Predicting the Future

10.1 Unsustainable Futures

10.1.1 Challenging views

When the author was studying mechanical engineering and German in the early 1970s as an undergraduate at Bath University, our German applied mechanics tutor, Gustav Winkler, was a champion of the simple over the complex and the mechanical over the mechanized. Following the presentation by a visiting lecturer on the nascent subject of “alternative technology,” his challenging view was that what we needed were alternatives to technology not alternative technology.

In essence, this view has been expounded generally by “naysayers” for whom the solution does not lie within the development of new and better technological solutions, but rather within the return to some real or imagined bucolic golden era, where people interacted with their environment on a more sustainable level, using mechanical rather than electromechanical devices, and remaining in harmony with their resources: living sustainably.

Incidentally, we must credit the same now Prof. Dr. Winkler (Turbo Gustav) with the design of a wind-powered car—see succeeding text—so it would seem the view was expressed as a devil's advocate (Plate 10.1)!

The contra-wind car is a demonstration that the power of the wind can be harnessed to travel into the wind, without tacking. The Flensburg-built machine was the winner at the Danish wind-powered competition held at Stauning airstrip in 2010, reaching between 35% and 50% of the oncoming wind speed powered only by the wind [2].

10.1.2 The limits to growth

Thus, since the early discussions prompted by the publication of The Limits to Growth [3], there has been a polarization of views.

Those supporting Meadows are generally held to be in the minority. They argue that there are limits to growth set by the finite resources contained within our planet and that current global problems such as ecological, equity, conflict, and social cohesion problems and the differences between the developing and developed worlds cannot be resolved without radical change in the fundamental social and market models and principles. The key to this is the abandonment of high material living standards maintained by a largely unfettered market economy. The contention is that advances in technology cannot sufficiently reduce the use of resources required to maintain the current levels of consumption or the economic growth necessary to sustain the current prevailing economic model. Thus, extending these levels of growth or consumption to the developing world would prove fatal to the world's ecological balance, ensure the final consumption of a number of critical mineral and other resources, and cause the collapse of society.

What is required, according to this view, is an alternative approach that will change the dynamic of consumption and growth and ensure a more equitable distribution of the access to resources.

There are some well-presented arguments in favor of this view. In his paper [4], Ted Trainer supports the challenges the “technical fix” solution espoused by the positivists, taking issue, for example, with the prevailing view that modifications to the market and resource scarcity and a combination of legislation and technological development will bring about a sustainable future. He is justifiably critical of the arguments advanced by Julian Simon in The Ultimate Resource [5] regarding the apparently inexhaustible nature of resources, which will be controlled purely by the classical elastic pricing model, or that we will never run out of energy. Other reviewers have also challenged the simple or even simplistic logic of this book, often seen as an attack on the limits to growth espoused by the neo-Malthusians, including H.E. Daly, who exposed the illogicality of the infinity-based arguments, or at least how Zeno's classical paradox of Achilles and the tortoise may not be applied to unknown resource levels [6]. Nonetheless, although Daly's assertion that dismissing Simon's argument as flawed indicates that the neo-Malthusian first principles are unscathed is equally unconvincing, his conclusions are somewhat more moderate than the rhetoric would suggest, in that while sensibly objecting to “Further prolongation of the current compulsive quest for infinite growth, power, and control,” he is actually seeking a steady-state future rather than a dismantling of current structures and activities.

10.1.3 The natural market-driving sustainability

The alternative viewpoint is that political and socioeconomic pressures will force change on commerce and industry and that those changes will substantially alter the consumption patterns and hence demand, while the advancements of science will be translated by engineers, microbiologists, geneticists, and the like into products and systems that help satisfy the need to material advancement while reducing or eventually eliminating the burden on the planet and its inhabitants. Thus, for proponents of this argument, ways will be and are being found to improve cultivation rates and yields to ensure that an ever-growing world population will be fed. Within this strain of thought, it is also assumed that elastic market forces will price out of reach increasingly rare resources and thus reduce consumption, without the need for a radical rethink or reorganization of the basic tenets and principles of westernized “civilized” society.

This could be styled the technical fix solution.

Certainly, the contributions to the 2010 REWAS symposium on sustainable metal production in 2010 suggested that new ways are being sought to treat current waste products to source key materials for future use and that recycling of base materials, such as metals, was becoming increasingly resource-efficient. In their review of the event, Anne Kvithyld and Christina Meskers acknowledged the importance of detail and the contribution of the material scientist and the metallurgist. They also observed that the detail is not enough: “Understanding sustainability requires also a bigger system or life cycle perspective.” Their argument shows how sustainability is bigger than the engineering sciences and should involve the social sciences for context. They also argue that clear communication from the scientific to the lay communities is an essential ingredient for success in developing sustainability strategies [7].

Erickson and Gowdy conducted a historically based study, Resource Use, Institutions, and Sustainability: A Tale of Two Pacific Island Cultures. The study concluded that extending the historical results of two differing approaches to managing resources and population growth “would imply that the amelioration of natural resource scarcity through trade and emigration might artificially raise carrying capacity in the short-run, but would be limited in the long-run due to the destruction of essential natural resources” [8]. The natural market solution is, then, implicitly flawed.

This chimes well with the authors' observations in travel within West Africa, where subsistence existence within tropical rainforests is largely unchanged by industrial development, but continues nonetheless at the expense of resource depletion. Life expectancy is relatively short, and by all typical measures of adult literacy, infant mortality, access to clean water, etc., these communities are on the margins of what we regard as developed society. Since the vast majority are “equally poor,” perception of poverty only really comes into play when these same people are displaced or migrate into the cities, where their condition and hence status can and will be measured against their neighbors. The key is, however, that resource depletion, such as denuding forests of edible wildlife or even deforestation for charcoal burning and manufacturing of domestic products or implements, does not seem to limit population growth.

10.1.4 The third way

There is a third strain of thought that recognizes the current starting position and proposes a mix of the two opposing views:

• Advancing technology will indeed help to reduce the burden of growth on the planet's resources.

• At the same time, political and philosophical pressures will modify the current pure market economy, replacing it with a more collaborative and inclusive model

Indications of this sea change in approach are found in

• collaboration projects such as Wikipedia and open-source software such as Linux;

• crowdfunding of projects and product development, where the innovator appeals directly to the user for funding and support;

• the huge increase in awareness of sustainability issues as witnessed by the wealth of informal discussion, articles, and blogs.

In this vein, the World Economic Forum report in 2009 concluded that innovation was the only way forward: there is a long-term need to dematerialize the economy and focus on satisfying the consumers' rather than the producers' needs. This will also demand an improvement of collaboration along the whole value chain, based around improvements in resource efficiency, product takeback, and sharing [9]. They also comment on the temporary drop in some material resource prices, driven in their view by the world downturn, and due to recover before the middle of the decade as demand recovers. They do emphasize the roles played by both producer and consumer in the way ahead. The producers must seek to diversify material sources and reduce waste while becoming fundamentally more energy efficient in the production process. To make this an effective strategy, companies will need to share resources and collaborate. The consumers will react to the inevitable price rises in energy, food, and water resources by seeking out more efficient ways to consume these resources.

Jacqueline Novogratz in her talks about patient capitalism posits the theory that sustainable jobs, goods, and services add dignity to the world's poorest and that we need to change the way of working by listening to the demands of the consumers, including low-income consumers to improve their access to goods and services in a sustainable manner. The key from her viewpoint is to fuse the interests of commerce, society, and ecology. Effectively, she is also advocating the triple bottom line, both at the bottom of the business pyramid and at the top [10].

The more utopian ideals of happiness index from Nic Marks' claim that measuring the success of an organization or country by the happiness index as an alternative to production will lead to a sustainable future: the “Happy Planet Index” (HPI). The index uses life expectancy experienced well-being and ecological footprint. The results are displayed in tabular form and as a colored world map. Countries such as Argentina, Vietnam, and Mexico score well under this system; India and Brazil are ahead of the United Kingdom, most of Europe, and Canada; while the USA ranks alongside Denmark, just above most of sub-Saharan Africa at the bottom. While this may be at the more extreme end of the systems of measurement, it does indicate that we can and should be thinking along new lines to encompass the full impact of sustainability on the world [11].

Adnan Khan in The Khalifa 08/10/2008 article proposed Islam as an alternative and more sustainable way forward, but while his arguments may carry some weight as regards Islamic banking as an alternative to the current Western banking model, there was no real evidence of a commitment to sustainable use of resources in his article [12].

Beers and colleagues of Wageningen University in the Netherlands reported on a Transforum study of the way public perceptions and attitudes shaped the direction of sustainable development. In their paper [10], they accept that ambitions for sustainable development require a structural change of existing societal (sub)systems. These changes will result from experimentation and innovation, and the images associated with these transitions can have a decisive influence on decisions whether to adopt, support, or reject particular ideas and innovations. An example cited is that of biofuels, where their initial positive image as a sustainable fuel drove a specific response by many governments, particularly in emerging economies. The consequential changes in cropland usage and unsure net outcome in terms of net greenhouse gas emissions could be said to be a result of an initial overpositive image.

On the more positive side, Hartley reported in 2010 for the Energy Savings Trust that sustainable goods and services represent both a growth opportunity in themselves, valued at £200 billion in the United Kingdom alone, but that adopting sustainable policies, practices, and standards could produce annual productivity savings of 100 billion. This suggests that it is already making commercial sense for companies to adopt a positive approach to sustainability and develop standard procedures and designs to embed their strategy.

Supermarket group Asda (part of the Wal-Mart family) is working with the University of Leeds to set up a large study into public attitudes to sustainability, cost, and value. By looking at “mainstream” (rather than the committed “deep green”) consumer, we can start to influence opinion and generate positive action on waste management (including food, energy, and rubbish waste) and buying habits and thereby help the move to a low-carbon society. Furthermore, the survey intends to help clarify communications with the consumer to improve trust in quality and sustainability symbols and measurements [14].

In the words of a rival supermarket's advertising campaign, “every little helps.”

10.1.5 How the viewpoints collide: example, the milk bottle

Consider the issue of the milk bottle. Our childhood memories of milk delivered in truly recycled (i.e., steam-sterilized) bottles have been replaced by blow-molded HDPE (high-density polythene) containers purchased from the local convenience store or supermarket.

The culture of re-using glass bottles continues in Germany, where the collection, sterilisation and re-use of glass beer bottles has become standard practice, being both commercially successful and widely accepted and understood by the consumer, and is encouraged by a returnable deposit system, as we had many years ago in the United Kingdom.

This older model apparently offers a more sustainable alternative: over 90% of the bottles are reused typically up to 10 times, with each reuse being subject to the added embedded energy of return transport, condition check, and cleaning. According to Van Doorsselaer and Lox [15], the break-even point is around 5% breakages, below which multiple-use glass bottles tend to win out over single-use ones, based on energy needs over the life cycle.

The newer solution of HDPE offers reduced mass and lower embedded energy of production and recycling, but it is a single-use product, with the possibility of recycling, currently in the United Kingdom at a rate of around 76% in 2010 [16]. A study in 2011 by Singh, Krasowski, and Singh suggested that modern HDPE containers, even packed in reusable crates, still offered an advantage in terms of overall energy used in transportation [17].

So, which of the two is actually the more sustainable and is the traditional reuse model better overall, as many activists would believe? It appears that most bloggers writing between 2010 and 2013 opted for the traditional route of reusable glass bottles. Although some contributors accept that they have limited access to facts on the relative embedded energy or greenhouse gas emissions, they nonetheless hold opinions based on the “feel” of one solution over the other or based on single against multiple use: a single aspect of the overall whole life cycle issues.

The truth is that each system needs to be examined as a whole. A calculation of the embedded energy or ecological footprint of both systems would be required, based on properly gathered evidence and using one of the currently accepted calculation models or better still using the algorithm in development by the authors, taking into account the embedded energy across the whole life cycle of the product.

The conclusions of the existing study in India, referenced earlier in the text, must be correct for that specific distribution mode, whereas the sustainability merits of recycling (largely locally) beer bottles in Germany need to be examined in that context and may well differ from the situation regarding milk, produced increasingly in larger, more efficient dairy centers and distributed regionally or nationally.

10.2 The Engineers' View

In ASME's third annual survey published in November 2011, Brown indicates that while many of the 2000 engineers and students surveyed have apparently embraced the concept of sustainability in their work, some among them see the term as a “trendy name for what used to be called good engineering.” And while some dismiss the concept as “flavor of the month,” most see that sustainable practices are ultimately cost-saving.

As an indicator, the responses to the question “Over the past year, approximately what portion of all of your projects included specifications that were based on sustainable and/or green design principles beyond those mandated by regulations?” are given in Table 10.1.

So what are these engineers and their organizations actively doing to promote sustainability? 62% of the respondents cited the need to design for reduced energy use, 35% were seeking to reduce material waste in manufacturing, and 27% were looking to improve manufacturing efficiency in both energy and material usage terms [18].

The importance of sustainability to the organizations for whom these engineers were working is also used as an indicator of the level to which sustainability is embedded into engineering practice at an organizational level. The result for the question “How involved is your organization with sustainability or sustainable design practices?” gives a moderately positive reading, with over 40% indicating that their organization is “somewhat involved” (see Table 10.2). It will be interesting to see how this changes as the pressures of market and cost come to bear more heavily in the future and as smaller organization begin to embrace the 3BL principle.

Neither the Institute of Mechanical Engineers nor the UK Engineering Council annual membership surveys have to date addressed this subject, although the Engineering Council does issue sustainability guidance to its members, including a six-point plan:

• Contribute to building a sustainable society, present and future.

• Apply professional and responsible judgment and take a leadership role.

• Do more than just comply with legislation and codes.

• Use resources efficiently and effectively.

• Seek multiple views to solve sustainability challenges.

• Manage risk to minimize adverse impact to people or the environment [19].

The German Association of Engineers (VDI) is also keen to promote sustainable development and focus its membership on these issues, with a number of studies conducted, and an active lobbying voice in Europe and domestically for improved legislation in this regard [20].

10.3 Conclusion

In conclusion, it seems that in many articles and publications concerning these issues, several key factors seem to emerge:

(a) The number of articles, blogs, and papers attacking the current system actually outweighs those supporting it; thus, the status of this as a minority view is uncertain: it is becoming the popular view that the current system as a whole is not sustainable.

(b) The observation and listing of failures of the current system and the impending doom for human society or indeed survival of the planet are rarely accompanied by a credible argument as to the alternative.

(c) There is far more published opinion in online sources, blogs, articles, and social networking site entries than there are learned papers, and there is far more from social scientists and economists than from physical scientists and engineers.

(d) Arguments from all sides are often based on a limited view of the effects of specific products, packaging, or energy sources. Few consider the whole life cycle.

(e) Can the differentiation between the sustainability of two alternative products, materials, or processes be measured entirely in terms of greenhouse gas emissions or embedded energy? How then do we account for the means of generation of the energy so embedded? Or factor in the effect of pollution of the ground or watercourses?

10.4 If I Were You, I Wouldn't Be Starting from Here!

10.4.1 We can only move forward

In our view, sustainable development is not an issue for articles of faith or belief systems alone, nor is it a discussion that should provoke intolerance of opposing viewpoints at an almost fanatical level.

What is critically important is that the general public, opinion formers, and indeed politicians understand and debate the concepts associated with sustainability based on observed fact rather than wild speculation and that we seek to develop a solution from where we are, not where we would like to be.

The famously apocryphal advice, genuinely given to the author on seeking directions in Ireland, “If I was you I wouldn't be starting from here,” is not applicable in this case.

We are where we are and need to move from here, not from some imagined ideal starting point.

10.4.2 The benefit to the environment

The benefit to the environment of designing in sustainability is quite clear. If we improve fundamentally our approach to sustainability within the field of engineered and manufactured product, we reduce our impact on the environment while simultaneously continuing to offer a maintenance of or even improvement in the standard of life or living of the inhabitants of the planet.

Even if the pessimistic position is that we delay the inevitable overexploitation of the planet and the resulting destructive trigger points by two or three hundred years, the optimist, and indeed the engineer, in us suggests that developing technology will continue to push that envelope forward, allowing a little longer for the much slower process of evolutionary social and economic change to take place. It is in our view clearly better to drive forward the pace of technological change while being mindful of the need to report openly and honestly on that change and its sustainability impact.

10.4.3 The benefit to the consumer

The benefit for buyers and consumers of these better-engineered and more consciously sustainable products is less immediately clear. Will they be more expensive? Will they be inferior in some way? Will they mark a step backward toward some imagined bucolic utopian past? Will they simply be another means of marketing ever-increasing consumption to those who already overconsume?

The answers to these questions are by no means certain, but the indicators are currently that consumers in the developed world are already seeking to change their buying habits with the deliberate intent of improving or securing their environment. Clearly, this is a change of small steps—evolution not revolution—and some believe it is either too little too late or simply a veneer of sophistication on a basically flawed consumption model.

Our view, based on the current evidence and trends, is that the increasingly well-educated younger generation is genuinely seeking ways that they can positively influence a sustainable future for themselves and their offspring while striving to maintain a certain standard of living for themselves and their nearest and dearest.

10.4.4 The challenge of the designer

And what of the designers, manufacturers, and producers of these products, machines, and equipment? Will they trade in their hair shirts of penance for the silk or satin garments of smugness and superiority? Will they use the illusion of a fundamental shift in the design paradigm to continue on the path of constant growth necessary to stoke the fires of traditional capitalism?

It is clear that the command economy model has failed. It is equally clear that unfettered (natural) capitalism and unchecked growth have also failed. So, if we are to be ruled by neither the politics of envy nor those of greed, can we devise a way that the natural human ingenuity, that which has marked us out for a stellar path in evolutionary terms, will become a force for good rather than a force for ill?

All around us, we can see evidence of how standing still is not an option: our own curiosity, greed, and desire for constant “improvement” will ensure that this is not so.

From history, we can learn that the scientist and the engineer must take moral responsibility for the effect and use of their systems, machines, and creations. We also see that if public reaction can promote or stifle alternative ways forward, then the public must become better informed, allowing an open and clear debate based on issues and facts rather than dogma, opinion, and self-interest.

This involves giving designers the tools by which they can make a positive contribution: educating other decision-makers as to the whys, wherefores, and possibilities offered by this approach and communicating the resulting successes and failures to the public.

10.5 The Way Forward

Do we anticipate an immediate response to or recognition of the fundamental principle espoused by us in the book?

Taking the historical view shows that many now cannot see what the “fuss” was about when Taguchi suggested that the design engineer should be fundamentally responsible for quality: this is now accepted as common sense. We anticipate that in 10 years time, the idea that the designer is responsible for the sustainability or otherwise of their products, designs, and creations will be similarly thought of as common sense. In the meantime, we need to ensure that

(a) designers the world over take this message on board;

(b) the companies and organizations within which they work accept that this is so and that it forms part of the companies responsibility under 3BL;

(c) the buyers and consumers of engineered products, white goods, etc., expect to be able to evaluate with some confidence the sustainability of any given product and compare it to others of similar vein, just as we can for the nutritional value of foodstuffs at present;

(d) that the bases on which these evaluations take place are factual, well researched, and straightforward in application;

(e) that the generation of designers, engineers, managers, social scientists, politicians, and consumers we are now producing will have received sufficient education on the critical issues surrounding sustainability that they too will become the solution and not the problem.