Sustainability as an Engineering Problem – Don’t Shit Where You Eat
Sustainability is not just a hippie idea, or a leftist communist plot. It’s actually something we as engineers must embrace. If we are going to live in space or populate some other planet or moon, we’re going to have to learn to be less wasteful, and be smarter about our resources. To make moving to Mars realistic as a long term venture, we have to learn to not produce waste that can’t be reused in some way. Honestly, if we’re going to continue to live on this planet, we’re going to have to learn the same things.
When we see it through this lens, sustainability is an engineering problem, or can at least be solved through an engineering mindset. Engineering after all is at least partially about efficiency, and making the most of resources, inputs vs outputs.
The two original sustainability problems for humans – the original Don’t Shit Where You Eat conundrum – have been how we deal with resources and waste. We’ve added more facets to the problem, but these are the original and most basic problems. Groups of people would use up all the resources in an area, eat all the apples, catch all the fish, kill all the mastodons, and then move on to do the same thing somewhere else. The availability of food for a growing population is an obvious problem. The other problem is creating waste in such a way that we destroy our freely available resources.
Sustainability is not Left vs Right politics
Sustainability doesn’t have to produce the knee-jerk reaction that terms like “environmentalism” or “global warming” evoke. Sustainability is a rational mind-set that will help an ever increasing number of people live on a finite supply of resources. These resources include the land, the air and the water. With these, combined with the right conditions, we produce the food to feed everyone on the planet.
I grew up in the Adirondacks. When you live there, the value of the natural world is the first thing you see in the morning and the last thing you see at night. But of course you also live by modern convenience and technology. You can’t live without a heat source, modern plumbing, and of course Amazon.
It’s easy to overlook the purity of a running stream when you live in the concrete jungle, but the Hudson river runs right through NYC. I’ve stood with one foot on either side of the stream at the headwaters of the Hudson, deep in the Adirondacks. So even in the concrete jungle, it’s important to maintain clean wilderness areas. Because the air and the water are fluids, you can’t contain pollution to a single area – all of the air – the atmosphere of the entire planet – is connected. It’s one atmosphere, and it’s the only one we have. Same with the water system. Pollute the air in Detroit, and it rains acid in the Adirondacks, and that water flows through NYC into the Atlantic. It’s a big cycle, a loop. There is no dead end to stash trash. We’re living in it.
We should have paid more attention at the beginning of the industrial revolution, but somehow we came to excuse giant smoke stacks and slag pits, and the accompanying processes that produce unusable waste. Maybe we never thought that eventually there would be billions of people on the planet. Maybe we thought that one smoke stack really isn’t all that bad. But when you multiply it by thousands, it becomes significant. One camp fire, one guy who shits in the creek.
Manufacturing has become synonymous with giant smoke stacks spewing black waste into the air and unknown chemicals into the water that we drink. We would never accept this in our own home towns, whether you live in the Adirondacks or not. The air doesn’t have any way to digest or eliminate all of that blackness, so it just remains there, and we breathe it, drink it, eat it.
Stewardship is Not a New Concept
The Iroquois are a league of indigenous tribes that call northern NY – including the Adirondacks – home. There’s an old saying that I can imagine may have had roots in their distinctive type of wisdom about how to treat the natural world around us – Don’t Shit Where You Eat. I’m not saying the Iroquois invented that phrase, but the idea fits with their notion of stewardship. In my mind, nothing could sum up sustainability any better than that.
Engineering – mechanical engineering specifically – is all about efficiency and ratios. Strength per weight, speed per energy, output per input, sales per development money. Unfortunately, the bottom line of business is often financial. And that’s what we call “good business”. Unfortunately this view is short-sighted and it leaves out a lot of factors, like stewardship and the long term effects of our actions.
What if the product you produce actually harms your customers? Maybe it doesn’t hurt them immediately, but it does so over time. Is it ok because the customer bought what you sold, so the customer is ultimately on the hook? Is it ok as long as the check cleared the bank before anyone was harmed? What if it takes years or decades for the effects to accumulate?
Common Good vs Currency
The phrase “common good” tends to be code for collectivism. In a society that values individualism above all else, common good can be anathema. But again, life is a balance, and following one idea to the exclusion of all others is its own kind of poison. The irony here is that individualism is good, but it can only be supported by a collective effort. America won its right to individualism through collective effort (war). No one fought those battles by themselves. Unless we return to medieval Feudalism, American individualism can only exist under American collectivism. Which is to say My rights certainly exist, but they are superseded by Our rights.
In our society, we reward work with some sort of currency. Currency can be accumulated by an individual. And that’s a good thing. But again, it’s always possible to overdo any good thing. There are people who value currency above all else, but life is not so one-dimensional. It’s a balance of competing interests, and when one aspect gets out of balance, nothing works. When we value currency over everything else, we create a situation that can’t be maintained forever.
So we have the ongoing classic conflict between the individual and the collective. How does this relate to sustainability? The truth is that we can’t keep making more people, making and disposing more plastic bottles, making more nuclear waste, burning more (whatever) that goes into the air we breathe, creating more waste products that through negligence or accident make it into the water that keeps us alive. Individuals are sometimes making choices that affect us all, and the usual motivation for harming society, even if unwittingly, is the financial gain of an individual. Financial gain is not a bad thing, it keeps our standard of living high. But how do you bring what is wrong with the system back into balance without trashing what’s right with the system?
Motivating Sustainability
We used to have milk bottles that were made of thick glass, and were reusable. Now they are made of thin plastic, and disposable. They used to be distributed and collected locally. Now we transport them hundreds of miles.
Some areas have a 5 or 10 cent deposit on bottles, and I’m sure that helps make sure that they aren’t just thrown out. If you haven’t lived in an area that requires deposits on bottles, all sorts of groups scour the landscape for bottles to turn into supplies for schools, lunches for the homeless, activities for churches, or just helping families reduce costs. Attaching some kind of value to things that otherwise get thrown away is an excellent way to prevent waste. Some places do recycling, and I’m sure that helps. But for whatever reason, a lot of this stuff still winds up violating the “Don’t Shit Where You Eat” rule.
The problem with recycling in many cases is that it isn’t economically viable to recycle – it is more expensive to collect and process than it is to just create virgin material. When it is less expensive to trash someone else’s backyard than to rely on the civic responsibility of corporations to come up with an effective but possibly expensive solution, you can guess which is going to happen.
The next step that no one wants to see to help reduce pollution and one-way waste in general is taxation. If you can’t make the refuse a valuable incentive, you can assign some sort of dis-incentive for throwing away single-use containers or even creating it in the first place. If governments place a tax on the creation or import of single-use containers, private industry will come up with a solution. If you produce it and it gets thrown away in high volumes, you pay a penalty. There has to be some way to realign the rights of private/public sector actively rather than passively.
De-Centralization
Centralization leads to waste as well. It can lead to some efficiency gains, but at the same time, you wind up transporting goods long distances, which is a waste of resources. Transportation in itself does not add value to anything. Local production increases jobs, and benefits everyone. A great example is transporting cheap crap from China. How much oil does one of those big container ships burn? And then the container ship that delivered the oil? Producing our cheap crap at home creates jobs. Plus, sending that money to China causes more problems beyond the scope of this already too long post.
Obviously, you can’t produce everything locally. The facilities required to make computer chips are too expensive for every city or even every state to produce their own, but in a time when local family farms are going out of business or getting bought out by large corporations, we’re setting ourselves up for a collapse at some point in the future.
Centralization fails us every time we have a big natural disaster like a hurricane that wipes out infrastructure. If the power generation is split into smaller, local sources, the power outages become smaller. We can’t sustain the continued mergers of governments, corporations, infrastructure, resources.
Sustainability, in a real definition sense, is all about the ability to maintain our way of life indefinitely, without that way of life making itself unattainable. The dinosaurs reached a point where they couldn’t get any bigger because they couldn’t support their own weight. Humanity is headed for the same kind of reckoning. We are well past the point where we can continue to sustain our way of life for two reasons – the number of people, and the voraciousness with which we want to consume finite resources.
The Real Problem is a Ratio
The problem at the head of the chain is the ratio of population vs resources of land, air and water. Because we have been so successful in making humans live longer, there are more of us to feed, house, clean up after, entertain, transport, warm, cool, etc. We could almost afford to be wasteful when there were fewer of us. Killing billions of people is not really an answer, but maybe we can look to reduce our numbers over time. Social engineering of this sort is unpopular, but if we are going to continue to live with the kind of quality of life we value, we can’t keep increasing, and must do something.
Right now, the US can be construed as taxing the working part of society so it can pay the part of society that doesn’t work to reproduce, and there are those who shame us if we don’t do that. This is going to sound heartless, but from a sustainability point of view, we should be doing the opposite – taxing new arrivals. Increasing the population is a drain on common and limited resources. Is this an inhuman suggestion? maybe. Families are certainly the backbone of who we are. But taxing what works to support what doesn’t work is not sustainable from either the over-population or the fiscal point of view. In the long run, over-population is going to have severely inhumane consequences, and the only way to fix it is to solve it before we crash the system. We have to make some hard decisions at some point. If we don’t do it now, the decisions will made for us in the future.
Energy
Energy production should be an obvious way to plan for the future. In the past, we burned stuff to produce energy – either heat or electricity – that helped us live or helped us produce currency. We did it at a small scale, so we didn’t really think that choking on smoke around a trash fire would turn into a global issue. But enough of us did it so often, and in so many ways, and for so long, and at an ever increasing scale, that yes, it has become a global choking hazard. Directly – through breathability issues – and indirectly – affecting the atmosphere that deflects radiation and traps heat.
Modern technology in some respects has been misused and has caused this problem, but I also believe that we can make better choices and make use technology with the subtext always in mind that yes – we can continue to make money through industry, but yes – we also need to do it in such a way that we can continue doing it indefinitely.
The sun has been powering this planet for billions of years. It will continue to do so. We have the technology to harness this energy without making our situation any worse.
Solution
I’m far from the first person to say this. There have been multiple factors in arriving at a place where we’re noticing that we can’t keep doing what we’re doing. The fix will also entail multiple factors.
Humans really started having a major negative impact on the planet in the last couple hundred years (industrial revolution). If we were to live on the planet in the way that the rest of life has lived on this planet for billions of years, we may also last for billions of years.
Plant life consumes CO2 (waste products from human activity) and supplies the oxygen in our atmosphere, yet humans seem bent on destroying as many trees as possible. This is a double whammy. Reversing this 60% loss of vegetation on the planet is a step that we can take, and one that will have a real impact.
Use renewable energy that doesn’t make the problem worse.
Smarter farming such as live stock directly grazing crops in a way that doesn’t destroy the land can return large tracts of land to open vegetation.
Consider the end of life of every product. “The landfill” is not a reasonable answer. Doesn’t it make sense to produce items that aren’t meant to fail after a certain period only to ensure repeat customers?
Consider the process of production – dangerous chemicals hurt people. That statement should be enough, but obviously it’s not, because corporate actions continue to hurt a lot of people through destroying the land, air, and water.
When you’re making decisions about product development, keep in the back of your mind “How will this action affect the land, air and water where I live?” It does affect you. Smoke stacks in Detroit cause acid rain in the Adirondacks, which feed water to NYC. Lifecycle is a loop, not a straight line with an endpoint.