Core77

Guest Blogger Tom Igoe reflects on Friday's Greener Gadgets Conference:

Last week's Greener Gadgets conference, presented by Inhabitat and Marc Alt + Partners, brought together representatives from consumer electronics companies academics, and many others focused on sustainable design and business. It was heartening to see so many people interested in the subject, and enlightening to hear what electronics manufacturers had to say about the ecological impact of their work. What was more interesting than the information shared, however, were the questions that hung unanswered in the air afterward.

Photographer Chris Jordan started the day off with an excellent presentation about his work. His composite pictures tell sobering stories about the huge volume of waste generated every day: 426,000 mobile phone handsets "retired" per day; 30,000 reams of office paper used every 5 minutes, 24 hours a day days a week; 1.14 milion brown paper bags per hour. At a certain point, the magnitude seems absurd, yet it's very real. Author Elizabeth Grossman addresses these numbers as well in her book, "High Tech Trash," pointing out that the amount of metal per ton available in the e-waste we dispose is greater than that in most mining operations today, but is difficult to extract without further negative ecological impact. Among other issues, recyclers do not have full information on how products are manufactured in the first place, so they have to be prepared to deal with any number of toxic substances that might be present. This is one part of electronics recycling that adds to its expense. While other roadblocks to recycling were brought up at Greener Gadgets, this one never came up.

Mary Lou Jepson, Chief Technology Officer of the One Laptop Per Child project and founder and President of PixelQi, followed Jordan's presentation, explaining the engineering process that led to the XO laptop. She and her team managed to get the XO laptop's power consumption down to 2 watts, about 5% of the average laptop's consumption, all for about $180 per laptop. She explained how much of her work was information gathering, learning about manufacturing processes and coming up with changes and improvements. She pinpointed an important information gap: why aren't best practices, or even standard practices, shared industry-wide? If they were, would leaps like the XO laptop's become commonplace? Could we achieve an rate of increase in power efficiency, parts re-use, and full recycling equivalent to Moore's Law? The gap exists, of course, because these details are trade secrets. Jepson's talk left me wondering what would happen if open source hardware projects were the norm instead of the exception. We've seen that it's possible to make software that way and still make a profit: how about hardware? It's a gamble I think is worth making.

Another overlooked fact came up in the Life Cycle & Materials panel, chaired by O2NYC's Jennifer van der Meer. Jeff Omelchuck, Executive Director EPEAT, Green Electronics Council, pointed out that energy intensity and materials use in of the manufacturing process may account for 80% of the impact of a product. Why, then, are we so focused on efficiency of products while they're used, if it's only 20% of a product's impact? And how do we begin to address that 80%? How much of the information needed to improve manufacturing best practices is not shared for competitive reasons?

Doug Smith, Sony's Director of Corporate Environment, explained that Sony signed an accord to not export any of their waste overseas. There was no mention, however, of how they work with recyclers. They're working with Waste Management, Inc. to recycle their end-of-life products. While this is laudable, I wondered why they have to work with just one company. What would it take for any recycler to have what they need to recycle Sony's gear in a cost-effective way? Surely if we encouraged competition among recyclers, the price would go down.

Echoing Doug Smith's comments, Renee St. Denis, Director of product take-back & recycling at Hewlett-Packard, brought up the logistical difficulties of recycling, especially in the US. We're not managing that effectively, she said, and as a result, so many products go into landfill. She asserted that consumers need to be educated about the value of recycling their end-of-life products. That's a strange notion. Does anyone say "Consumers need to be educated as to the value of buying our products?" We don't educate consumers at the beginning of a product's life cycle -- we sell the product to them. So instead of educating consumers to pay for recycling, why not make them want to pay? Come on, folks: Apple twice got me to part with what I needed to in order to get this laptop by making it sexier than a Dell, and making it much more enjoyable to use. What would it take to make recycling the thing as sexy? Don't educate me as to why I should recycle: sell me on the notion. If it's not of value to the producer to recycle, how can it be of value to the consumer?

The afternoon featured a heavy focus on energy efficiency. John Solomon, VP, Imaging and Printing Group, H-P, talked about H-P's commitment to using alternative energy sources, and how, through good information management, it can help address these issues. Valerie Casey, Executive Creative Director, IDEO, chaired a panel on energy efficiency in which industry leaders from Philips, Intel, and the Consumer Electronics Association discussed what's being done now to improve energy efficiency.

What was not addressed was why energy efficiency matters. The common assumption seems to be that if we all use more efficient devices, it'll lead to less energy use and a greener world. But is that true? Economist Harry Saunders doesn't think so. In "Does Energy Efficiency Save Energy: The Implications of accepting the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate" he argues that energy efficiency improvements that are economically justified at the microlevel lead to higher levels of energy consumption at the macro level -- in other words, saving energy at home doesn't stop Con Ed from producing more power. He argues for a more top-down approach, through energy taxes and regulation. Whether you accept the idea or not, it raises a good point: our economy is based on increased production, and that's not going to go away. Rather than "use less, make less," perhaps our mantra needs to be what William McDonough and Michael Braungart suggest in "Cradle to Cradle": Waste = food. The economy can grow as much as we want it to with little impact if everything we make is 100% recycled into the ecocycle or technocycle. That may be an oversimplification, but it's not a bad ideal to shoot for.

Perhaps we focus so much on energy efficiency because it's the simpler problem. Radical reform in the manufacturing and re-manufacturing seems to rest on our long-held assumption that how we make things is the real value in the electronics industry. Until we can figure out how to share enough of that information to increase the rate of un-making things, we're at an impasse. Even the most energy-efficient products don't look to green when they become landfill. So how about we start to work on that other 80% of the problem that Jeff Omelchuck's talking about?

Tom Igoe teaches physical computing and issues of sustainable technology development at ITP, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. He also consults on physical interaction design, and hopes someday to work with monkeys.