Design For Sustainability

Source: Design for Sustainability

By: Indeco Strategic Planning, 1997

Reflection:

This is not the first document we’ve looked at that deals with the need to redesign our products and alter our patterns of consumption in the name of sustainability. As with those resources, I find this one to be utterly logical and, dare I say, obvious. Once I attempted to look objectively at these things, at our “stuff” and the patterns with which we consume it, (potential PhD dissertation: is that possible?), it really did become obvious that The Way Things Are is not sustainable, and even if everybody on Earth lived like me, we still would not be living sustainably. That’s a bitter pill to swallow.

So, if this is obvious, and not just to me, why aren’t all our products designed to be sustainable? What has prevented that transition? After all, this document is thirteen years old. That’s a fair amount of time to expect change. Furthermore, Design For Sustainability contains several mini case studies outlining companies that are already successfully implementing these ideas. But, for better or worse, these sustainability initiatives are not what these companies are known for. We like Volvo because they make safe cars, not because they’ve embraced some sustainable ideals. It's better, because it shows that “mainstream” success and sustainable business practices can coexist. Worse, because it gives short shrift to those sustainable initiatives. Again, we’ve talked about the need to communicate before. Changing one individual, or one family, or one business, or one city, or even one country, isn’t enough. These are big problems, and if solutions exist, we need to make sure everybody knows.

Fast forward 24 hours. I recently moved (hence the lack of recent posts) and I don’t yet have an internet connection at my new place. As such, I had time to sleep on the above, ruminate, and as usual, I came up with some other stuff. Coincidentally enough, in looking at some previous comments from Dr. K, I realized that what I came up with ties in nicely with some things I should have replied to long ago, so here goes.

Looking back to my post on Sustainability Reporting, the comment was, sustainability has been shown to negatively impact efficiency and innovation. The questions were: (1) Are you surprised by these findings? (2) Do you think this is the Achilles heal of sustainability? (3) How might human rights be dealt with in order to succeed yet NOT compromise sustainability?

Am I surprised by these findings? I am not surprised that concerning yourself with the human resources aspects negatively affects efficiency. People can be pushed to be more productive and more efficient long past the point where it starts to affect their physical and emotional well-being. In some cases, workers will put up with this, and in others, they may not. The point is, disregarding physical and emotional well-being, people could be more productive in a given amount of time, which is just another way of defining efficiency.

This is the point that ties into the above post. The epiphany I had upon awaking today was, our “stuff” needs to get more expensive. At some point in the past, I questioned whether was money was an accurate analog for resources. It is not. Because we have gotten so efficient, and because we have gotten so good at consuming raw materials, the cost of our stuff has decreased. What we pay no longer reflects the raw materials therein. Therefore, if we want to rely on market forces to lead us to consume sustainably, we must pay more for our stuff. This argument has been put forth many times in regard to food. Food has never been less expensive than it is now. We have never devoted a smaller part of our disposable income to food than we do now, but the price of that food is dependent on cheap oil. When oil is no longer cheap, and unless we have figured out some other way of fertilizing and transporting our food, we will be faced with the prospect of paying the true cost of our food. It will be more expensive, and we will consume less. Those who try to eat local and organic are getting closer to paying the true cost of food, and in many cases, it is more expensive. So maybe sacrificing efficiency for the sake of human welfare is a good thing. How you would make that case to a business manager is another matter.

The relationship between sustainable business and innovation is a little more puzzling, and I don’t know what to make of it. Superficially, I can see no reason for this connection, unless it is a direct result of the above, since innovation is one measure of productivity/efficiency.

Whatever that connection, the argument brings us full circle, back to the moral standard of sustainability. If one asked a business manager to trade efficiency and innovation for happier, healthier workers, it would be a hard decision, unless you accept that happy and healthy workers are the only sustainable option. Any business manager, given the choice of a business model that will work and one that won’t, will choose the model that works. Of course, saying a business model will work is easy to say, harder to quantify, and much harder to prove.