The eco-efficient carpet sweeper

Using a fly-wheel as a mechanical energy accumulator, the ecoefficient carpet sweeper cleans very effectively by brushing the floor without consuming any electricity. The brushes rotate even when the user stops moving the appliance, making it possible to sweep into corners and under furniture. This is helped by the fact that the brushes protrude beyond the dust box. Details such as the low height of the box, the ergonomically-shaped handgrip and an adjustable handle make for ease of use.

The carpet sweeper is able to replace the conventional vacuum cleaner in most cleaning situations. This would mean a lot of energy and material could be

saved by using the carpet sweeper instead of a material and energy-intensive vacuum cleaner. Furthermore, this new cleaning tool is designed for durability. It is easy to repair and has a steel box, which can easily be recycled. All its retail parts are replaceable, which means that it could have a life span of an estimated forty years. That is at least four times longer than conventional vacuum cleaners generally last.

Kambium kitchens: individual, ecological and long lasting.

The Kambium Furniture Workshop, Inc. is a small- to medium-sized German company with approximately 35 employees Example of a Kambium kitchen

and a fairly horizontal organizational structure, typical for a company of this size. The managing directors decided very early to commit themselves to environmental principles. This environmental optimization started with the choice of the company’s location in an area excellent for wind farming. This was followed by the architecture of the factory which incorporated amongst other concepts that of building-biology. Next came the distribution philosophy: all sales within a 100 km radius are delivered with no outer non-reusable transportation packaging.

Kambium kitchens are situated at the high end of the market in every respect. The average price is 40,000 DM, as the quality and durability of the product is extremely high. The use of modern computer technologies (CAD/ CAM) facilitates the production of very individual kitchens, tailored to the customer’s specifications. Unlike other kitchen manufacturers, Kambium uses no pre-processed mass-panels, all the kitchens are entirely handmade. They are made primarily from wood originating from European sustainably managed forests (short transportation distances). The kitchen’s surfaces are impregnated with natural oils thereby avoiding the need for toxic varnishes. One will never find a model that is no longer produced or out of stock. It is always possible to obtain spare parts, and have repairs undertaken. All these aspects together ensure that Kambium kitchens are extremely long-lasting. When however, the client no longer has a need for the kitchen it can be easily recycled or disposed of since it does not contain harmful substances.

A research project was undertaken by the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy together with Kambium, which analysed the kitchen designs and service. The checklist of environmentally relevant product properties as well as MIPS were used in the strength and weakness analysis of the kitchen designs. As a result of the analysis technical and

organizational improvements were suggested to the company, some of which are to be implemented.

Conclusions

Product designers should accept the ‘Sustainable Development’ paradigm as a challenge and try to:

• design useful environmentally benign products (eco-design);

• suggest eco-efficient service-concepts and dematerialised solutions.

Thus a technical eco-efficiency revolution and new environmentally sound consumption patterns could be facilitated. MIPS as a time- and cost-efficient measure of the environmental impact potential of goods and processes could be used for estimations within the design process. Planning methods should integrate environmental and social questions right from the beginning. For that purpose a checklist of the environmentally relevant product properties regarding the whole life cycle of goods was developed by the author together with the Wuppertal Institute. By using tools like the above mentioned, asking the right questions and reflecting also on social aspects, designers could become part of the solution, instead of being part of the problem, like most of them are today!

References

Friends of the Earth (Ed.), ‘Towards Sustainable Europe’, (Wuppertal Institut, Germany, 1995)

Schmidt-Bleek, F., ‘ MIPS re-visited’, in Fresenius Environmental Bulletin, Vol. 2, No. 8 (August 1993) pp. 407 – 412.

Schmidt-Bleek, F., ‘How to reach a Sustainable Economy?’, in Wuppertal Papers, No. 24, Wuppertal Institut, Germany, (August, 1994).

Schmidt-Bleek, F., and U. Tischner, Produktentwicklung. ‘Nutzen gestalten – Natur schonen’, Wien: Wirtschaftskammer (Dosterreich, 1995)

Tischner, U., and F. Schmidt-Bleek, ‘designing Goods with MIPS’, in Fresenius Environmental Bulletin, Vol. 2, No. 8 (August 1993) pp. 479 – 484

World Commission on Environment and Development, ‘Our Common Future’, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, UK, 1987).

Footnote

1. For further information concerning MIPS contact the Wuppertal Institute, Döppersberg 19, 42103 Wuppertal, Germany.

Professor William McDonough, Dean of School of Architecture, University of Virginia, US

Joint Coordinator, The Centre for Sustainable Design, UK

William McDonough is an architect and industrial designer. He is principal of William McDonough & Partners, Architects and Planners as well as co-founder of the design and consulting firm McDonough Braungart design Chemistry in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In September 1994, he was appointed Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia, where he is the Elson Professor of Architecture. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Dartmouth College and his

Master of Architecture from Yale University. In 1996, he received the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development from President Clinton.

Background

 In preparation for the World’s Fair in the year 2000, the City of Hannover, Germany commissioned Mr. McDonough to author ‘The Hannover Principles: Design for Sustainability’, a document providing design principles for all participating architects. A founding member of the American Institute of Architects ( AIA) Committee on the Environment, Mr McDonough represented the AIA as well as the International Union of Architects at the Earth Summit in Brazil in June 1992. He served as advisor to the President’s Council on Sustainable Development and was the lead designer for the ‘Greening of the White House’.

In February of 1993, Mr McDonough delivered the Centennial Sermon, entitled ‘Design, Ecology, Ethics and the Making of Things’, at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine. He has initiated a new approach to ecologically considered design and manufacturing as a step towards the Next Industrial Revolution, and advocates the formulation of Declarations of Interdependence.

Mr McDonough’s design work ranges from products to buildings to cities to regions. He has worked with the City of Chattanooga, initiating their Zero Emissions Zoning Concept and leading the design of the City’s South Side Plan. For the City of Atlanta he articulated the ‘Solar City’ concept, and for the City of Pittsburgh he worked with the Heinz Family Foundation to craft a year-long colloquium on the subject of Pittsburgh as the ‘Environmental City’. He designed a furniture factory for Herman Miller that has won Business Week’s design of the year award for 1997, and for designTex, a subsidiary of Steelcase, he recently designed a line of environmentally safe fabrics working with Michael Braungart and the EPEA in Germany, and the Rohner Company and Ciba Geigy in Switzerland. The fabrics, made withbiodegradable fibers and re-engineered chemical manufacturing processes, were awarded a Gold Medal at NeoCon 1995, the annual showcase of the contract furniture and fabric industry, and have been invited into the permanent design collection of the Chicago Athenaeum.

Mr McDonough advises major corporations such as Interface Corporation and Monsanto on sustainable industrial protocols and environmental ethics, and is active in the conception and development of new products with chemist Michael Braungart.

What do you consider to be the key issues that will affect business arising from the sustainable development agenda in the next 3 to 5 years?

I think the most exciting issue will be the prosperity and creativity considerations that sustainability will foster. I have worked with chairpersons and CEOs of major companies, and they are realising that one of the biggest issues they must address is what the concept ‘sustainable development’ means for their organization. Because when they take their leadership position and say, ‘I want to see this sustain-ability issue get addressed’, they quickly realize they don’t know what it is they are actually asking for, and that their people don’t know how to respond. Everything gets very confusing very quickly, because it’s all relatively new. Sustainable development has many different definitions; it can really only be understood as a local phenomenon with universal implications (there are no ‘universal solutions’). We have to make it up as we go along – forever. It’s going to take everyone.

For example, from Michael Braungart’s and my perspective, business has been mistaking eco-efficiency for sustainable design. That is a fundamental problem, because eco-efficiency is an impoverished agenda in terms of the real creative possibilities. With eco-efficiency you’re inhabiting a world where you wake up in the morning and feel guilty, then spend your day figuring out how to feel less guilty. A sustainable design agenda, on the other hand, says you wake up in the morning and feel hope. You measure your progress against locally-considered ideal conditions which hold sustainability as only the lowest maintenance aspiration. One must begin to humbly imagine what an ideal might look like in order to measure progress toward it. Then it becomes a positive, creative event, not one that simply measures a negative progress relative to the status quo. So considerations beyond sustainability lead to a positive rather than a negative agenda.

It is important that business does not just look at the ‘eco’ part of any equation – saying that part is primary, or even that it's the focus of an agenda – because it’s really just one element of a complex set of interdependencies that we are only beginning to understand. The agenda is much richer than the ‘eco’ element. We all know the complete search is for propitious balances across social, ethical, economic and environmental issues. From my perspective, business has the important task of rendering both the goals and the processes visible. Unless you have something visible against which you can chart your course, it is very difficult to take these discussions much further. My colleague Michael Braungart and I are working on an indexing process where a consensus-building exercise helps individuals and groups imagine what going beyond ‘sustainable’ might look like in each specific arena of interest, whatever it is you are working on, at all scales, from the region down to the molecule.

Once people come together around a common question, it is astonishing how consistent the understanding of sustainability can be among people with diverse interests. They can actually identify and agree on positive characteristics and find a common aspiration very quickly.

During this process you hear two kinds of questions. One might be, ‘Wouldn’t it be better if we used less of a persistent toxin?’ That would be an eco-efficiency question. Another would be, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could drive this whole system from our current solar income instead of with fossil fuels?’ This is a fundamental design question and reflects the real excitement, along with the tremendous opportunities, of the process.

Because we are interested in a design discussion, a rich agenda of choices starts to unfold. But first, and principally, we must understand what the nature of the decision-making framework will be, so everyone has a

common understanding of the issues.

The first thing we must do, as designers in the material world, is to recognise the world as having two metabolisms: a biological metabolism and a technical metabolism. Then we can begin to frame the discussion that builds up the concepts of ‘products of consumption’ consumed in the biological metabolism, or ‘products of service’ circulating in the technical metabolism (we have trademarked these terms for use in our work). In that way, as we move into the design discussions, we can frame the conditions in advance on the materials side. The discussion must be driven by the opportunities of these two metabolisms. Once people understand the concepts, then you have a framework in which you can have a conversation. You test yourself against them and then fine-tune your design process. The hardest part of this for people to understand is that it’s not just about eco-efficiency: it is actually about re-design. Almost every modern product can benefit from this exercise.

What do you consider to be the key principles of Sustainable design for business?

I have articulated three principles and six criteria. The principles are:

• waste equals food

• use current solar income

• respect diversity.

We’ve added new criteria to the traditional industrial revolution criteria.

The traditional criteria are:

 • cost (can I afford it?)

 • performance (does it work?)

• aesthetics (do I like it?)

Our additional criteria, which enrich the design agenda, are:

• is it ecologically intelligent?

(Do its materials comply with

our principles?)

• is it just? (is everything

equitably considered?) • is it fun? (do I get up in the morning wanting to do it?)

This is something Michael Braungart and I are developing together with our colleagues.

We have created a company called ‘McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry’ to work with these principles and criteria. On the one hand, we look at the specific effects of the assemblies of the molecules, which are what Michael can do in a highly effective way, while also developing benign alternatives with the same end result. On the other hand, we look at design and ask ourselves, ‘How do we make this attractive and prosperous? How does this fit within our cultural enjoyment? How does this spark the imagination and become something we want to do?’ Not something less delightful that we feel like we must do for some ‘moral’ or ‘ethical’ reason. We all know the design side really has to balance equity, economy, and ecology. Because it won’t matter if you have the most secure, integral and robust ecological product; if it’s unattractive, people won’t value it. If it’s destroying some cultural situation somewhere else, or causing people to suffer, people shouldn’t give it the same value as something benign.

Jaime Lerner, Governor of Parana State and the former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, says, ‘When you project a tragedy, unless you do something, you have the tragedy’. For example, if we look at a city which has 600,000 people and will have over one million in 20 years, we can get very nervous when we consider it in light of what has happened in Sao Paulo or Rio. The pundits say, ‘Look what’s going to happen. It’s going to be terrible. We’re going to have crime and destitution, and we’re going to lose our children.’ Then guess what happens? They get proved right. Ironically, they have a vested interest in being right about their projection. So, as Jaime says, the strategy cannot be one of tragedy. It has to be a ‘strategy of change’, because what’s happening now will not work to avoid the tragedy. As you adopt a ‘strategy of change’, you then find yourself operating on a new set of principles, which is why I’ve been trying to develop-new design principles, leading to prosperous change.

Business needs to enjoy the sudden bursts of energy that create incredible new opportunities for products that we didn't even know we could want because they didn’t exist! We didn’t realize some of these new design concepts themselves existed, and that’s what’s so exciting. So for business people, this is the real hot one, this is the entrepreneurial front-line, and it is the place where the next round of magnificent industrial prosperity will occur. It is imperative that we re-design everything. So imagine getting it right. How about that strategy! The only way to pursue the ‘strategy of change’ is to start changing. You have to begin immediately. Even if it’s just a faltering step, you have to start moving. You can’t sit back and say, ‘I’ll wait until I see what else is going on’, because then you’re already in the tragedy, and that is the tragedy.

There’s an interesting story about Confucius.

Essentially, a master of ceremonies comes in and says, ‘Confucius, there’s a problem. You put this person in charge of the ritual and he’s constantly questioning the ritual. Why put him in charge of the ritual?’ Confucius answers, ‘That is the ritual!’

It doesn’t matter how conservative you are, the most conservative position you can have is to question the ritual, because that’s what strengthens it. Infusing all of this is the need for change and the need to stimulate creativity. The fact that this process is delightful, and that it has to be, is what will make it happen. It is intensely profitable for those who participate – significantly profitable!

Could you give a couple of examples from the work you’ve done on textiles and are looking to do with carpets?

We’re looking at re-designing whole sectors of the industry, and these principles are being adopted by large companies in design and industry. The carpet and fabric designs, which I won’t talk about specifically,

Are in some cases so much more efficient in terms of their delivery and material flows that there is no question they will allow the company to out-compete any competitor. This is simply because of their effectiveness, and all of this grew out of our design process. Modeling design on nature makes you realize nature is, by its own nature, inherently efficient and effective. Once you start to adopt these ideas, your whole company and its products can become more effective. We are now looking at, from a design perspective, a point where the designers and the people working on these new products will be getting royalties on billions of dollars of production. This should catch everyone’s interest.

There are hundreds and thousands of things ready to be re-designed, but we must be very careful to avoid what Michael Braungart calls ‘ecologism’. If all we're going to do is insist on recycling a package that wasn't designed to be recycled in the first place, we’re going backwards. That’s very bad design. It will create infrastructures that we don’t want, and we’ll have invested in interests that are actually counter-productive; instead of recycling, for instance, we will actually be ‘downcycling’, a term Michael and I use to describe most recycling today, where products lose quality and are used to make less sophisticated products on their way to their eventual ‘grave’, a landfill or an incinerator.

This re-design issue is something very important, and it has to be very attractive. That’s why designers have to be so involved. Our re-design of textiles did not just create a safe material (see JSPD, Issue 1, 1997, p.57), it created a more efficient, safer production system, more profits for all concerned, less regulatory need, and a factory that might never need to release water again. Because if the water coming out of your factory is cleaner than the water going in, you’d rather use your effluent than your influent. You can ‘close the loop’. This is not eco-efficiency. This is re-designing. It eliminates regulations – regulations which, in many cases, can be seen as signals of design failure.

I want to envision the big opportunities. We’re a bit unimpressed by the need to design something so that everyone understands its ecological or social dimensions. We think people should actually be able to throw something away and enjoy that act without feeling like they’re some sort of criminal. Right now, there is guilt coupled with bad design: ‘Oh yes, we will recycle, but we’ll drive 10 miles to recycle!’ This doesn’t make sense in the big picture. Our challenge is to change the design, because people are confused by systems of ‘re-cycling’ that are not effective in the long run.

There is also a challenge for these products and services to play a role in educating people about the positive aspects of sustainable product design. They should be full of ‘embodied’ information. But in the end these things will happen because they are simply smarter, and people like to be smart. In a wonderful way this re-design has what you might call a spiritual dimension, because it leads to the ‘dematerialization’ of design. If you imagine the safely designed ‘product of consumption’ that grew out of our work, you have something that goes back to the soil safely. Or, if it is a technical ‘product of service’, it goes back to a high quality industrial cycle. Neither product needs to end up in a landfill- that would mean you’ve failed in your design. Once you actualize these concepts, what happens is truly fascinating: things literally dematerialize.

You have much less stuff and much higher ‘design intelligence’. As human beings get better and better at things, instead of using more stuff, they use less stuff, with a higher ‘embodied intelligence’ to replace it! Buckminster Fuller, the inventor and creative thinker, said something like, ‘The better technology gets, the more it disappears’. I think that’s the key to the whole product business, because it gets everybody going in a creative way, respecting and optimizing material and human resources.

Some companies begin to realize new design principles in the process of instituting eco-efficiency. But when they begin to articulate the desire to be better than what they have been, we ask them to do more than just try to be more efficient; that may just prolong their agony.

We say re-design instead. It’s much more powerful and productive!

What do you think are the key characteristics of a more sustainable firm?

Adaptability. I think Darwin had it. The whole idea of ‘survival of the fittest’ has been misinterpreted, especially in business. It’s really ‘survival of the ‘fitting-est’; it’s about niches, about understanding a place where you are safe, where you get nourishment, where you don’t have as much deadly competition.

Looking for nourishment without competition is a very legitimate attitude, one that is fair and not abusive. We need to think in terms of areas of potential surplus where we can find pleasant forms of noncompetitive nutrition. That should and can apply to working processes as well. We’re actually designing buildings where the chairman of the board might give up the corner suite to share the joy of working next to her assistant sitting near a logistics manager, for example.

We know linear hierarchies don’t matter anymore. Everyone has their role to play, and everyone should revel in it. It's a much more thrilling prospect, and it’s creative and fun. As I mentioned earlier, the decision-making frame has always included the three components of cost, performance, and aesthetics.

• can I afford it?

• does it work?

• do I like it?

That’s been as much as we've been dealing with. What we're saying now is to add three more:

• is it ecologically intelligent?

• is it just?

• is it fun?

Because we’re not having fun anymore! Everybody feels like they are working all the time. There’s this whole idea of a leisure class, a leisure society, but the reality is that everyone feels like they are working two jobs. It doesn’t make any sense. A lot of that has to do with the fact that we’re not enjoying an effective structure. We’re not designing well. We’ve built a system that makes us think we have to be active all the time that we have to work for lots of stuff we don’t really need.

Jefferson had it right: it’s ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, free from remote tyranny’. This time, it’s inter-generational remote tyranny we have to free ourselves and future generations from – the tyranny that is us and our bad design.

This is an updated and edited version of an interview conducted by Martin Charter, originally published in ‘The Green Management Letter', Euro management by, The Netherlands.

Dr Jonathan Williams is currently Managing Director of Contech Design Ltd, holding company for the Group for Environmental Manufacturing ( GEM). Here he is responsible for launching and promoting a variety of innovative projects, with emphasis on exploiting environmental market opportunities, technology prototyping and training products. He is also Managing Director of the technology transfer and research management company Marinetech South Ltd. Previously he managed the environmental team at the Centre for Exploitation of Science and Technology (CEST) where he created the ACORD consortium and was responsible for projects exploring new synergies between commercial advantage and environmental improvement. He has extensive industrial experience within the energy sector, ranging from international petroleum development projects to renewable energy technologies. He has engineering degrees from Cambridge University and Imperial College, with a Masters in Information System Design from Cranfield University.

A design tool for eco-efficient products

Director, Group for Environmental Manufacturing, UK Project Manager, The Planning Exchange, Scotland

Producer responsibility is a growing issue in various markets. Operationalization of this concept is starting through the application of eco-efficiency. The article highlights a tool that has been developed to improve the quality of eco-design decision-making throughout the life-cycle of the product.

Introduction

 any sectors of industry are facing up to the challenge of producer responsibility. This stewardship of products through all stages of the life cycle is demanding a radical reappraisal of product distribution, use and ‘end of life’ processing within the context of conventional design and concurrent engineering.

Some ‘priority waste stream’ sectors face specific, regulatory responsibilities for their products at ‘end of life’. But in addition all manufacturers have to cope with increasing costs of waste disposal: direct costs of disposing of production waste, and a less direct loss of competitiveness arising from significant ‘end of life’ disposal costs. ‘Business as usual’ strategies are rapidly becoming increasingly untenable.

Product stewardship is also requiring firms to examine the resource efficiency of their products: how to extract the maximum customer value from the minimum resource consumption. Wasteful resource utilization implies unnecessary material expenditure and also liabilities for materials not appearing in the final product. Already there are commercially driven examples of firms adding high-value services alongside their traditional commodity products – more customer value for no extra (and sometimes less) resource consumption. These changes in the business environment are challenging traditional approaches to new product prototyping and production management. Existing design tools, focusing on functionality, production cost and attractiveness at point of sale, are insufficient. What is needed in addition is assistance with management of whole-life value, and its integration within the design process. The Regional Eco-Efficiency Demonstrator Initiative (REDI) project was conceived as a timely response to that need.