IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

Lightness 13
areas of productive land needed to support them. They discovered that the
ecological footprint of one Canadian is 4.8 hectares (an area 220 meters
long by 220 meters wide—roughly comparable to three city blocks). This
statistic means that if everyone on Earth lived like the average Canadian,
we would need at least three Earths to provide all the material and energy
essentials we currently use. 17 The World Wildlife Fund calculates that mankind’s
ecological footprint is already 1.2 Earths.
Another way to describe environmental impact is called ‘‘weighting.’’ In
weighting, different impacts—or ‘‘endpoints,’’ as they are described in the
dry terminology of international standards—are assessed in tandem: damage
to human health, damage to ecosystem quality, and damage to resources.
Damages to human health are expressed in disability-adjusted life
years (DALYs), a system used by the World Health Organisation and the
World Bank. 18
Collecting all these data is one thing; making sense of them holistically is
another. Other researchers are working on that. A British project, Environmental
Life Cycle Information Management and Acquisition (ELIMA), integrates
data on human, ecological, and industrial processes. The assessment
of environmental impacts on human health (from carcinogens, respiratory
organics and inorganics, climate change, radiation and ozone layer depletion,
and so on) is linked to data about ecosystem quality (from ecotoxicity,
acidification/eutrophication and land use, and so on). These data, in turn,
are connected to data about industrial processes such as raw-materials use,
especially minerals and fossil fuels. 19
Environmental impact researchers are also bringing us harder and better
information about individual products. A Dutch group called PRé has
developed software for product and packaging designers that enables them
to model a complex product and its life cycle. Built into the software package
are more than two hundred eco-indicators for commonly used materials
such as metals, plastics, paper, board, and glass, as well as production,
transport, energy, and waste treatment processes. The software calculates
the environmental load and shows which parts of the product ‘‘weigh’’
the most. These can then be rethought. 20
Environmentally sound product life cycle design takes into account all
processes that occur in relation to the product during its life cycle, from
cradle to grave—or even better, from cradle to cradle. One of the methods
used to document findings is the so-called MET matrix—a scorecard for the