Believe it or not, Ecotec is apparently going to run a truck that runs on processed chocolate through parts of Africa. Three tons of wasted chocolate were used to make 396 gallons of biofuel. Apparently, burning that biofuel does less damage than landfilling the chocolate, which would then generate methane. Which makes the undertaking appear carbon-negative (so they say). I'd like to see the math on that. Apparently, a single British chocolate company generates 5,000 tons of waste chocolate a year. That's enough to make 660,000 gallons of biofuel per year - from just one company's waste.
What do designers need to design sustainable products?
There are many analytic tools out there. SDTC's STAR process and Okala are just two. It's been made evident to me that engineers take to these tools easily enough. I would wager that generic designers could do the same - assuming they can use excel and look numbers up in a table.
The problem with analytic tools is that they're after the (design) fact - you use them to figure out what you did wrong. Our goal ought to be to figure out how to do it right the first time. In a perfect world, Okala wouldn't be needed cuz you'd know it was as good as it was going to get.
While I think Okala is especially interesting and worth 'pushing' in some way, the main question is: how does one define 'design activities' such that there's some guarantee of sustainability from the outset.
I also think that it's not that big a problem methodologically, but it is a big problem politically & psychologically. Designing is a kind of problem solving where you balance a bunch of different factors that conflict (e.g. cost v quality). None of the design methods that I'm aware of make specific commitments to a defined set of factors. This means that all we have to do is add 'sustainability' as a factor. In the case of some methods, it's literally that simple.
Assume we could do that, and have a design process that embeds sustainability. The real problem is convincing people that its a good/valid process. Using it would be a 'risk.' To knock that down, we actually have to apply the process to the design of things and then analyzing the designs (with Okala or other things) to demonstrate it.
If we can demonstrate that the process works, then people will be more likely to accept it.
So I see the following research program:
- Establish a design process with sustainability built in.
- Publish it broadly.
- Find industries willing to let a 'third party' (e.g. a school like Ryerson, or a consortium of schools) help them design things using the process as pilot projects. Also run workshops and courses where the process is applied to real problems.
There is one problem in developing the process: decision making on matters of sustainability is context-dependent, and the context-sensitive information needed for such decisions isn't quite there yet. For instance, decisions about how to treat rainwater will depend whether you're in Arizona or Athabasca...or anywhere else for that matter.
Ideally what we'd want in this case is a method that evaluates a design with respect to a certain context. From a computer-y or mathematical point of view, the method would be like a procedure that takes the design as an argument, along with other key parameters that describe the context, and produce an evaluative result - like an impact factor. You could use the same method to then describe the same design used in different settings.
If this is a worthwhile goal, the question is: How do we understand what goes into that procedure? I think the answer will come little by little, and by doing examples: perform manually an analysis of the same design in two different settings/contexts. Look for similarities and differences. Come up with a heuristic that applies. Now do it again, for another product or design. Look for more heuristics. As you collect more heuristics, you can start to study the heuristics themselves, and find (hopefully) universal principles. This will allow the overall algorithm to start to get integrated.
...just some late night thoughts.
On the weird side of things: There's an electric eel in Japan that is powering the lights on a Christmas Tree.
Say it with me: D'oh!
I ain't kidding. See this treehugger article and the youtube video.
Does anyone know of eels feel pain when they discharge? I seem to remember something like that, but I couldn't find anything on Google.
The real question is: is this an energy solution? What if there were a farm of these eels - thousands of 'em - would the electricity be enough to do anything useful, given the expense of keeping the eels alive?
Let's just hope Detroit doesn't figure out how to run a car on eel-power....
