From raw material extraction to end-of-life possibilities, Nadine Gudz gives sound advice to designers and architects for getting off oil.
Nadine Gudz, Director, Sustainability Strategy
InterfaceFLOR
Last night, I had the honour of attending the 20th anniversary celebration of the David Suzuki Foundation. I can still feel the shivers up my spine as Stephen Lewis, Ed Begley Jr, Melissa Auf der Maur, Adam van Koeverden, and Sereka Cullis Suzuki read aloud the Declaration of Interdependence (http://www.davidsuzuki.org/about/declaration/), (http://bit.ly/btVIDR) an acknowledgement of how humans are fundamentally altering Earth’s life support systems. Written for the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, every word remains relevant today.
The Declaration reminds me that Zero Waste - eliminating the whole concept of waste - means rethinking humanity’s relationship with Earth. This is bigger than the 3 R’s I grew up with; although, maybe it’s worth revisiting these key principles.
Reduce means consume less. Consume smart. This is about waste prevention. Products and processes are also [re]designed using fewer raw materials without compromising quality and performance. Hopefully those raw materials come from high quality recycled sources or rapidly renewable sources. Recyclability also becomes a design principle. Reusing is pretty straightforward, but “recycling” means different things in today’s marketplace. As decision-makers, we need to question how products are being recycled, and if recycling processes further environmental degradation through their own material and energy flows. The goal is landfill and incineration diversion. This is where life cycle thinking fits in.
Life cycle thinking asks us to consider the potential environmental impacts and material and energy flows occurring throughout the product’s life cycle from raw material collection through to recycling. By comparing products and materials based on life cycle performance, we can make smarter, more informed decisions toward a Zero Waste world.
Fields like Green Chemistry, (http://www.learngreenchemistry.com/Learn_Green_Chemistry.html), the science of making smart choices from the very beginning about the chemicals that compose the products we use every day, asks us to think more deeply about design considerations.
A Zero Waste philosophy can inspire innovation and creativity, opening new markets for recycled raw materials and low impact recycling technologies. This includes rethinking “value” beyond financial measures and considering social and ecological costs associated with the life cycle impacts of products and services. This has big implications for business and industry, primary perpetrators of environmental degradation since the boom of industry. Frameworks for change towards a Zero Waste economy, like The Natural Step (http://www.thenaturalstep.org/the-system-conditions), can help with the transition.
The industrial revolution has brought as pain and joy. We need an “evolution” in business, mindful of our intimate interdependence with all of life’s finite systems.
Meet Nadine at the upcoming IIDEX/NEOCON Canada 2010. Nadine is part of a panel of representatives from top organizations known for their sustainability programs and will present an overview of “zero waste” on Thursday, September 23, 2:30pm - 3:30pm.
Link to IIDEX site for complete seminar overview:
http://www.iidexneocon.com/2010/index.php/seminars/details/t21/
I was thinking about my personal dependence on oil as I was getting ready for the World Without Oil (WWO) symposium in January, powering my hair dryer, considering my tube of toothpaste, my toilet seat, the emissions from cultivating and transporting my coffee beans, and on and on.
Let’s face it, as biologist Dr. Dayna Baumeister said at the symposium, “Oil defines all of our realities, not to mention all the realities of every other species on the planet.”
From provocative presentations like Mirko Zadini’s reflections on global responses to the 1973 oil crisis (including the emergence of board games like “Oil War” and “Energy Crisis”), to curious predictions shared by Bruce Mau (we might have 50,000-60,000 years left of oil extraction), it was refreshing to hear important questions being raised about what so-called “industrialized” societies can learn from indigenous communities and traditional knowledges in the transition off oil.
This marriage of “old” and “new” thinking, industrial production and handcraft, will require unlearning, relearning, new learning.
· Mau asked the audience to reframe the discussion – can we imagine a beautiful future with oil? Not because we should, but because we can. It would be embarrassing if we don’t.
· Fritz Haeg and Baumeister reminded us that we are nature. Nature is not something we escape to on the weekend.
· Baumeister shared her thoughts on biomimicry as a practice of deep remembering of who we are as a species. It’s time to throw away our egos, admit we don’t know what we’re doing and ask for help. It’s time to leave an era of extraction and borrow some recipes from the biosphere and our co-inhabitants.
The calibre of thought leadership at the symposium was inspiring, but I left the symposium hoping future dialogues about oil venture will evolve into a more cross-disciplinary debate.
What else was missing from the day?
Perhaps a discussion about why Canada was named the “colossal fossil” by Climate Action Network International at the 2009 Summit on Climate Change held in December in Copenhagen. Few countries have had the dishonour of receiving three consecutive fossil awards.
Despite the dishonor, Canada continued to aim low at the Copenhagen talks, not letting a day pass without earning a Fossil of the Day award. This “prize,” bestowed on countries blocking progress at the summit, was awarded daily by a coalition of 400 leading international NGOs.
Let’s not forget that the Oil Sands are the fastest growing source of global warming pollution in Canada.
Extensions of the Word Without Oil symposium that cannot be overlooked:
· A film called “Petropolis” is a fantastic resource for a deeper understanding of how Canada is transforming the Athabasca Watershed at a spectacular rate to fuel. This way of life requires some serious rethinking. Peter Mettler’s aerial perspectives of the Oil Sands in Northern Alberta offer cryptically beautiful insight into the magnitude of the impact of oil extraction and an embarrassing reminder that we are facing the end of cheap oil.
· David Orr’s 2009 book, “Down to the Wire,” addresses the reality that we have already exploited the cheapest and most accessible oil: “Having exhausted the easiest cheapest and nearest sources of oil, what remains is deeper down, farther out, harder to refine and often located in places where the politics are unfathomably contentious – as a result it has become far more expensive to extract, refine, transport and defend our access to it.”
· Hubbert’s peak theory, which accurately predicted U.S. oil production would peak in the 1960’s, also applies to our global economy. Orr reminds us that we are not just facing the end of cheap oil, but the end of a way of life built on flimsy assumptions of easy mobility, convenience, and dependability of long distance transport of food and materials.
It is dangerous to talk about oil in isolation from climate destabilization, habitat destruction and consumption. We are faced with a convergence of challenges of an unprecedented, global scale. This is what Orr calls humankind’s long emergency.
A world without oil is also an unprecedented design problem. Our long emergency will require the genius, commitment and passion of all the disciplines.
Nadine Gudz
Director, Sustainability Strategy
Nadine Gudz, Director, Sustainability Strategy, InterfaceFLOR Canada
What an honour it is to present at the World Without Oil (WWO) symposium on a topic that warrants far more than one day of discussion. Oil is the one material, the one resource that’s in nearly everything we see. Yet, when we talk about making the world a “greener place,” we often talk about every issue but oil. The social, economic and ecological impact of oil extraction is no “flavour of the month” topic. This is a challenge of a lifetime.
Communities around the world are stepping up to the challenge through initiatives like the transition towns movement. How can the design community help facilitate humankind’s transition off oil? Presenting the WWO symposium is an opportunity to support the design community, stir thought leadership and action around systems change toward a more just, closed loop economy.
InterfaceFLOR is the world’s largest producer of carpet tile, and we have a plan to get off oil – completely. Our goal to eliminate our dependency on oil (and other virgin raw materials) by redesigning our products, processes and purpose makes InterfaceFLOR’s operations more efficient, inspires us to innovate, and helps us become less vulnerable to the volatile price of oil. As Interface founder and chairman, Ray Anderson says, getting off oil is part of an even more ambitious and challenging commitment that we have made under the umbrella of “Mission Zero”; that is, to get off ALL fossil fuel-derived energy (coal) and materials (natural gas) by 2020. That means using renewable energy, and closed loop, recycled petro-derived or naturally renewable materials. And beyond those commitments, we intend to eliminate any other negative environmental impacts our operations and products may still have, as we strive for zero environmental footprint.
Having worked as a sustainability practitioner and researcher for more than 15 years, I have often felt frustrated and disenchanted with the slow pace of real, systemic change – going beyond purchasing “green” products (can we really “buy” our way to a sustainable future?) and rethinking our relationship with one another and the biosphere that supports life on Earth. Sustainability for me really gets at the recognition that all life is interconnected. My actions here, today, may impact someone or something else, here or somewhere else, now and/or in the future.
As “A World without Oil” approaches, I’m thinking about how this event might influence the lenses through which the design community sees their work and their relationship with the natural world. I am anticipating a day filled with rich debate and open dialogue to raise tough questions and encourage self reflection. I hope new ideas and collaborations may emerge from the symposium leading to ongoing dialogue and action. Overall, I am excited about the event’s living legacy through the future actions to be inspired by the event.
Dematerialization by conscious design
The Sustainability Dictionary hosted by the Presidio Graduate School defines Dematerialization as, “Reducing the total material that goes toward providing benefits to customers; may be accomplished through greater efficiency, the use of better or more appropriate materials, or by creating a service that produces the same benefit as a product.”
Just as firms seek to economize on energy, labor, land, and other factors of production, they are searching for opportunities to economize on materials. Encouraging examples of more efficient materials use exist in many sectors, functions, and products; however, the taste for complexity, which often goes with so-called higher performance, may intensify other environmental impacts.
Innovation inspired by nature
In her thought-provoking book, Biomimicry, author Janine Benyus opens with a quote by Vaclav Havel, “We must draw our standards from the natural world.” This is the heart of dematerialization by conscious design and what the Biomimicry revolution is all about – the conscious emulation of life’s genius. Biomimicry requires a shift in mindset from thinking about what we can extract to what we can learn from nature. It requires changing our relationship with the natural world to mentor, measure and model. “[L]iving things have done everything we want to do without guzzling fossil fuel, polluting the planet, or mortgaging their future. What better models could there be?”
How would nature design a carpet?
The answer is Entropy™ – the biggest selling product in the shortest period of time in InterfaceFLOR’s history. InterfaceFLOR’s principal designer David Oakey observed how no two square yards of a forest floor are the same, yet they blend perfectly together in a harmonious whole. There is no solid color. It’s a diverse system. He asked, “How could you make carpet so that in one production run, the color and design of every single carpet tile would come out slightly different?”
In his most recent book, Confessions of a Radical Industrialist, Ray Anderson, founder and Chairman of Interface, Inc., reflects on how designing carpet the way nature would has many advantages. “We could actually lay it randomly instead of in a monolithic fashion, saving installation time. It was easy to make repairs because the tile didn’t match exactly to the other tiles. Off quality practically vanished, inspectors could not find defects among the deliberate “imperfection” of no two tiles alike. And it practically eliminated installation waste.” The goal is to make the best looking, most durable product while using the least amount of raw materials, ultimately reducing environmental and financial costs.
Toward a sustainable materials economy
A next step in our research is to develop a scenario for a significantly dematerialized economy and to explore the changes in technology and behavior needed to achieve it. What would a dematerialized, sustainable materials economy look like? Such an exercise should include careful examination of hazards as well as benefits to natural systems associated with a qualitatively and quantitatively sustainable materials economy.
In other words, how does the overall growth of a system offset any efficiency gains in its components? We must measure product life cycles, industry sectors, and the total materials economy at several stages, in various contexts, drawing our standards from the natural world. Imagine a sustainable materials economy that respects its place as a subset of the biosphere, and actually enhances life on Earth as products travel through their life cycles!
Nadine Gudz
Manager, Sustainable Strategy
Source: Materialization and Dematerialization: Measures and Trends
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