Hi I'm John Byrd and welcome to week three of become sustainable business change agent. This week we cover some really interesting topics. I think that you're going to find that some of these are going to spark ideas about how you can make your company greener. We begin by looking at principles of green or sustainable design. Often this is called design for the environment. Design's an important topic for two reasons. First, in almost all companies, the products that are sold have a much greater impact then what goes on within the company. That means that, become really sustainable you have to make products with the lowest impact you can during their consumer use phase. This is that life cycle concept that we talked about earlier. The activities beyond the company’s boundaries can have a huge impact. So, we need to try to find ways to reduce those impacts. The second reason for thinking about design is that the design stage which mainly be fraction of the total cost of a new product or building, maybe just 8% or 10%. It usually determines a large percent of a products or buildings environmental on social impact, some say up to 70 or 80% of the impact. So if you don't invest time and thoughtfulness in the design stage, you're probably going to have a product or building with a high impact and you're going to live with that impact over the entire life of that product you're building. We need to start out thinking about how to make a great product that has low impact. I'm going to introduce the green design principles that I see most often. These will give us a theoretical understanding of what a highly sustainable product should aspire to. Then we'll talk about some practical issues in design. If this is a topic that interests you, I post several excellent resources. Now, here are the principles that I found De-materialize, use less material and make things lighter. This is beneficial because it reduces the use of new raw materials that have to be abstracted and refined. It also reduces the energy required to transport both the raw materials and the finished product compared to a similar but heavier product. Here's a great example of reduced material use. Look at how Apple's iMac has changed over time. The numbers at the bottom is the electricity used in sleep mode. So, not only are the machines lighter and smaller, they're also using less power. This is an example of our second principle, design for energy efficiency. Here's another example, Ford F-150 pick up truck, the best selling truck in the United States for the last 30 years and 35 years. Between 2012 and 2014 or 15, it got 680 pounds to 1,000 pounds lighter depending on the model. For you, folks that aren't used to our kind of primitive, American measurements, that's 300 to 500 kilograms lighter. Now, that also increased its gas mileage by about 10%. Ford is also using more recycled materials in the truck, especially aluminum. Third principle, design for multi-use. Make products more useful. You all have one item that replaces all of these. Think of all the things that you can do with your phone these days. And this picture probably misses lots of new things that app developers were thinking up daily. Maybe we actually do too much with these phones. The next principle is design in modules. Modularity makes disassembly and recycling easier. It also allows products to be packed in a smaller space for transport. Also, if one piece breaks or gets worn out, it can be replaced pretty easily. Here's a great example of modularity. Herman Miller makes high end office furniture. It's Mirra 2 Chair is beautiful and it comes with instructions for putting it together and taking it apart and recycling it. Carpet companies have been doing wonderful things in terms of modularity and recycling. Interface makes carpet tiles. The neat thing about carpet tiles is that when the carpet begins to show wear only the tiles in the traffic path need to be replaced. The old tiles are returned to Interface where they're recycled and become new fibers in the next generation of carpet tiles. Use recycled materials is another one of these principles. This is important for two reasons. The obvious one, is that using recycled materials means new raw materials don't have to be extracted. But there's another, and this is possibly a more important reason. The recycling industry is very young and it's not very well developed. But the industries that extract, grow and harvest new materials are amazingly well developed. Think about this, the oil industry can go 100 miles offshore in 4,000 feet of water. Drill wells that go 3 or 4,000 feet into the earth, bring up oil, transport it to shore, refine it, and sell us gas for about $2.50 a gallon. Which in Colorado includes $0.40 of tax. In California the tax is $0.69. So the cost of gasoline delivered to the gas station near your home is about $2 a gallon. Yesterday at the grocery store, I saw that Perrier water was selling for $1.99 a liter or about $8 a gallon, four times more than gasoline. This is absolutely incredible. A gallon of gasoline can move a car and its passengers 25 or 30 miles. It's really quite spectacular there's this mobility and independence. So, these basic industries do quite remarkable things. To compete recyclers need to find ways to increase efficiency and lower their cost. Buying more recycled materials will help them do that. Companies are using more recycled materials. Here are the recycled plastic parts in a Mercedes SUV car. Car manufacturers such as Ford are very good recyclers. In the US, about 25% of a car's weight is recycled material. Paper recycling has improved a lot. 30% post-consumer content paper used to be about the highest recycled content you could find. But now, you can find 100% Post Consumer Content paper, 100% entirely made out of used paper. Remember we talked about biological and technical nutrients, materials and decomposer, composed or biological nutrients and materials we manufacture are technical nutrients. Aluminum, plastic, glass are the main ones. Paper is made up of natural fibers. So has limited recycle opportunities before the fibers get too short to be useful. Maybe five times as copy paper then the shorter fibers can be used in bathroom tissue or newsprint a couple more times. Well, bathroom tissue only once. We'll look at people recycling again in a little bit. Here are a few other design suggestions. Reduce the number of different materials. Design with recycling or refurbishing in mind. Coating or combining different materials makes recycling very difficult or even impossible. So don't do that. Minimize the number and type fasteners for easy disassembly. These design ideas are in addition to some pretty obvious ones. You want to avoid using toxic or harmful materials. Potentially dangerous materials like PVC and polystyrene and toxic chemicals like PPA and formaldehyde have non-toxic replacements. Try to reduce packaging. And make it humanly possible to get in to. Reduce material waste. Here's Nike's single thread shoe with zero waste. Is this cool, or what? One thread becomes a shoe. Also, we have to think about reducing the energy required to manufacture and use the item. Reducing the carbon footprint of items is important, and it's usually related to energy use. Reducing water that's required to operate the item is important too, if it's appropriate for the particular appliance or a piece of clothing.
