Seong Im Hong

October 22, 2012

Weekly Journal 7

This week, we mostly learned through the required reading on Green Engineering due to the midterm and group project problem. (Sorry.) I found that Green Engineering paper actually connected pretty well into the themes we have explored in the class. For example, the need for an ideological change to the way we approach the environment was pretty clear in the reading. This is similar to how the MHC 200 class began with discussion of philosophy regarding the environment. Additionally, small parts of the paper (like Nike and Ford’s Model U) reminded me of the previous discussions we had about the responsibility of the consumers as well as the manufacturers and the government.

The Green Engineering paper started off by saying that inherent, ideological changes were necessary when it came to green engineering. According to the paper, there is the traditional way of being green (fixing what is already there, kind of like the “reuse, reduce, recycle” mantra of “pollution prevention”) and the new, radical way of being green (changing the system by creating a closed loop system). I agree that there is a need for radical change in thinking about the role of environment.

For example, the phrase “designers need to strive to ensure that all material and energy inputs and outputs are as inherently on-hazardous as possible” from the reading can take multiple meaning based on the kind of philosophy the reader subscribes to. “Non-hazardous” to whom? What if the output is a non-hazardous but yet un-reusable item? Those subscribing to the cradle-to-grave might be okay with accumulation of output items that are inert yet unusable. But cradle-to-cradle engineers would be wondering (or should be) what they can do with the output and whether this process gives enough benefit to warrant using a yet unusable output. The same sentence can mean worlds of different things according to the reader’s mindset. Hence, it makes sense to talk about philosophy first, as we did in class, because “working smart without perspective or guiding principles can ultimately become an efficient pursuit of the wrong goals.”

Another part of the paper that I found interesting was the phrase about PVC: PVC is “sent to landfills, incinerated, or recycled into products of lesser value”. I found it interesting initially because recycling (something generally considered Very Good for Environment) is listed with what is generally thought to be Very Bad for Environment—landfills and incineration. However, with more careful reading, I realized that recycling into products of lesser value is also bad—not Very Bad, but maybe Pretty Bad because it won’t close the loop completely. There will always be a need for more raw materials with that kind of recycling. Therefore, I found the fact that I did a double-take interesting because I realized that I never think about what happens to things I recycle, or what it means when things are advertised to be “recyclable”. “Recyclable” is a vague r-word that, when seen, is good and will raise my opinions on the product without actually having to follow through its actual value. It’s clever marketing, I suppose, and will increase the demand for recyclable things, but it doesn’t really make the consumer more engaged or knowledgeable. This kind of marketing (“buy this because it’s labeled green!”) really hinges on the consumer feeling better about themselves more than actual change.

I also found it interesting that Nike had some positive PR regarding its PVC use fade-out. However, it’s also worth noting that we just had a talk about Nike’s blatant human rights abuse. It’s good that they’re doing something for the environment, but what’s their end goal? Are they truly subscribing to C-to-C philosophy and/or the Triple Bottom Line philosophy, or did they need some positive PR, or mix of both? Is there truly a mix of both, or does C-to-C philosophy require environmentalism for the sake of environmentalism? I think it’s the latter, but I guess credit should be given where it’s due to encourage corporations to do what’s right. Or do they expect us to like them better, and are planning on something bad/continuing to do something bad to offset whatever positive PR they get? Am I turning into a conspiracy theorist?

William Arguelles

Spiro Alexandratos

Seminar 3

October 24, 2012

Opinion Paper 7

            Seeing as I’ve gotten these opinion papers down to a formula at this point, I feel almost obligated to continue with the general theme of “find the bad guy.” I don’t want you to think this means I don’t appreciate everything else you teach in class however. It’s just easier to form an opinion on a person or a company then RCRA or general philosophies like “cradle-to-cradle.” I guess it’s my own personal bias, because I’m just more interested in people’s thoughts and actions then societal policies and philosophies as a Psych major and I cannot resist seeing the world in the classic “good versus evil” bias. I don’t know why I feel this is relevant to anything, and I apologize for that, I just felt weird cause I keep focusing on this one element. I guess it’s my own little “theme” to the course, so at least I can say I got something out of this class!

Anyways, my opinion! This week I think we finally covered a good guy, William McDonough. So I guess that makes the scoreboard 6 people destroying the world to one guy trying not to. Apparently, according to the video you showed in class, Macdonough has created the ultimate fabric of pure 100% sustainability; a fabric that’s so wonderfully made you can eat it and drink the runoff. I feel like I’m being hyperbolic, but seeing as he described it like it was the most revolutionary thing since bread, I think it’s actually fairly accurate summary.

McDonough described the process in a few steps. First he stated that there was a lot of problems with current manufacturing in mills, with massive runoff of chemicals and hugely expensive filters that didn’t catch 100% of the pollutants. So what McDonough first did was identify the chemicals he couldn’t use, and it was a staggering 7,309 chemicals. What McDonough then used was the 38 chemicals left and made these magically and incredibly clean shirts that are edible and environmentally friendly, while also being implied to be cost efficient and desirable (i.e. people would buy them).

When I saw this in class my initial thought was, “oh my god this is the greatest invention since bread. These shirts are like the shirts of the future, I want one.” And then I thought a bit more, perhaps a bit more cynically, and came to some problems with it. If these shirts are really environmentally friendly, cost effective/efficient, and apparently delicious, why do we make any kinds of shirts that aren’t these? I mean, I’m not an economist, environmentalist, or a chef, but even I can see that a shirt that is so sustainable and cheap it becomes a viable food source is at the very least an incredibly profitable novelty item and at best a third industrial revolution. It’s a product (and production process) that covers the basic needs of food, shelter, and water and seems to be roughly neutral in terms of pollutants and energy, why haven’t these factories appeared everywhere, making millions and millions of shirts to feed/cover the starving masses of the world? Most companies have to deal with environmental fines and bureaucracy around dumping hazardous chemicals when they make anything, be it shirts or tacks, why wouldn’t the company want to make a product that needs no regulation, infinitely marketable, and completely sustainable?

So seeing all the pros to these magic shirts, and I use magic because they truly sound like something out of a science fiction or fantasy novel, why are these shirts not the most common thing in the world? My guess is that the shirts aren’t as cheap to produce as he sold them as, or that it’s still more profitable to make the inferior inedible shirts we wear today. My gut reaction was that some corporation is keeping McDonough down, but after doing a little cursory research, I’ve learned that isn’t the case.

Apparently, McDonough is an almost messianic figure in some circles of the green movement. He’s beloved by pop culture icons like Cameron Diaz and John Mayer and the wealthiest people in the world like paypal founder Elon Musk and Virgin Mobil CEO Richard Branson, making him a kind of “green movement” power broker for the world. In an interview, he offhandedly remarks that if he felt like it, he could just call up the CEO of Gucci and have them start working on making the fashion industry more green and sustainable. Which just brings up more questions, mainly, Why doesn’t he do that? Why not make your magic fabric into magic Gucci purses. People are used to paying hundreds for Gucci, so even if it’s highly expensive to make the fabric, you still have a wide room for a profit margin. Why isn’t this a thing? Which brings me back to my main problem with William McDonough; If he truly is this super powered messiah figure that the six or so articles I read painted him as, why haven’t I ever seen these magic shirts?

I don’t really have any answers for this, except that maybe McDonough is actually just an ordinary man who has had some very good ideas and isn’t actually superman or the green messiah we apparently were waiting for. Maybe, just maybe, we can’t just throw all our hope behind this man, whose highly secretive solutions might not be as feasible as he’s promising us they are. Maybe we should actually consider that while he’s doing great work, McDonough is still outnumbered by companies who don’t seem to care at all. Maybe McDonough wants to get rich by solving this issue, so he’s purposefully withholding information so he’s the only one who knows his solutions.

Or maybe McDonough is wizard Jesus whose come to save the world from the environmental and energy crises with magic shirts made from a secret recipe of 38 chemicals and spices. I’ll let you decide which one is true.

Emotional engagement, along with a general paradigm shift, are necessary for people to convert to more sustainable lifestyles because of the personal sacrifices people will have to face. People today say that they care about a cleaner environment, but what will they do to attain it? Will they only buy food that’s in season, or organic food if they can afford it? Will they boycott all companies that slip past environmental and labor regulations by exploiting overseas labor? Will they become part-time activists, slow the growth of their economies? Will they pressure their families and employers to recycle? How much, in short, are they willing to change? How much do they care?

The people who care the most are the activists. They are the researchers, the consciousness-raisers, the ones who bring their own recycling bags to events which they know won’t be providing. They’re emotionally engaged, and make it a point to fight for sustainability in their lives and the lives of others, even if it’s not terribly convenient. They are of critical importance in catalyzing change because they give people an alternative set of behaviors to mimic—make people stop and think, “Why am I following the crowd I’m following, when I could be following this one instead?” Unfortunately, only a minority of people are like this. Most people will cede that they care but excuse themselves from making change a priority of theirs by saying, “I’m too busy”. They’re too busy to care too much; they have emotional engagements elsewhere.

Why, then, do some people care more about sustainability than others? My guess would be that many people don’t see it as their personal problem. They don’t see it as their responsibility to care or do anything, because responsibility has still not been clearly relegated. It’s everybody’s responsibility to care—we all share this planet together. But because it’s such a collective responsibility, people feel comfortable ignoring it completely and focusing only on the personal duties in their immediate lives. They’re not emotionally engaged because they don’t see how the political can also be highly personal; they don’t feel that they can make a significant difference; they do not see the consequences of their inaction. Of course, they might simply not care, or feel safe in assuming that “progress” will eventually set the important things (whatever those are) right again.

This is why we need a shift in the way of thinking, a widespread change in values. As long as people value what is cheap, quick and easy more than they value something of quality and substance—that costs more in the short run but less when the long-run costs of production are accounted for—they will not care enough to change. As long as people think only about what they want to buy next, and not what it takes to make it—they will not care enough to change. As long as people feel that the consequences are minute, distant, and not their fault—they will not care enough to change. Until they feel that it is their personal responsibility, as denizens of this planet, to live on it without compromising the ability of future generations to do so, they will not care enough. It’ll always be one of the last things on their list of problems to tackle—until ignoring the problem becomes so painful that they have to do something about it, until the situation gets so bad that they begin to see things that scare them.

For a country that claims to have great faith in the power of the individual, we don’t seem to have much faith in ourselves. People go about their lives without making even the smallest, easiest eco-friendly changes because they feel that their choices don’t matter. They feel that one person is too small to make a difference. That’s not true. It’s a cognitive distortion, it’s a logical fallacy, it’s wrong. Everybody’s actions make a difference. Humanity is made up of individuals, and the sum of our individual choices, accumulated over time, reveals what we care about and impacts everybody. So how do we empower people to make the positive changes in their own lives that will benefit everybody? How do we make them realize that caring is worth it in the end? How do we make them believe that, by making more sustainable choices, they can impact the world in a good way?

For the past few lessons, the lectures have turned opened up to a brand new, exciting portion of our semester’s arc.  Recently we have focused on the ways in which we can change the negative influence us humans have on Earth, as well as fixing already existing problems.  I enjoyed the organization of last week’s lesson, starting with the definition of a word we already thought we knew.  A directly expressed distinction between our passive and active knowledge of vocabulary is important in clarifying definitions that compound with other words we are not familiar with.  Engineering is applying science to design or develop structure, machine, apparatus or manufacturing processes.  It was interesting to see that the class, one composed of majority native English speaking HONORS students, failed to easily come up with an accurate definition.  I am disappointed in myself and the class. Tisk tisk.  Green engineering is directed toward improving local and global environmental quality.  And now back on track, cradle to cradle we learned is assessing the life cycle and impact of  a chemical in a process, but more importantly we learned that natural systems operate on the sun’s limitless energy which drives the Earth’s biogeochemistry to sustain productive, regenerative biological systems.  Technical systems designed to operate by the same rules approach the effectiveness of the closed-loop cycling of living systems in which almost no waste is unused.  Which comes to the idea that we should potentially be investing in solar income, as well as the potential to use more sources of alternative energy.  The ideal I came out of the class with had to be changing our perspectives.  A paradigm shift is necessary for the population of the Earth, if we are going to waste less, and keep the intrinsic value of the Earth alive.  What we consider waste in this country is completely different from what the citizens in places of Guyana consider waste.  Especially here in New York, for example, I find that many people who I encounter that are on a “diet,” do not change the ways they eat, but rather just buy a full meal, and throw out half of it.  This is an extremely effective means of controlling portions, because one is just reducing the portion in half.  The problem here is that if someone in a rural Kyrgyzstani village saw a picture of my friend throwing out half of a Chipotle burrito, they would probably cry from frustration.  One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.  In this scenario I have created, to us New Yorkers, a cheeseburger with ONE bite taken out is trash, but to a huge population of the world, that cheeseburger is a luxury.

Reva McAulay

MHC 200 Weekly Writeup #7

10.22.12

The differences between optimizing the existing solution, re-engineering the solution, and re-defining the problem seem rather vague, but I guess its just a matter of how much work it takes.  So optimizing the existing solution is anything that keeps the bulk of the process intact, while re-engineering the solution changes most of it.  And re-defining the problem means coming up with an entirely different solution.

The three design principles of cradle-to-cradle make it seem a lot easier than I’m sure it is.  Using current solar income is very do-able, just a little more expensive.  Celebrating diversity doesn’t seem like a challenge at all, as its actually probably the easiest and most efficient way anyway.  The really tricky one is turning waste into food, as there are still lots of kinds of wastes that no one knows how to re-use, or at least not without enormous cost.  In this case, it is almost certainly easier to create processes that produce easily re-usable wastes than to try to convert dangerous chemical wastes into inputs for another process.  The easy ones, the wastes that we already know how to re-use at a low cost, are unfortunately also mostly the less harmful ones.  Except for plastic, which is easy to re-use but for some reason often is not.

So if cradle-to-cradle engineering is technically viable, why isn’t it everywhere?  Again with the economics.  Or, probably more accurately, the lack of forethought amongst the people who make business decisions.  There are plenty of success stories of companies that, to a limited extent anyway, made environmentally-friendly decisions and benefitted from it.  For instance, when HP decided to start developing non-lead based solders for no other reason than that they knew lead was toxic, they had a working non-lead solder already in place when the EU banned lead in electronics(http://www.businessandsociety.be/assets/ee902e549915b8586e8a8daa338e073e.pdf). So basically when everyone else was scrambling and spending lots of money to figure out how to follow the EU’s restrictions, HP already had something that didn’t have any side effects and was cost-efficient.  It’s always better to be ahead of the game, whether you’re expecting government regulations or the eventual limited supply and high prices of fossil fuels.

While a number of people are saying that the government should step in and fund cradle to cradle processes if businesses aren’t willing to do it, I don’t think that is the solution.  The government should be funding cradle to cradle manufacturing, but they have a very minor role in the manufacturing of the huge amount of stuff that gets made every day.  There’s no way the government could afford to subsidize every industry that should be using these principles. In any case, businesses should decide that it is worth it to implement them without government support.  If no one can or will take the time to make cradle to cradle cost efficient on a grand scale, it will never catch on the way it should.  What the government should do is fund research on how to make it cheaper, and ensure that it is used in the industries the government can have more control of—say, electricity.

Random noticing of the day: glancing through the Wikipedia article on Cradle to Cradle Engineering, the Chinese government is listed as one of the major implementers of Cradle to Cradle engineering.  Not to knock China here but I think if the US government is falling behind China’s in environmentally friendliness, there might be a problem.