have a multiplicative effect, as the
production of goods and services is
closer to the source of non-renew-able consumption choices.
Environmental sustainability
could be defined as the balance—or
imbalance—between production
and consumption. Unfortunately, a
massive imbalance exists, due to the
automation of manufacturing and
the un-automated process of recycling and materials recovery. This
lack of automation symmetry means
it is very difficult for consumption to result in large quantities of
recovered materials as input to the
production process. Due to these
difficulties, most consumption output is not reused or recycled and is
essentially pollution or garbage.
Before the industrial revolution,
the large effort involved in the
manual manufacturing and craftsmanship processes implicitly created a context in which goods had a
high cost and, consequently, a high
value. In this context of scarcity,
the “consumption” of goods was just
part of a larger process leading to
repair or repurposing. The automation of manufacturing led to an
abundance of goods, which introduced the notion of waste, in which
consumption leads to the creation of
garbage. The goal for sustainability
could then be called a return to a
mental model, or context, of scarcity in which the concept of waste
is deprecated. Currently, the general feeling of abundance, together
with the ongoing process of global
automation, has led to both a waste
problem and an emissions problem,
formerly called pollution.
The task of understanding the
scope and magnitude of the global
pollution problem is immense.
Toward this end, the Sustainable
Consumption & Production Branch
of the United Nations Environment
Programme (UNEP) has attempted
• Figure 1. Autodesk
Inventor, with a
sustainability panel
(right) called Eco
Materials Adviser,
presents mate-rial properties from
Granta Design to
support the decision-making process.
• Figure 2. Eco
Materials Adviser:
(top left) Material
assignments to
various parts of
the device being
designed; (bottom
left) Water usage
in liters to manu-facture the parts;
(middle) Materials
search interface to
help the designer
select materials
that meet their
sustainability, per-formance, and cost
needs; (bottom
right) Eco Impact
Dashboard show-ing relative impact
from baseline of
material changes.
to collect data and determine key
indicators for measuring environ-
mental problems. Dimensions such
as global warming potential, land-
use competition, and human toxicity
have been identified as key metrics
in this area. These metrics can be
combined into an environmentally
weighted material-consumption
value for understanding the primary
factors that contribute to pollu-
tion. UNEP’s research reports that
the relative contribution to global
environmental problems caused
by material consumption is led by
animal products ( 34.5%), followed by
crops ( 18.6%), coal ( 14.8%), crude oil
( 9.4%), plastics ( 9.1%), iron and steel
(4%), natural gas ( 3.7%), other metals
( 3.4%), biomass from forestry ( 1.7%),
and minerals (0.8%) [ 3].
September + October 2011
