome input on this important tool for company sustainability and encourage stakeholders to comment on the program. To register as a stakeholder before January 16, 2009, click here.

    For details on the Laureate Program and its requirements, call Dr. Mark Rentschler at Green Seal, (202) 872-6400 or email laureate@greenseal.org

    Green Seal Laureate Requirements

    Green Seal Laureate Guidance Document

  • Saul Griffith talks energy at Continuum

    by Grant Kristofek on December 5, 2008
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    Last week, my friend and former classmate Saul Griffith visited Continuum’s Boston office to share some of his thoughts on energy.

    Saul is a busy guy and, among other things, he runs a renewable energy startup in Alameda, California, called Makani Power. Many folks have inquired (with rightful interest) about Makani’s work with high altitude wind, but given that the company is still operating in ‘stealth’ mode, there’s not been much to share. Instead, Saul has been taking his speaking engagements as opportunities to talk about another topic close to his heart, energy literacy. He believes, as do I, that we need to reframe the conversation from being about what is politically possible to what is technically necessary.

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    At Continuum, Saul shared two stories with us – one global, one personal – aiming to give us a more tangible sense of our energy consumption, and of what it will take to meet that consumption in the future. He told us the global story in very big numbers, addressing the issues of climate change, global energy consumption, and fossil fuels. He shared his second story, the personal one, by focusing on the decisions we make in our everyday lives and the energy impacts that come with them. While sick in bed with the flu last winter, Saul rigorously calculated his own energy footprint, taking into account his home, his workplace, his travel and commuting, even getting into the nitty gritty detail of the stuff he owns, the food he eats, the trash that’s hauled from his house to the dump every week, and his 1/300 millionth share of the U.S. government’s energy expenditures. By combining a broad world view with his individual perspective, he clearly illustrated the magnitude of the energy challenge.

    Fortunately, based on the known and calculable amounts of energy available to the planet, Saul has also developed a ‘game plan’ to address climate change. First he asked, “what is the temperature we want, and what does that imply in terms of our carbon dioxide concentration?” Currently, we’re at approximately 385ppm in the atmosphere, and increasing that at a rate of about 7GtC/yr (gigatons of carbon per year). He chose 450ppm as a target which could, based on conservative estimates, result in an approximately 2°C rise in global temperature and 10% species loss. So, with that CO2 concentration limit as a starting point, he then looked at the available energy resources from a science perspective (based on high school physics and chemistry) and compared them to humanity’s energy consumption.

    He showed us rational, data-driven evidence to suggest that, although humanity uses a lot of energy, there are very large sources of non-carbon producing energy that can be tapped to meet our needs. Beating climate change will certainly be a challenge of epic proportions, requiring a scale of global cooperation larger than any humanity has undertaken (including the World Wars — think all countries on the same side, cooperating for the force of good), but Saul was nonetheless optimistic that we could meet this challenge.

    For starters, one unique approach he’s undertaken is to launch a new Web site called WattzOn.com that crowdsources individuals’ data on personal power consumption. The site helps its users discover how to reduce their personal roles in climate change by giving them tools to track their own energy consumption, compare it to others’ and understand its consequences. Hopefully, it will also, over time, act like Wikipedia, and refine the quality of our understanding about our energy consumption and habits.

    Climate change is a global problem, but it’s going to be solved by individuals. Saul is certainly doing his part, and we were delighted to have him here at Continuum giving us insights to help us do our part.

    Image credit: Grank Kristofek

  • Transmaterialization

    by Guest contributors on December 1, 2008

    This post was submitted by guest contributor and author Nathan Shedroff. In his upcoming book, Design is the Problem, Nathan explores one of the most interesting sustainable design strategies available to product developers.

    Transmaterialization is a strange word, but the process is a new phenomenon not easily recognized by most people. Sometimes called ’servicizing‘ or ’product service systems,’ defined simply, it’s the process of turning a product into a service. Because this is often abstract and foreign to many people, the best way to explain it is in an example:

    Consider how people bought music in the past. First, there were records, followed by tapes of different types (reels, 8-tracks, cassettes, and so on), and finally, starting in the 80s, compact discs (CDs). All of these are physical products, even though the music itself wasn’t necessarily physical. (It could already be transmitted across radio waves, for example.) Most people associated music with a physical object. Now, however, music is completely digital and even more virtual. The rise in music downloads (both legal and illegal) is displacing the sale of the physical CDs (though some, like records, will probably always be traded by collectors). In this way, the physical product has been displaced by a nonphysical service.

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    The best example of this is Apple's iTunes music store. Not only does the service enjoy 75 percent of the entire market for music downloads (and sells more music than any other company in the U.S.), but it is also no longer limited to music. The iTunes Music Store now sells films, television shows, applications (remember when those, too, were shipped on CD-ROMs?), and even books (as audio books). Where it would have once been unheard of to discuss these products as services once upon a time, we now regularly conceive and design new systems that do exactly this.

    In the CD example above, one study1 of the life cycle analysis compared CDs bought in a store (do people even do this anymore?), to those bought online and shipped to a house, to music downloaded from the Internet directly. Of course, downloading music (or any service) still has an environmental impact (if only in powering the servers, hubs, and computers) but it is much less than the physical CD itself. Here’s proof:

    In 2003, Digital Europe conducted a life cycle analysis of music CDs bought in stores, bought off Amazon and shipped to customers, and music downloaded off services like iTunes. Their study showed that all of these solutions had an impact of some kind. For example, music services require electricity to run services and lots of equipment to store, process, and transmit their data around the world. It’s not insignificant, either. However, even the demands of electronic data are a significant improvement over the demands of producing and distributing light-weight CDs and shipping them around the world.

    Scenario* Abiotic impact (kg) Biotic impact (kg) Water use (kg)
    CDs bought in physical store 1.56 0.09 39.52
    CDs bought online, shipped to homes 1.31 0.06 46.73
    Music downloaded (user burns CD-R) 0.67 0 23.31
    Music downloaded (no CD-R copy) 0.60 0 20.29

    * Inclusion of computer materials impact is the same in each scenario

    Services are often preferable to products because they focus on delivering consistent value while making more efficient use of products and resources. Consider how cars in rental firms or car share services are used more than privately owned cars that sit in parking lots and driveways most of the time. In addition, they’re usually better maintained. Services that replace purchased products outright can have the same efficiencies but they sometimes present a conceptual challenge to customers.

    One example of where this has failed, though valiantly, is when the Atlanta, Georgia, floor covering company, Interface, tried to sell carpet as a service in the late 90s, Interface revolutionized the environmental impact of one of the worst industries in the world. (You should know that traditional carpet is terrible stuff, from an environmental perspective.) Interface changed everything about the materials and processes they used to make recyclable, less toxic carpet tiles that lasted longer, were better for workers as well as customers, and were taken back by the company when customers were finished with them.

    However, when Interface took their ideas one step further and tried to reframe carpet from a product to a service (leasing floor coverings), they weren’t as successful. For the most part, business customers just couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea that they weren’t purchasing carpet, but they were leasing great-looking floors. Even though Interface guaranteed that they would maintain the carpet (including replacing damaged sections) and update, recycle, and dispose of it at their own expense, most people still couldn’t make the cognitive leap that they would be paying monthly for something they could otherwise buy outright—even if it represented an overall savings.

    To transmaterialize solutions successfully, it's critical for developers to understand what makes a great service. Great service needs to do more than merely fulfill customer needs. Developers must understand customers' complete needs (often extending far beyond the transaction in both directions in time), and do so in culturally appropriate ways. Services build relationships, and when organizations aren't aware of this, poor relationships are usually the result.

    As with products, a service's value must be framed in terms of customer benefit, not merely company benefit. Great service requires cooperation and coordination from all aspects of an organization (including IT, customer service, HR, senior management, product development, and operations). Customers’ needs must be understood not only in terms of price and performance (features), but also in terms of emotions, values, and meanings. All touch points must be coordinated so that the overall experience seems cohesive and consistent and this often requires coordination outside the organization to partners, suppliers, and other stakeholders in order to be successful.

    Done correctly, services can provide better value and deeper connections than products while reducing impacts on natural, social, and financial capital. Transmaterialization offers the possibility of meeting our needs better and building deeper relationships with organizations, essentially creating more value and more meaning, while using resources more efficiently. This ’get more for less‘ approach should be at the heart of sustainable design and development and form the core of how we message to our customers and the rest of the world.

    Design Is the Problem is now on sale; Sustainable Minds readers can receive a 15% discount by using code SUSTMINDS when entering their purchase at the Rosenfeld Media site.

    1. Source: The environmental and social impacts of digital music: A case study with EMI by Digital Europe

    Image credits (in order of appearance):
    Rosenfeld Media
    Apple Computer, Inc.
    Interface, Inc.