IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

into product development have resulted in substantial positive achievements.
Europe leads the way internationally: Countries such as Denmark,
Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, and Sweden are front-runners in impact
assessment, design method development, and eco-design education.
Their efforts contributed to an overall reduction of carbon dioxide emissions
from EU manufacturing of over 11 percent between 1985 and 2000. 22
Internationally, some large multinationals now address the issue of environmental
product design in a comprehensive way, particularly in the fields
of electrical and electronic goods, motor vehicles, and packaging. These
firms have responded to a variety of drivers and now pay as much attention
to environmental and social aspects related to their products, from a life
cycle perspective, as they once did to economic and market aspects only.
Weighty Factors
Lightness 15
Three factors throw a shadow over this otherwise positive picture. The first
is that industry is changing, but too slowly relative to overall economic
growth. During that same period in which carbon dioxide emissions were
reduced, manufacturing production as a whole rose by 31 percent—with
the result that industrial production still accounts for a considerable share
of pollution. Much-maligned global corporations are less of a problem
than small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), for whom eco-design continues
to play a very small role.
A second brake on progress is inadequate information diffusion. A lot
of potentially weight-reducing research goes unreported. Environmental
design information tends to be scattered and fragmented, and many ecodesign
tools and data that could help us remain hidden from view and
underused. Kathalys, a research group in Holland, turns ecological footprints
into design action points by measuring pressure on the environment
in terms of everyday activities in the home—such as taking a shower. Taking
just one shower in a top-of-the-range cubicle, Kathalys has discovered,
consumes as much as thirty-five kilojoule-pounds in energy and two hundred
liters of water. Kathalys is testing a mist shower that, combined with
water and heat recycling, reduces those numbers tenfold, to five megajoulepounds
of heat and twenty liters of water per person. These numbers
are impressive, but too few people know about them. I live less than an
hour away from the Kathalys offices, for example; I have met the gifted
and dedicated people there on numerous occasions, and I am known to