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2021 | Buch

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An Environmental Life Cycle Approach to Design

LCA for Designers and the Design Market

verfasst von: John Cays

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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Über dieses Buch

This book introduces readers to Life Cycle Approach (LCA)-supported design solutions, through non-geometric-data-driven methodologies, to provide a clear picture of how to optimize individual designs in addressing ecological challenges. By offering LCA, the book gives designers a complimentary set of science-based perspectives and techniques with a focus on high data quality for clarity and public accessibility. While most design solutions and resources are meant to appeal to people by solving everyday problems, this book uses LCA designs to appeal to people through a combination of practicality, accuracy, and the need to decelerate ecological destruction through products offered to marketplace consumers. In essence, the book teaches designers how to craft environmentally responsive designs for their clients at little to no extra cost, but with necessary ecological benefits.
The book analyzes the human desire for consumption, and suggests design innovations for promoting "best practices". LCA tools, data, and methodologies are explained and offered as these potential innovations for affecting positive environmental change. As an underlying component of LCA, the book defines the energy essentials related to environmental problems, and how LCA design solutions must address these factors while also appealing to a designated client-base. The book also teaches designers how to consider corporate incentives for trusting LCA designs, such as investor confidence, loyalty, and consumer trust. The book will appeal to a broad range of designers interested in sustainable and data-driven design, and may be utilized by non-LCA specialists in expanding their design perspectives and goals in the marketplace.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Chapter 1. Do Nothing: The Danger of Believing in a World Without Limits

Abstract

Human desire and ingenuity have shaped the modern world. The natural human need to consume and fears of scarcity drive desire for more and more creature comforts. We must and can improve the way we consume.

The American Way of Life is often interpreted as an exhortation to freely pursue individual happiness without regard for physical limits or finite resources. Engendered at the end of the eighteenth century in a new nation, this worldview is rooted in the pragmatic and powerful impulse to satisfy individual well-being at a time when nature’s abundance seemed limitless. That idea continues to beckon us to live large. It is still the context in which we consume nearly two-and-half centuries later.

The penchant for planning, making, and consuming is normal; it is what humans do. Yet as technological innovation has removed nearly all natural limits to our species growth, it has also produced myriad, unintended, negative environmental consequences. Reversing these effects requires us to coordinate “best practices” to guide our individual and collective decisions.

New and constantly evolving tools, data, and methodologies reveal our impact on the planet as we design each new product and service. They allow us to quantify, evaluate, and improve the environmental impacts. It promotes system-wide approaches to innovate truly sustainable ways to satisfy growing global demand.

John Cays

Chapter 2. The Energy Essential: Physical Forces Animate All Things

Abstract

Technology purposely channels, concentrates, and transforms energy, matter, and information to improve the human condition. Continuous energy-rich fossil fuel use is the root cause of environmental degradation. Since matter is embodied energy and humankind’s demand for stuff is at an all-time high, energy sources directly affect future ecological prospects. The proposed solution of shifting to 100% renewable energy is complicated by the need for high embodied energy industrial processes. Understanding abstract concepts of energy is critical to finding solutions for unintended consequences at the root of environmental problems. This chapter demystifies energy terms and establishes conceptual foundations for designers to consider as they work through the primary challenges of consumption.

Technical language and abstract units can obfuscate and seemingly minimize the negative impacts of energy production. Major environmental impacts can hide in dense detail and make it easy for producers to externalize important environmental impacts or shift one ecological cost for another. This chapter provides brief introductions of classical thermodynamic concepts such as energy, exergy, and entropy, as well as the more recent concept of emergy. These and the larger underlying scientific phenomena that support them are at the heart of natural and anthropogenic ecological transformations in an industrialized world.

John Cays

Chapter 3. Trash Can Living

Abstract

The byproducts of consumption constantly flow between ecosphere and technosphere. LCA environmental impact categories—including global warming, eutrophication, acidification, and stratospheric and tropospheric ozone—form the basis to evaluate massive torrents of material and energy and their potential to degrade ecosystems.

Waste is defined not simply as unwanted or unusable material but more broadly as “material in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Earth is the first of three “trash cans” that humankind has created as a result of its inability to deal with its waste. Illustrated examples establish the amount of land available to support us, the general magnitude of the solid waste problem, and the inherent disparity between the two.

Air, the earth’s atmosphere, is the second “can” used to take up the lighter-than-air waste byproducts created by human activity. The evidence of an increase in greenhouse gasses correlates to the pronounced rise of fossil fuel-driven industrial production since the late 1700s through the present day. CO₂, tropospheric and stratospheric ozone problems, and methane are discussed.

Water comprises the third and final “trash can” survey, from solid waste fouling our waterways that ends up slowly churning in the great Pacific gyre to agricultural and industrial chemical elements and compounds that reduce the ability of the oceans, lakes, rivers, streams, and underground aquifers to support life.

Externalizing what is considered of no economic value transforms the world’s litho-hydro-atmospheres into receptacles for waste.

John Cays

Chapter 4. Do Something: Mid-twentieth Century Developments

Abstract

Life cycle thinking as it pertains to cost through time is developed for the US military industrial complex. An analyst working in the late 1950s for the military contractor, RAND, introduces and applies the life cycle concept and term to nonliving things. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, popular sentiment, science, and government (EPA) use it as a structure in the modern environmental movement.

Increased awareness of solid waste’s many negative and invisible health and environmental impacts and the problem of its persistent physical presence in the landscape spurred people to action. Less visible than solid waste but equally critical, air- and water-quality problems require increased government regulation to monitor pollution and create policy to hold industry accountable. By the end of the decade, corporations began to formally self-assess their role in the problem and tie improvements in environmental performance to operational efficiency and build the precursors to today’s LCA models.

Homo faber as environmentalist emerges in the twentieth century able to take action to effect limited positive change in large-scale resource management. Post-World War II responses to a growing solid waste crisis were blunted throughout the twentieth century by institutionalized programs of planned obsolescence and a growing consumer class.

John Cays

Chapter 5. Life Cycle Assessment

Abstract

Born as a military accounting tool and adopted by corporate America to increase efficiency, life cycle assessment has matured into an indispensable method for environmentalists to quantify ecological impacts.

Chapter 4 presented how in the 1950s the US Military employed a life cycle approach to optimize resource allocation by applying scientific scrutiny to the budgeting process. In the 1960s, Coca-Cola was the first corporation to implement similar techniques to include the consideration of environmental impacts as part of their strategic financial decision-making. Nearly 30 years later, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) codified such techniques as life cycle assessment. The ISO published a concise definition of this complex and sprawling activity in the first formal global LCA standard in 1997.

Environmental LCA, which takes a life cycle view of a product or activity from gathering raw materials through end of life, is now a recognized formal scientific discipline and currently the purview of scientists, economists, and accountants. Specialized terms and methods, fundamental to the proper assessments carried out by these technical disciplines, continue to challenge LCA’s broad acceptance by the design community. Design professionals familiar with origins and fundamentals of LCA, however, can more thoroughly engage with these processes to actively shape a design’s ecological profile and provide additional value to their clients and the public. A working knowledge of the basics benefit the non-specialist. This chapter will focus on “goal and scope,” the first of the four primary LCA phases as an introduction to the three others that will be covered in later chapters.

John Cays

Chapter 6. Addressing Resistance to a Fact-Based Approach

Abstract

Facts are critical to making informed decisions but are often not enough to convince people to change their priorities. Scientific approaches like LCA presents obstacles and opportunities to non-specialists, including designers.

The self-preservation instinct is typically hardwired into each individual. This genetic predisposition to avoid certain risks that loom large in our consciousness both safeguards the continuation of our species and blinds us to less visible and possibly much greater threats. Media outlets play to the natural human reliance on heuristics and implicit biases. The confusion a “post-fact” world creates serves to maintain the status quo by perpetually calling into question well-established facts and stalling fruitful debate. Spectacular headlines provoke irrational fears that distract from other, more statistically likely threats.

Rhetorical techniques frame facts. Denialism is intended to create paralysis. More information is not necessarily better, if it is derived from sources that only confirm sociopolitical biases rather than challenging them. It is important to acknowledge contextual headwinds operating at the largest scales in society before blithely applying a targeted set of analytical techniques to measure environmental impacts in a design project.

Before presenting the “how-to” of integrating a data-driven approach to sustainable design decisions, however, it is important to recognize that facts in one domain are not always enough to persuade a decision-maker. Attributional LCA may improve process-based decisions without requiring wholesale recanting of firmly held world views. Non-geometric data serves designers as a foundation to a fact-based and measured approach.

John Cays

Chapter 7. LCI Data and Design

Abstract

LCA gathers and presents facts that can appeal to both those who aspire to save the planet while not materially impacting the financial bottom line.

Steady and relentless fact-based reporting can counteract the worst effects of climate denialism. Data-driven actions are especially effective when aligned with major stakeholder interests. LCA systems thinking is predicated on the quality and quantity of available foundational life cycle inventory (LCI) information. It is transparent in how it arrives at its conclusions and qualifies its findings. Thus, even a result with a relatively low level of certainty, when accurately stated, is superior to an unquantified assertion.

LCA data quality improvements in recent years create the foundation for a trustworthy evaluation system. More public and private service providers are leveraging statistically more accurate environmental impact reporting. Verified quality data provides a continuity that compensates for the vagaries of changing political decisions such as the funding or defunding of any particular nation’s environmental protection agency.

When armed with “good” data, designers are in a unique position to present options, early in decision-making stages, that simultaneously provide elegant solutions and improve the environmental profile of a project. Multiplying these effects by all of the projects of even a single designer who employs LCA over the course of a career creates a material environmental benefit. This chapter presents an overview of the LCI data and the environmental impact assessment tools available to designers working at the building scale.

John Cays

Chapter 8. Dashboard

Abstract

Evolving LCA interfaces simplify and translate complex data for non-specialists. Intuitive, visually compelling signals inform judgment and improve outcomes. Seeing clearly guides action.

The dashboard has evolved in its primary purpose as a protective device. Initially, dashboards were purely physical objects, planks of wood placed between the carriage and galloping horses to block the “dashing up” of mud, rocks, water, and other debris onto travelers. That early functionality has developed into a locus of increasingly complex, critical information about the current state of dynamic machines, systems, and networks. Evolving hardware and software interfaces increase the access, understanding, and effectiveness of environmental impact data. This, metaphorically, returns the dashboard to its original, protective role for those capable of “harnessing” the flood of information in real time.

Sustainable dashboard information focusing on life cycle environmental impact assessment guides improved decision-making. Designers familiar with and capable of navigating this dashboard information are better positioned to make a case for their own design solutions.

Designers can use tools to satisfy final customer demands for sustainable products and services. Individual consumers are not the target market for existing LCA tools. BEES, ATHENA, EIE, Tally, and SolidWorks Sustainability put LCA in the hands of designers, who translate the information and present cohesive, data-driven options to clients.

John Cays

Chapter 9. Case Studies

Abstract

Using analytical tools is a good first step to making better data-driven design decisions. The second, even more important, step in the process is interpreting and acting on the results. The results of the LCIA phase of an LCA study will rarely produce a clear “winning” design option that is obviously better than the others under consideration. A properly framed and conducted study does, however, provide a clearer picture of the environmental impacts associated with various design component. It is then up to the designer to weigh the pros and cons of each decision, guided by a clearly stated goal and scope of the study. This chapter will address both the ways in which each of the LCIA tools best function as well as how the results of the tools can be used to affect positive change in design decisions at the building component scale. The general workflow followed in the case studies here can be applied to many other design disciplines working at smaller and larger scales.

All of the LCIA tools are founded on the same scientific framework, introduced in Chap. 5; pull from overlapping data sources, presented in Chap. 7; and use the same LCIA method, described in Chap. 8. Even with the differences in methodologies used by each tool, which make studies completed in different programs not comparable, there is overall common agreement in the results of studies completed across multiple tools looking at the same set of design elements. In most cases each tool will lead a user to the same general conclusions regardless of what tool is being used.

John Cays

Backmatter

Titel: An Environmental Life Cycle Approach to Design
verfasst von: John Cays
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-63802-3
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-63801-6
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63802-3