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hello and welcome to another special bonus episode of technically speaking in our recent episode about sustainability antonia and i got terribly distracted by talking about soap making, feet, libraries and many other things we figured we probably didn't do a very good job of defining what sustainability is so we've condensed the episode down by cutting out all the distractions this shorter episode should give you a good idea of some of the aspects of sustainability that can be measured just
how challenging it is to do so and why some aspects of sustainability can't be measured but are more of a philosophy the 1987 u.n bruntland commission definition of sustainability as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs ah it sounds very profound though yes it also doesn't give you direct instruction about what is and isn't sustainable it's just a kind of in general live your life without stopping
other people from living theirs seems to be the answer yeah doesn't really help an engineer say well we need to do this which is where i feel a lot of this stuff comes from if we're gonna engineer bridges and energy systems and product development chains there needs to be some practical or as i think of it engineering-y way of doing it yeah and i think the sort of key point as well is it's not just about sustainable full stop it's sustainable development so we're not trying to
keep the status quo because if you think about the original dictionary definition of sustain it could just be conserved but it's actually about you know making sure as a as a species or as a planet or community we're all growing and developing it's just what kind of growth we're having that's why the united nations came up with the sustainable development goals about you know addressing inequality in the world so it really encompasses what we call the free pillars of sustainability environmental
economic and social okay i've heard of those i've seen various diagrams of this where it's literally three pillars holding up a roof that's called sustainability there are venn diagrams where the three different circles overlap to form sustainability in the center yeah those three concepts seem sensible to choose environment economy and social aspects what does that mean in practice if we ever get an issue like the solar cells episode you need energy so you generate
it from the sun that seems a good idea the sun isn't going to run out in our lifetime so that ticks the box of meats future generation needs but having the other aspect of well is it affordable if we have to replace the cells frequently how affordable is it and then there's a social aspect of who makes the cells and what sort of environment are they working in so there's the social element and then finally environmental element where do we get the resources to make it we don't
generate electricity from nothing we use silicon metals elements and then make the solar cells so how are they made so guess sustainability kind of is thinking about everything that goes into everything or on an engineering project you might consider the life cycle so we're going down this really philosophical route and that it sounds like that is a lot of what sustainability is about but if there's all this engineering involved maybe we can find like a practical example
maybe sticking with the food industry and talking about farming i think it's almost like you can just say what principles should be there based on again the three pillars you know that when we're producing food it feeds everyone and it's affordable and it doesn't harm the environment simple right i suspect there's a bit of a competition between it being affordable and harming the environment you know in these kind of things you need tools to help you measurements
criteria and again i guess that's why we have definitions of sustainability because that's what you would base your assessment on you'd kind of have questions that you'd ask like what effect will this have on water quality what effect would it have on biodiversity how much energy would it use you know noise pollution light pollution because that will have effects on the residents or the wildlife as well and then economically you know does it create jobs does it put people out of jobs
you know we start off with principles and then we get somewhere towards how do we actually make it happen yeah and i guess how do you make it happen differs depending on what you're doing and where you're doing it yeah sure like each sort of place will have different things that are a little bit more affected it's almost like an optimization problem if you're trying to write this for a scientist or engineer if this then that and what are your constraints for this
and that's how you take philosophy into an action and ball plan you come up with a whole load of logic gates that say if and then maybe you can have continuous variables you know not they don't have to be discrete that would make more sense because most things happen on a continuum right how do you actually measure sustainability that's a question that's not been answered because at the end of it someone should just be able to say yes that is sustainable no that isn't
sustainable but that doesn't work in practice you can't just say yes or or no or bad or good ah so that's why it kind of seems like a bit of a buzz word because it's it's difficult to explain it well i wouldn't say it's subjective i think there's just a lot of variables yeah fair enough there are ways to make it a bit more objective but i think at the end of the day there probably will be some constraints to anything being measured fair enough so if i'm a consumer of a product or wanting
something from a company what sort of questions could i be asking to know when you say it's sustainable is it really sustainable it's a really good question it's hard to like say what what could work for every single product can we find a specific example there is a problem statement you can have which is is an e-reader more environmentally friendly than a book and should that be a consideration if you're buying an e-reader because honestly when i did search paper books and e-readers
a lot of like e-reader manufacturers were saying it's more eco-friendly and so how how do you prove it there is a definitive way to say whether it is or not oh okay and that's what life cycle assessment can be used for that's one of the sustainability measuring tools there's other ways but there's you know looking at it and assigning values so you can sort of see it as an input output process input these materials get this waste or emissions to water air land and you get this product and then
this product has this lifespan and you know you'll use energy to recharge it how was it distributed to you as well how was it stored was it packaged and then all the waste that comes from all that and then at the end you recycle it you pass it on and then so on so forth so you can do this kind of it's like it's like accounting really so what was the verdict then what's more environmentally friendly so you know who was saying there's no just good bad answer there is scale yeah of at what
point is it better to have an e-reader or not the paper well this article based on another paper and the paper based it on sorry academic paper it's getting really confusing if i start saying e-readers books and then a paper and they based it on textbooks that's a weird choice because i wouldn't want to read a textbook on an e-reader but okay that was their basis and they used an ipad rather than a traditional e-ink reader so i also thought this changes the way it goes
because an ipad is multifunctional whereas an e-reader is only a book yeah some of them do audio but the point of the e-reader is they use far less energy because of the technology that's inside them than an ipad so this is the other issue is like there's so many considerations you know is that standard is does everyone read on an ipad or not but essentially there is a graph with multiple lines that works well in an audio only medium i know so if you use the ipad only for reading books
you would have to read between 10 and 15 textbooks before it has the same environmental impact in terms of greenhouse gas emissions so it might have other environmental impacts i think essentially you have to use your e-reader a certain amount before it kind of does a environmental payback so if you're an avid reader then it makes sense if you're a casual reader then maybe a book isn't that bad fair enough no i'm guessing these were all like brand new books no i went to my library
and got a 20 year old book yeah i think the assumption was a brand new one so again textbooks they're often like you know there's a whole resell market because no student is going to read that keep their textbook on their bookshelf forever it's unlikely and it's not like that knowledge is going to change a whole lot if it's a well-established field it's interesting to see that that sort of study has been done though and there's it's only quite a small part of
just that industry and to find out if an entire industry is sustainable you need to look at a lot more things from the sound of it like how people use that product i mean look at how far do you take it you have to look at how were they generating their electricity to charge the ipad so some of these you have to base on location because energy plays such a big part of a lot of things that where it's manufactured if it's manufactured let's say france versus the us france are
have a lot of nuclear electricity so emissions from a product manufactured there would differ quite a lot to somewhere with lots of fossil fuels for example so yeah there's a lot of considerations into every single environmental impact i mean i can almost get a decision paralysis whenever i have to buy anything new i just try not to for the same reason it just seems easier to let things fall apart got about four pairs of shoes that i probably should throw out but i really don't want to buy
new ones because i'm going to have that same debate you talked about sustainable development which suggests it's something that industry engineers scientists are all moving towards in general yeah i'm not sure it was true some years ago it's really at the forefront now it sort of makes me wonder what would the future look like is it even possible to imagine a future that encompasses those three pillars of sustainability because at the minute i feel like a lot of companies
are driven just by making profit in things like the environment and social aspects aren't considered as fully but maybe that's me being really cynical i think a lot of companies are doing it to stay in business aren't they and that in itself is sustainable because that keeps their business going if they stop making money that does stop their business i guess it starts out with companies becoming more efficient in resource use which i i suspect they probably are it's
when i think we said this in the zero waste episode as well that's when that gets out into the world what happens to it then so there needs to be some way for us to recover these jumpers we were talking about jumpers that have been distributed around the world and get them back into some way of making them into a new jumper or something of equal or greater volume yeah circle economy yeah i think that would be a huge step in the right direction you know making sure we do
things more than once it's repeatable like a peaceful experiment because we've gone back to the same state yeah it's a bit like lego you can take it all apart and put it back together again i feel like the idea isn't to remove people from nature and let nature claim most of the world back it's to live with nature so rather than concentrating people into massive skyscrapers we'd be more spread out in smaller populations maybe yeah i've heard of the sort of 20-minute village or town idea where you
kind of have hubs everything you need is in a 20-minute walk which would you know make transport a lot easier for people there's also home delivery if you want to use it and is that something that would maybe be removed if everything's a lot closer i would like to not be as reliant on places like amazon and ebay which for me would mean ways of repairing things myself on my doorstep rather than buying the tools to repair it but then we do live with some very complex items is it possible for us
to know how to repair everything it's an interesting question like if my ipad breaks and it needs a new processor say where's that processor manufactured does it make sense to have a manufacturing place on my doorstep or do you have a few of them and then ship things around the world i think supply chains are probably here to stay because in some respects it is efficient to have hubs of expertise there's a mix of technology behavior systems governance that will all help us
towards sustainability at the end of the day i think everything has to work together i don't think only technology can solve it or only people by changing their behavior can do it so we're now on this course for the future of technology and systems and supply chains and communities that are all flourishing and we're not necessarily thinking about profit but we're also thinking about the society and the environment as well does that sound like a fair assessment of
what sustainability is i think so the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them they do not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening to these views it would really help us out if you could rate us leave a review and tell a friend this podcast was sponsored by no one but if you're interested in funding us to continue to have frank discussions about science and engineering please get in touch [Music]