Transdisciplinary Designs for a Sustainable Future
The spring Environmental Life Cycle Assessment in Design (eLCAd 2021) symposium brought together experts and practitioners working in life cycle assessment with architects and designers, with the goal of establishing shared language, tools and applications across disciplines and scales. The American Center for Life Cycle Assessment (ACLCA) was a co-sponsor and co-organizer of the symposium with NJIT’s Hillier College of Architecture and Design. ACLCA is a non-profit membership organization providing education, awareness and advocacy to accelerate the efforts to reach global environmental sustainability. Many different strands of research, practice and scale were threaded together with presentations and experience shared by experts who have already bridged these two parallel systems of thinking.
Minal Mistry, sustainability consultant for the State of Oregon and moderator for the Responsible Product Design Approaches panel stated in his introduction, “It's not the idea of making materials or products sustainable, it’s about the bigger idea, to get to sustainable development, to maintain a resilient biosphere with a human economy that functions within the resources of the earth.” The speakers represented the intentionality of the transdisciplinary conversations taking place throughout the symposium. Jane Abernethy, industrial designer and chief sustainability officer at Humanscale, Justin DeMarco, business development leader in North America for BASF, and Chris Jordan, a photographer, artist and documentarist, rounded out the panel. Much of Jordan’s work visualizes both the scale and impact of human consumption. Known for his photographs of sea birds with plastic in their stomachs, one focus of his work is the human journey, looking into how we can free ourselves from the paralysis that occurs when we face the sheer scale of the environmental damage we have already caused.
The eLCAd symposium tapped into the potential of environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) becoming a commonplace tool at all scales of design and planning. From regional infrastructure to urban development, architecture, product and material design, the potential is evident when looking at what the federal government has already done to facilitate using LCA across several agencies. As Debbie Steckel, executive director of ACLCA pointed out, “The U.S. government has developed a platform called LCA Commons, where agencies from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), to nationals labs, to the Forest Service, the Environmental Protection Agency and others, can share knowledge, tools and a growing database of LCA inventories for different materials, products and processes.”
Looking at the built environment, which accounts for almost 40 percent of global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions annually, one can begin to understand the potential impact environmental LCA can have. However to reach sustainability thresholds that will mitigate the impacts of climate change, designers need to look upstream at whether their materials choices store or release embodied carbon. As Craig Schwitter of Buro Happold said, “It is literally at our fingertips. How do we accelerate towards a repurposed world? We use the concept of circularity - is it technically feasible to retain the building? Do we repurpose and refurbish? If we do that, we are driving down that embodied carbon, just as we have been driving down operational carbon and operational efficiencies over the last 20 years.”
Looking at the downstream consequences of infrastructure decision making, Shoshanna Saxe of University of Toronto, shared an insight into how LCA can inform decision making at the scale of transportation systems. When roads and highways are built, the buildings associated with that infrastructure are often single family homes, as found in suburban development. The building type most often associated with public transportation systems are multifamily buildings. Per person, greater energy use and consumer goods consumption are associated with larger homes than for smaller apartment dwellings. The cascading consequences and scale of environmental impact of that initial decision to build more roads over public transportation can be measured with LCA.
As reported in research by Maurie Cohen at NJIT, based on assessments of global resource availability and total material consumption calculations developed with the use of LCA, Cohen estimates that sustainability (and equity considerations) require that the maximum size of a home for a four-person family should be approximately 860 square feet. As a striking point of comparison, the average home size in the U.S. today is 1,901 square feet — more than twice what could be considered sustainable.
Vince Martinez, COO of Architecture 2030 said, “We are focused on the transformation of the global built environment to being the primary solution to climate change as opposed to the primary contributor.” Kate Simonen of the Carbon Leadership Forum added, “We are in a place in which the urgency to act is so high the risk of not acting is way worse than the risk of making some mistakes as we act. If designers and policy makers are using this data to make decisions the data will get better. Simultaneously we have to experiment and be OK that sometimes the data is not as precise as we want it.”
Connie Hensler, Global Director Environmental Management and Product Stewardship at Interface, and LCA certified expert, put it like this, “There has never been such demand for the support that LCA can bring to design and product development. The time seems right for LCA and industry to come together. For LCA to become more mainstream we need to communicate in mainstream language and get better at telling these stories.”
John Cays, associate dean of academic affairs at Hillier College and author of An Environmental Approach to Design, summed it up by saying, “We convened conversations between broad thinkers who are dealing with fundamental challenges at the scale of the planet. Individual LCA data driven design decisions accumulate. Huge leaps in computational power and data flows are helping us draw down across multiple environmental impact categories. This can work at scale to quickly yield nationally and internationally relevant results.”
