Reva McAulay
MHC 250
Weekly Writeup #8
The 12 Principles of Green Engineering were an interesting if random seeming list of guidelines for how engineers and businesses should make their products. Obviously they should avoid hazardous products and byproducts, prevent waste ,use an efficient production method, use renewable sources of energy and materials, and consider what happens to products after they are done being used. But some of the other principles were more interesting, like the idea of using output-pull products. Output-pull was something I had never heard of before, and didn’t really understand until we learned about the thing where you pull a nylon thread out of a chemical solution and it forms more nylon. I’m still not sure whether or how this could be applied to anything other than chemistry, and google doesn’t have anything on it except more lists of the 12 Principles of Engineering. Taking advantage of entropy is another interesting idea that is not obvious at first. Using as few materials as possible is similarly not something that you would think would make a big difference, but it does make sense because the more materials that are in something, the more work it is to recycle. And we’ve seen how people barely recycle the easy stuff, like aluminum cans or water bottles, so making things even more complicated to recycle will naturally make recycling even less common.
My three favorites of the 12 Principles of Green Engineering were the ones about designing for unnecessary capability, using energy and material flows, and designing for durability instead of immortality. Using energy and material flows is interesting because it shows how little people consider the idea of reusing anything, even perfectly good energy that is already right there and doesn’t require any transportation or anything. Using energy flows in manufacturing does not require an entire infrastructure like using alternative sources of energy does. Nor does it require changing things to reduce the amount of energy it takes to complete the process. All it takes is figuring out how to use waste energy from earlier in the process to help with a later part, using the waste energy as is. It shows how little people consider using anything but something new, that minimizing energy use is thought of first before thinking of how to reuse energy that has already been taken out. The same goes for waste products, obviously.
The idea that designing for unnecessary capacity or capability is flawed is great too. It doesn’t make sense on any level, even a strictly economic one, to spend time, money, and resources to design and build something to do something it will never have to do. Similarly, people tend to buy the most capable products even if they are more expensive and the consumer will never use its capabilities. Why buy a computer that has huge capabilities and many special features if you just want to do basic internet and word processing? It doesn’t make any sense, and neither does buying a car that is made to handle off-road driving in terrible conditions, or one that can go 160 miles per hour, if the vast majority (or all) of its use will be driving in the city or on highways and never going over 60 mph. If people did not demand unnecessary functions, manufacturers would be able to build more environmentally friendly products at lower prices.
Similarly, designing for immortality is basically designing for an unnecessary function. The odds of a product being used for the consumer’s entire life and then being passed down to the next generation is absolutely none for most things, and very small even for things that people intend to use forever. Certainly things that are meant to be disposable, like Styrofoam cups, don’t need to be made to last forever (unless recycled). But for most things, people are not going to want to use it forever. Eventually it’s going to be so outdated and out of fashion that nobody will want it even if you give it away for free. Going back to computers and cars, only basic computers even need to be particularly durable, since the people who buy them might actually hold on to them for awhile. A really fancy computer will probably only be used for a few years before it’s obsolete. Cars need to last a while because they tend to be re-used, but even those will eventually be retired because they don’t have up to date safety features or gas mileage.
