Sustainable design is not normally taught in Engineering Schools and in courses on "environmental engineering" students learn to calculate what load of toxins a river can take. Sustainable solutions, in contrast, are premised on the idea of ecological stability or the Jeffersonian principle that no generation may contract unpayable debts to its successor generations. It therefore limits growth (thermodynamically conceived as growth of expended energy) to the regenerative and absorptive capacity of the environment, thereby controlling entropy (Wally recommends Depew and Webers edited collection on Entropy, Information and Evolution). When it comes to the production of waste it takes trees as its example: Trees are manufacturing facilities that take in mass and energy in order to make a product through the process of photosynthesis. While this process generates waste (oxygen), this waste provides food for another process. On the standard economic and engineering principle that less waste makes for more efficiency, sustainable solutions should emulate the efficiency of the tree.
Wally questions whether the currently predominant interest in recycling achieves this efficiency in that it merely retards the "produce, use, eventually dispose"-mechanism. For example, if ownership of products was never transferred to their users, the product would never leave the cycle of (re)production and the question would never arise as to how the used product can re-enter the process of production (e.g., via recycling). While much of a new car is already a product of recycling, energy could be saved if the company retained ownership and the customer only bought and extracted the use-value of the car, eventually returning it to its owner who would refurbish it for the next user. Some manufacturers are experimenting with such models and Wally recommends a paper written by three graduate students who are working in his laboratory: Katherine Neal Blue, Nicholas Davidson and Eriko Kobayashi "The 'Intelligent Product' System" in Business and Economic Review (January-March 1999, pp. 15-20.
Questions of sustainable engineering therefore cannot be separated from experiments in economics and politics. For millenia, human sapiens has just dropped, discarded and abandoned its waste; sustainable design teaches us to unlearn deep-rooted customs, habits or conventions like these.
Alfred Nordmann
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