UWIC DFIM - Nick Gerrard

CCS Sustainability

Sustainability

Concerns about our society’s impact on the environment and especially our contribution to global warming are growing by the day and most people have accepted that we have a shared responsibility to minimize the worst effects of our carbon greedy lifestyles. Sustainability is a new concept, still in its infancy, but it will surely become an increasingly pressing issue at all levels from government policy making to how individuals conduct their lives including how we travel and where we get our energy from. The UN has a new Division for Sustainable Development (http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/) for whom Sustainability is “a form of development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
A good deal of people certainly seem galvanized by the challenges facing us and it’s easy to find the websites of numerous organisations dedicated to tackling the issue. At this early stage in introducing the concept of sustainability the real boom seems to be in the promotion of its ideals and education and guidance on its implementation. Some of these websites belong to think tanks and profit making consultancy groups like Sustainability Ltd (http://www.sustainability.com/sa-services/index.asp) and many are non governmental and non profit like Columbia Universities Earth Institute whose goals are solely the raising of awareness and the influence of governmental decision making (http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/sus_dev/). At a local level there are increasing numbers of practical and educational community projects like Milton Keynes Council’s Sustainable Schools Project which is a trial at present but aims to spread to all the schools in the region. Children not only learn about the concept of sustainability but they also recycle, make compost and plant trees. People and businesses are eager to find out what they can do and the challenge seems to be in getting the information to them at present. The media seems to have picked up on this, the environment is now front page news, phrases like ‘Carbon Footprints’ have been forced into our everyday lives and on the whole we are all more conscious about our effect on the environment, for example we now recycle more than ever before. However, there are concerns about the way the media reports climate change, evoking apocalyptic visions of doom to sell papers or attract viewers and leaving people feeling overwhelmed and powerless (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5236482.stm). Is fear the best motivating factor to make us change how we live?
Carbon Offsetting is a new concept in which both carbon emissions and positive actions to reduce the amount of Co2 in the atmosphere are assigned values so that for example one long haul flight would be ‘worth’ the planting of several trees and the net effect would be zero impact on the amount of harmful gases in the environment (http://www.defra.gov.uk/ENVIRONMENT/climatechange/carboncost/carbon-offsetting/faqs.htm). It isn’t just governments that are buying into this idea however and now individuals and businesses can offset their impact on the environment through what is now being called Carbon Trading. The companies that conduct the Carbon Trading are doing very well and are increasingly popular; the market leader The CarbonNeutral Company (http://www.carbonneutral.com/) has an impressive list of clients including Volvo, Sky and Berkely Homes. Carbon Offsetting is popular with big business and governments because it allows them to continue running their business in a traditional way while seemingly having a zero net effect on the environment, very commendable but is it just an excuse to carry on polluting? I read an interesting editorial in The Independent last week challenging the benefit of this trend on three counts. Firstly that many of these companies aren’t properly policed and may not actually be offsetting the carbon emissions you paid them to, secondly that many of the trees they’ve planted to reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere might actually die because of global warming or disease and release their own carbon again and thirdly that paying someone else to “absolve your carbon sins” neatly sidesteps the tough decisions that everyone concerned about the environment will have to start taking more and more.
Governments have a huge role to play in introducing true sustainability. The G8 recently met to set long term plans to deal with climate change and the decisions made at that meeting will likely have a massive effect on the environment in the coming decades (http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/10/05/world_banks_dirty_power_plan.php). The negotiations were conducted through The World Bank, an organisation that has 25 billion dollars invested in coal and gas and it’s probably no surprise that wind and solar power feature very little in our government’s future plans for energy generation. I don’t think people are suspicious enough of the motivations of these decision makers when you consider that we’re all going to get the effects of their decisions. For example the World Bank’s own Renewable Energy Task Force put forward a plan to provide 1 billion people with renewable energy by 2010 which was ‘killed’ by the US government.
As depressing reading as that makes there is at least a glimmer of hope, I was surprised to read of big corporations going beyond government targets for sustainable business practices and proactively seeking solutions themselves. I was especially surprised to read that Nike, hardly famed for ethical business practices, were one of these companies and that they had set themselves targets for cutting down on “eliminating waste and eliminating toxics” with sustainability a major issue for them (http://www.nike.com/nikebiz/nikebiz.jhtml?page=27&cat=strategy). In a design sense, product design is the first area to really go for what is now being called Sustainable Product Development and knowledge and expertise on sustainable design are being passed around at industry seminars and through short courses at locations such as Teeside University’s ‘Clean Environment Management Centre’ (http://www.tees.ac.uk/docs/docrepo/clemance/SustainableProductDev.pdf).
Many companies are capitalizing on our ever increasing interest in our own environmental impact in different ways. Straw Bale houses are vastly more energy efficient then stone and wooden ones and although I’ve never seen one are growing in popularity worldwide and with the promise of $10 a month heating/cooling bills who wouldn’t buy this how to DVD for just 67 dollars (http://www.strawbale.com/dvds/straw-bale-howto.html). You can even pay to be buried in a manner that will have as little negative effect on the land as possible, in an eco friendly coffin with natural wildflowers for a headstone in any one of 200 ‘natural burial’ sites across the UK (http://www.naturalmatters.net/content.asp?cat=13). The United Nations Environment Program now has awards for sustainability, a Roll Of Honour featuring 500 companies. One that consistently makes that list is the manufacturer of ecological detergents and cleansing agents Ecover (http://www.ecover.com/gb/en/About/) a company that is run with sustainability at its core, they even have 6000 square meters of grass on the roof of one of their factories. I feel I should be using Ecover products the more I find out about them, carbon generation is the headline grabber but its also very scary to think of all the chemicals in my shower gel, washing up liquid, toilet freshener and so on ending up in the environment. The first time I ever heard the phrase sustainability was in regards to ‘sustainable tourism’ where people no longer wanted to feel like their visit was inherently damaging to some area of great natural importance and these initiatives have been massively popular (http://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/sustainable/).
Sustainability seems to be an umbrella term covering all our positive actions to decrease our impact on the environment and it seems to embrace a very positive movement towards a more motivated and responsible society. Kofi Annan stated that sustainable development “is the greatest challenge facing humankind today” so it’s not hard to see that facilitating this societal shift will involve a lot of work. In relation to my own career goals I see this vast and very important issue as something that I not only would love to be involved with but that I think there will be a call for people from a lot of different disciplines, not just design to think creatively really engage themselves with this.

posted by nick_gerrard @ 9:06 AM