Against Sustainability
To be clear, we are not ideologically opposed to sustainability in product design. Of course responsible stewardship of Earth’s finite resources is a good idea. But there’s a misalignment between the arguments these books make and the realities of an impactful response to climate change when designing products.
Let’s first examine what is meant, exac tly, by sustainability in this context. Common definitions include the repurposing of old materials into new products (upcycling), prioritization of renewable resources as input materials, and switching to manufacturing techniques that are less energy intensive.
These definitions, however, while advancing important considerations, fail to capture the full scope of a product’s environmental impact. A more thorough definition ought to take into account all of the energy flows required to produce something.
Fitting that bill is the concept of emergy, short for embodied energy – the amount of energy consumed in direct and indirect transformations to generate a buyable product or service. We’d argue that an emergy-centric approach to energy accounting is more honest than these other definitions, in that it includes energy inputs from the first mile (e.g. the offshore rig that processed the petroleum for the plastic) to the last (e.g. the truck that brought the widget from the port to the store).
