Jon Warren Lentz, Inc

Only Sustainability is Sustainable.

Perhaps you had crayons or colored pencils when you were a child. If you were fortunate, then you had a lot more colors than just the basic red, green, yellow and blue. If so, then you’ll recall that there were many shades of green. The same is true with the gathering effort to green our homes, our workplaces, our cities, and our economy; there are many shades - or degrees - of green.

Already in two areas of this site, I’ve referenced the “Hierarchy of Green™,” which is my concept of the five basic shades of green. Admittedly, I’d thought the concept so simple that it needed no explanation. But, subject to a comment I received from one of my more ardent supporters, I’m going to develop this idea more fully.

To begin with, this hierarchy is about progress and is therefore a cumulative progression. Thus, the higher an enterprise or activity sits in the “Hierarchy of Green™,” the greater the accomplishment while also including all the achievements that were attained at the lower levels:

     5. Sustainable
     4. Renewable
     3. Carbon neutral
     2. Clean technology
     1. Environmentally responsible

So, beginning at the bottom, let’s talk about what it means to be “environmentally conscious or responsible.”

Environmentally Responsible:

In a perfect world, everyone would have brought the nascent awareness of the 1970’s ecology movement into the present and would be conscious of their impact on the environment. They would recycle their soda cans, eat a sensible diet that lessens their personal burden upon the planet, and they would probably want to have a livelihood that reflects the notion of preserving this planet for future generations. So both at home and at work, we would choose products with minimal packaging and reduced toxic impacts. At work, company collateral would be printed on recycled paper while the offices themselves would - to the greatest extent possible - operate with electronic documents. Plus, both at home and at work, the furnishings, carpets and architecture would be LEED certified or closely equivalent.

By extension, then, a company that is environmentally responsible would establish best practices for environmental responsibility throughout all aspects of the business as well as all phases of production. This would include the implementation of a program of “Extended Producer Responsibility.”

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a strategy designed to integrate environmental costs associated with products throughout their life cycles into the market price of the products. For example, we can no longer exclude the costs of airborne pollution from the total cost of coal-fired production of electricity since there are health costs that must be paid, eventually. Similarly, the price of a gallon of gasoline is artificially low because it does not include the costs incurred by humanity as we begin to experience the adverse effects of global climate change.

Specifically applied to a single manufacturing process as, for example, a tire factory, extended producer responsibility imposes accountability over the entire life cycle of the tires and may even include the packaging. This means that the tire manufacturer would be required to be either financially or physically responsible for the tires after their useful life. This would mean that they must either take back the worn tires and manage them through reuse or recycling, or else delegate the responsibility to a third party, or producer responsibility organization (PRO).

EPR moves the responsibility for waste associated with a manufacturer’s activities from government and back to private industry, thus obliging producers, importers and/or sellers to internalize waste management costs into their product prices. EPR is a method for arriving at the total cost of production and including that total cost into the price of the product at the time of sale, rather than deferring that cost to be paid indirectly through adverse consequences felt by others – whether near or far, or by current or future generations.

Clean Tech:

Clean Tech, or Clean Technology, is as the term implies, a technology that’s clean and has no toxic byproducts or effluents. Ideally, in the clean tech sector, all the sub-process and activities of the humans employed within a clean tech operation would be performed with utmost environmental consciousness and responsibility. Whenever applicable, EPR would be part of the full cycle of a clean tech operation.

For the most part, the aim of clean tech is to create energy – whether electricity or fuels – with a smaller environmental footprint. It can be broadened to include the construction of green buildings that are both more energy efficient and environmentally benign.

Typically, clean technologies include renewable energy such as wind and solar power, biomass power, hydropower, biofuels, and related fields. It may also include information technology, green transportation, high efficiency electric motors, LED lighting, and energy efficient appliances.

The operative limitation to clean tech is that it is merely cleaner and more efficient. While greater and cleaner efficiency is better it’s not necessarily carbon neutral, nor renewable or sustainable.

Carbon Neutral:

Carbon Neutral was the New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2006.

CO2 is carbon dioxide gas, which is produced in many human induced processes, most notably the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil. CO2 gas is the primary greenhouse gas and the leading culprit in climate change.

Being carbon neutral, or having a zero carbon footprint, means that a process obtains net zero carbon emission by balancing the amount of carbon released with an equivalent amount that is either sequestered or offset. The concept of carbon neutrality can be extended to include other greenhouse gases. The term climate neutral is somewhat interchangeable.

The best practice for organizations and individuals seeking carbon neutral status entails reducing and/or avoiding carbon emissions first so that emission are reduce to the extent that only unavoidable emissions need to be offset in order to arrive at a carbon neutral position.

Carbon neutral can be achieved in two ways: (1a) by balancing carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere from the burning fossil fuels with renewable energy that creates a similar amount of useful energy, thereby compensating for the carbon emissions, or (1b) in a post-carbon economy, by using only renewable energies that don’t produce carbon dioxide, or (2) by “carbon offsetting,” which involves paying others to remove or sequester an equivalent of 100% of the carbon dioxide emitted. Examples include planting trees, funding ‘carbon projects’ that are intended to prevent future greenhouse gas emissions, or buying carbon credits. Offsets are commonly used together with energy conservation measures.

But carbon neutrality only addresses the issues associated with greenhouse gasses, primarily climate change. Plus, offsets and balancing are not necessarily clean tech or renewable. Some may argue that clean tech is superior to carbon neutral, but with climate change looming over the planet, it seems clear that the near term priority is carbon neutrality.

Renewable:

Renewable is a notch above carbon-neutral. (Obviously gasoline, coal, natural gas, diesel, and other commodities derived from fossil fuels are non-renewable.) Unlike fossil fuels, if properly managed, a renewable resource can have a sustainable yield. There are at least two connotations to the idea of renewability, the most prominent being renewable resources and renewable processes.

Natural resources that are replenished by natural processes at a rate comparable to or faster than their rate of consumption are considered renewable. These renewable resources are often commodities - such as fresh water, wood and paper, or leather - yet are replenished through careful stewardship of the resource. Other natural renewable resources such as geothermal power and biomass may also require careful management to avoid exceeding the environment’s capacity to replenish them.

A renewable process is one that relies upon perpetual resources such as solar radiation, ocean tides, winds and hydroelectricity. In this context the term may have a connotation of sustainability of the natural environment. However, human attempts to harness such resources (as for example deriving hydroelectricity from dams) can have adverse impacts.

While renewability is good, it is not necessarily sustainable because it does not (as in the example of hydroelectric power) take a holistic approach. At its best, renewability coupled with a life cycle assessment provides a systematic means of evaluating and providing for the long term use of a resource. But that is probably not enough. If we want our species and planet to thrive, the level of attainment to which all human activity should aspire is sustainability.

Sustainable:

In 1983, the United Nations Commission on Environment and Development defined sustainability as, “A way of living that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

Now there is irrefutable scientific evidence that humanity is living unsustainably, and that we need to make an effort to bring our use of the environment back to within sustainable limits. Unsustainability is most clearly expressed in the human engendered phenomenon of climate change, or global warming.

Worldwide sustainability is only going to be achieved by innumerable separate efforts in nearly every spot across the globe. Spot sustainability is achieved when a process or industry is clean, has no carbon footprint, and is infinitely repeatable without resource depletion, toxicity, or other damage to the environment. Dire threats of global warming aside, the problem most of us have with the concept of living sustainably is the perception that this is not easily achieved. Yet it is achievable if we view the project as a puzzle and work diligently to get each and every piece into place. The synergy between spots, or pieces of the puzzle, can be completely realized in the concept of Cradle to Cradle (C2C) Design.

By modeling human industry on nature’s processes, Cradle to Cradle Design is a biomimetic approach to the design of systems where materials are viewed as nutrients circulating in healthy, safe metabolisms. The premise of C2C is that industry can protect and enrich ecosystems and nature’s biological metabolism while also maintaining a safe, productive technical metabolism for the high-quality use and circulation of both organic and synthetic materials.

By articulating an achievable holistic economic, industrial, and social framework, the objective of C2C is to create systems that are not just efficient but essentially waste free. As such, C2C isn’t limited to industrial design and manufacturing. It has broad promise for application to most aspects of human civilization, including urban environments, buildings, economics, and social systems. “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things,” published in 2002 by Braungart & McDonough, is a manifesto for this model of biomimetic production.

In recent years, sustainability has been complicated by its application to nearly every facet of life on Earth, including biological organization (wetlands, prairies and forests), human organization (ecovillages, eco-municipalities, sustainable cities), and human activities and disciplines (sustainable agriculture, sustainable architecture and renewable energy). Yet, as evinced in the concept of C2C, sustainability might well be regarded as the natural evolution of human civilization when we need new ways of thinking and doing to sustain our species’ existence on Earth.

So when we talk about green, we should be mindful that while any shade of green is good, sustainability is the only shade that is sustainable; all other levels of green serve merely as steps toward the accomplishment of sustainability. In the “Hierarchy of Green™” sustainability sets the bar properly high. Only sustainability is sustainable.

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(Note: Although much of the thought is orginal, specific definitions within this explanation were developed from a number of sources, including Wikipedia.)