Page 173 - Design for Environment A Guide to Sustainable Product Development

152 Cha pte r Ei g h t

Public Health, Safety, and Security
Company-owned facilities should be designed to protect the public
from accidental exposure to health or safety threats, including
hazardous materials, industrial processes, and moving vehicles or
machinery. In an age of heightened concern about sabotage and ter-
rorism, security precautions at industrial facilities have been tight-
ened. However, there may be aspects of the product life cycle that
are less carefully monitored, such as access to hazardous or flam-
mable materials during transport. Enterprise risk management should
include a review of the full product life cycle to ensure that all plau-
sible scenarios involving public exposure and risk have been fully
anticipated and appropriately addressed.
Many of the environmental issues addressed above, including
process safety, product integrity, and waste management, have a
bearing on public well-being. Stakeholder engagement should ex -
tend beyond the supply chain to include local communities, disad-
vantaged groups, and nongovernmental organizations that have an
interest in public health and safety.
D.2 Design for Natural Capital
Natural capital refers to the ecological resources and services that
make possible all economic activity, indeed all life. Ecological resource
flows include edible organisms, sand, wood, grass, metals, and min-
erals, while ecological services include various forms of energy pro-
vided by the water cycle, wind, tides, soil, and pollination. Although
ecosystem products and services are the foundation of our economy,
they are excluded from typical energy and emissions accounting. For
example, corn ethanol proponents overlooked the fact that land
capacity is limited and that using crops for fuel could constrain our
food supply. Even in the case of cellulosic biofuels, the use of agricul-
tural wastes as a renewable energy source can hurt agricultural pro-
ductivity by reducing the resilience of soil ecosystems.
As mentioned in Chapter 2, an understanding of potential threats
to natural capital is essential for sustainable development, but indus-
trial societies have tended to take these services for granted. Already,
according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the majority of
ecosystem services have been degraded due to unconstrained eco-
nomic development. Climate change is causing polar ice to melt
and sea level to rise, supplies of fresh water are dwindling, and
ir replaceable ecosystems are being destroyed. Design strategies
th at can help to slow these effects and, thus, protect natural capital
include the following:
• Radically increase resource productivity (see Section A, Design
for Dematerialization)
• Mimic natural cycles by eliminating waste (see Section C,
Design for Revalorization)