Measurable Environmental Impact: Life Cycle Assessment in Design
In his recent book, An Environmental Life Cycle Approach to Design, author John Cays, associate dean for academic affairs and interim director of the School of Art + Design, opens the door of environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to the world of design. Cays posits that in the hands of designers, LCA tools can enable the integration of measurable environmental impact decision making into the design and production of everything, from the products we use to the buildings we live and work in, unlocking the regenerative potential inherent in designing processes, products and the built environment. Designers able to use LCA tools to make design decisions can go beyond the reduction of harm to the environment to design strategies that ‘see things whole’ and encompass and account for the intersections of natural, social and built environments, finding complementarities and synergies that result in regeneration. This kind of thinking and design exists already. Water resource systems that collect and purify rainwater for human consumption and convert waste water into safe grey water for the biosphere in surrounding wetlands designed to manage flooding, or product containers that can be composted to improve soil quality, or responsive building envelopes that adapt to interior occupancy conditions and exterior conditions such as humidity and temperature, while collecting and storing available solar energy. Many designers, especially students, are already thinking this way, yet there are some fundamental challenges to realizing the full potential. The primary challenge is the complexity of variables that go into a life cycle inventory (LCI).
Life cycle thinking first came into use in the biological sciences and was subsequently appropriated to describe non living material goods in weapon systems as the military industrial complex started to track their costs over time. The RAND Corporation first introduced the concept and term in the 1950s in the context of their contracts with the US military. By the late 1960s and early 1970s a protoLCA began to be used by American corporations and the U.S. government’s newly formed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as a framework to identify and quantify the harms that industrial processes and waste were causing to the environment, specifically water, air and soil (Cays, 2021 pp. 69-76). Starting in the 1990s, Environmental Life Cycle Assessment was transformed into an international standard framework which takes a quantitative life cycle view of a product or activity from gathering raw materials through the end of life. It is now a recognized formal scientific discipline the details of which are currently the purview of scientists, economists, engineers, and accountants. Five typical key impact categories that get measured and documented include whether and how much a given nonliving material product system’s life cycle creates acid rain, kills streams, rivers and oceans, makes smog, makes the hole in the ozone layer bigger or makes the earth warmer. Depending on the method followed, the primary list can be expanded to include the potential to: increase risks to human health, reduce the amount of usable land available to all species, decrease the amount of usable water, poison the environment with toxic chemicals or deplete finite abiotic resources including fossil fuels from nonrenewable deposits (Cays, 2021 pp. 79-82).
The assessment across the life cycle of a product or building begins with considering the inputs and outputs at each stage beginning with the extraction of raw materials from the earth, the manufacture of those materials into component parts, construction or production of the building or product, and it’s ongoing operation. At every one of these stages waste is produced, the most visible but not necessarily the greatest amount or most harmful is at the end of the product system’s life cycle. Imagine a car and all of its parts at the point of the disposal: metal, fiberglass, battery acid, dirty oil, coolant fluid, rubber, plastic, vinyl or leather and polyurethane. Each of these components is the result of many other processes that can each produce a mountain of industrial waste products.
Consuming natural resources as if they are infinite and disregarding what happens to the environment when we dispose of the harmful waste generated is the definition of unsustainable. Damage to the environment from the plastics discarded into the ocean, particulate matter and greenhouse gases released into the air, to chemical runoff from industrial processes or solid waste landfills leaching into the soil and groundwater, these processes cause levels of ecotoxicity that cannot ‘self-heal’ rapidly enough to do no harm to living systems. For the designer who knows sustainability matters and is often operating primarily within the constraints of the client’s concern for the economic life cycle assessment of a process, product or building, deciding which environmental variables are the most important can parallel the goal and the scope activities of an LCA. (see Chap. 5 pp. 82-101 for a detailed discussion of LCA goals and scope).
As Cays puts it, “Carbon is the clear and present danger right now. This is true for buildings and products in terms of both quantifiable embodied and operational environmental impacts. Once the grid is materially greened and operating entirely with renewable energy, however, the issue of carbon goes away. Everybody who lives in the northeast can live comfortably on a screened porch all winter. This is why we need a broad based framework that can simultaneously look at things like ecotoxicity, acidification, eutrophication, tropospheric ozone, land use, human toxicity and other issues that can threaten life on earth as well as the current and appropriate headline impact category of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. That is why an environmental life cycle assessment approach to design is the next step in a more comprehensive and balanced look at sustainability.”
Sustainable, smart, green and environmentally friendly materials, systems and building practices already make a difference minimizing the harm our accelerating production and consumption does to the environment. The potential laid out in An Environmental Life Cycle Approach to Design is the possibility of regenerative architecture, regenerative design. It starts by establishing benchmarks and using design software tools and the data that feeds them to measure the effects of one design option against another.
“What we know and control as designers is not always enough to make us change our priorities. Directly explaining climate change to the public is like telling a story about rust. Even the most committed designers will likely not change the hearts and minds of clients who are not already convinced that there is a problem that their [sustainable] design addresses.” Furthermore, says Cays, “Science denialism is intended to create paralysis. More information is not necessarily better… and sometimes the perceived importance and weight of making a correct decision are so great that we freeze.”
However, the current benefits of an environmental LCA approach to design can be compared to those in computing. At one time it was staggeringly expensive to do intensive computational processes, what used to require mainframes in cold rooms is now done on a smartphone. As the ease of choosing between criteria becomes easier and cheaper – willingness to use these eco data-driven tools and methodologies will become more widespread. Designers, in the face of climate related disasters unfolding all around will be empowered to ‘do good and do well’, designing for environmental sustainability and regeneration while also delivering to their clients bottom line.
The book, and an upcoming spring symposium inspired by it, unites two parallel cultures engaged in system thinking: designers working at many different scales and the LCA community of researchers, data experts, and information interface providers. As Cays points out, “Designers are entrusted with at once responding to market forces by bringing novel products and systems into the world while simultaneously safeguarding public health safety and welfare. LCA experts provide ways to improve the ecological profiles of product development through quantitative analyses of clearly bounded system conditions and carefully qualified studies. Truly sustainable design is increasingly driven by a steady stream of reliable data.”
What was once a field that relied almost completely on heuristics, sustainable design now leverages new methods and insights gleaned from computationally guided workflows in conjunction with robust databases. Cays adds, “Environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) provides a fact-based scientific approach to evaluate design decisions, grounded in a deep understanding of the environmental impacts associated with human-directed natural resource flows and the industrial processes that transform them. Designs that reflect insights gleaned from tracking current human impacts on the ecosphere in increasingly detailed ways is critical to reducing and even reversing the negative environmental effects of providing for a global population of nearly 8 billion people.”
