acrobat JSPD 8 - The Centre for Sustainable Design

us lots of error messages
because our software is not
compatible.
Only 0.001%
Only about 0.001% of industrial
products and services on the
market today could be described
as having good environmental
performance or being ‘biocompatible’.
A relative handful
of firms have already come up
with eco-product innovations –
and there are may be 1000 truly
bio-compatible products on the
market – out of an estimated
100 million products on sale
worldwide. Pressure for change
is coming from legislators,
customers and campaign groups,
but somewhere down the line
somebody has to come up with
better products, services and
processes – the role of product
and business concept design is
crucial.
Efficiency in energy and
materials use is a blind alley
Being eco-efficient has clear
cost benefits, primarily because
a firm can sell the same chunk
of material to more people.
Environmental benefits also
accrue in theory because there
is a reduction in upstream
production impacts. But in the
end eco-efficiency does not
deliver sustainability. There are
limits to efficiency gains, limits
which are both practical and
thermo-dynamic, and further
improvement becomes harder
and more expensive per kg or
kWh saved. Reducing emissions
does not make environmental
problems disappear, and because
of threshold effects, may not
alleviate environmental
problems at all – for example,
dumping less pollution into a
river can still kill all the fish…
Environmental Management
Systems (EMSs) such as ISO14001
offer a framework to drive
progress. But many firms have
not been sufficiently rigorous in
identifying their environmental
aspects, and so their system
simply manages a smaller subset
of the real problems. EMSs don’t
do much to foster innovation,
are not suited to smaller firms,
and can tie up staff time in
setting up systems and monitoring
and reporting progress,
rather than developing and
using new solutions.
The idea behind ‘Factor X’ is
laudable, but ecological theory
shows us that ecosystems,
whether industrial or DNA based,
strive to maximise throughput of
energy and materials. While each
product or species may develop
through competition to become
very efficient in their use of
energy and materials, the
number of individuals will
increase, as will the number of
species, giving the whole system
the same, or more likely an
increased, level of total energy
and material throughput.
The ‘biothinking’ approach says:
When activity equals damage, don’t
try to reduce environmental impact
by trying to reduce the amount of
activity – change the activities so
that they are biocompatible and
cause no damage.
JANUARY 1999 · THE JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE PRODUCT DESIGN
INNOVATION
The ‘biothinking’
approach says:
when activity
equals damage,
don’t try to
reduce
environmental
impact by trying
to reduce the
amount of
activity –
change the
activities so
that they are
biocompatible
and cause no
damage.
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