Long Live the Green
The January GreenPiece debut column contained a sidebar featuring a few suggested websites for learning more about green initiatives. A recent visit to two of the sites uncovered information addressing carbon emissions and green designing—both noteworthy issues.
Carbon Emissions’ Calculated Risks
Researchers at Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Mellon University’s Green Design Institute posted an article on the Printers’ National Environmental Assistance Center (www.pneac.org), calling for more stringent measures for calculating global warming-causing carbon emissions. An edited version of the article is reprinted here with permission.
There is no universally accepted way of calculating carbon footprint. Many accepted frameworks rely on “tiers” of increasingly broad scope. Tier one generally includes emissions by a company’s own activities, such as burning gasoline in fleet vehicles or natural gas in facilities. The second tier boundary expands to include emissions from electricity and steam purchased by the company. Tier three takes into account all other emissions, including the entire supply chain of goods and services.
Most companies reporting their greenhouse gas emissions use only tier one or tier two boundaries. Carnegie Mellon researchers H. Scott Matthews, Chris T. Hendrickson and Christopher L. Weber developed a new method that estimates greenhouse gas emissions across all tiers of the supply chain for all industries.
“By far, most companies are pursuing very limited footprints—toe prints, really—instead of comprehensive ones,” said Matthews, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and engineering and public policy.
The team reported two-thirds of U.S. industries would overlook 75 percent of their total greenhouse gas emissions if they continue to use the same tier-one and tier-two reporting boundaries.
For instance, only 6 percent of the publishing industry’s greenhouse gas emissions result from tier-one and tier-two uses of petroleum products and electricity. However, there are large emissions from electricity and paper in the supply chain that would otherwise be ignored.
The researchers helped to develop a website, www.eiolca.net, offering the comprehensive Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment (EIO-LCA) screening tool, which analyzes carbon footprints and other impacts for different economic sectors in the U.S. economy.
The EIO-LCA method was theorized and developed by economist Wassily Leontief in the 1970s, based on work for which he received the Nobel Prize in Economics. Green Design Institute researchers operationalized Leontief’s method in the mid-1990s, once sufficient computing power was widely available to perform the large-scale, real-time matrix manipulations. Now, the EIO-LCA method has been transformed into a user-friendly online tool for quick and easy evaluations.
Results provide guidance on the relative impacts of different products, materials, services and industries regarding resource use and emissions throughout the supply chain. The effect of producing an automobile, for example, would include not only the impacts at the final assembly facility, but also the impact from mining metal ores, making electronic parts, forming windows, etc.
The EIO-LCA models available on the site apply the EIO-LCA method to various national and state economies. Each model is comprised of national economic input-output models and publicly available resource use and emissions data.
“A company that is looking to move toward bio-based materials may find it far more cost-effective to encourage purchases of green power in its supply chain when it look[s] at its total supply chain carbon footprint,” said Hendrickson, professor of civil and environmental engineering.
Deadly Designs
In an article titled “Natural Systems Design—Design for the Death of Your Piece,” editors at renourish, a resource on sustainability for graphic designers (www.re-nourish.com) suggested keeping the idea of a “cycle” in mind when designing for more environmentally conscious and interesting work. Highlights are reprinted here with permission.
Rather than designing strictly in a linear fashion, keep in mind how the piece will be used when past its useful life. Consider the “death” of your piece in the initial design process. (The concept is explained more in depth by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in their book, “Cradle to Cradle: Rethinking the Way We Make Things.”)
Here are the basic principles of Natural Systems Design:
• Ask more “why” questions. For example, why is this project necessary and why are we doing it this way?
• Ask more “what if” questions. For instance, what if we minimized effort here and exerted more here?
• Ask more “how” questions. How is the piece going to impact the world while in production and after?
• Minimize and simplify designs.
• Design for cycles, such as reuse and remanufacturing.
• Design for durability, not obsolescence.
• Choose vendors who use renewable energy.
• Optimize the process, reduce print waste and make sure it’s nontoxic.
• Support sustainable forestry by choosing post-consumer waste paper and FSC- or SFI-certified vendors.
• Communicate openly to clients regarding any concerns and help educate each other on the impacts of the project.
Here is a basic “5-R framework” to remember when approaching a new design problem:
1. Restore—Use materials and support firms that help reverse damage or add to natural capital.
2. Respect—Examine impacts the item will have on stakeholders, as well as eco-systems. Be mindful of fair-trade factors, cultural respect, noise/light/visual pollution, clear property rights, accessibility issues and universal design issues.
3. Reduce—Opt for fewer materials and less weight to transport, less energy to manufacture, less energy to store, less energy to use (L.E.D. bulbs vs. incandescent, cold-water wash vs. hot and reduced toxicity, while seeking to limit it altogether.
4. Reuse—Redesign something already manufactured, and make items easy to be reused with minimal or no remanufacturing.
5. Recover—Create items to be fed back into the resource loop, have a robust and easy-to-use system to recover materials, use recycled substrates to make the item wherever possible and recycle recovered items.
A manufactured item should not be created as a one-way trip, or even a virgin renewable resource manufactured good that goes straight to compost, as a first choice. Paper, paperboard and pulp (wood, kenaf, bamboo, agripulp, etc.) are great examples of renewable, biodegradable resources that make many useful reuse and/or remanufacture trips before it’s time to retire them as compost fodder for the next growing cycle.
Related story: Sustainable Green Printing Partnership Opens Application Process
- Places:
- Pittsburgh
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