Page 385 - Design for Environment A Guide to Sustainable Product Development

360 C h a p t er T w enty

focus their work in seven specific areas: sustainable products, life-
styles, education, building and construction, tourism, public procure-
ment, and cooperation with Africa.

The Need for Systems Thinking
The greatest challenge to achieving environmental sustainability may
be the tendency of business and government leaders to deal with
issues piecemeal rather than striving for a more holistic perspective.
The Kaya logic above, while it provides helpful insights, is a perfect
illustration of the prevalent linear, reductionist, and incremental
approach toward analyzing sustainability opportunities. As a result,
sustainability policies and practices have focused mainly on reducing
unsustainability rather than strengthening the systemic underpinnings
of sustainability [6]. Indeed, most of the company programs discussed
in Part 3 of this book are directed largely at reducing environmental
burdens, measured in terms of resource consumption and waste
emissions. Little is understood about the broader impacts of these
material and energy flows, or about the qualitative differences among
sustainability conditions in different social and economic settings.
Organization learning expert Peter Senge is a strong advocate of sys-
tems thinking because considering the whole system may reveal
breakthrough opportunities that are not evident when one is busy
optimizing the individual parts of the system [7]. One example is
Dow AgroSciences’ innovative Sentricon™ system, which achieved a
10,000-fold reduction in pesticide volume by rethinking how termites
could be detected and controlled (see Chapter 18).
Systems thinking is being practiced in many parts of the world by
ecologists and city planners who are teaming up to develop sus-
tainable communities. Hammarby Sjöstad, a suburb of Stockholm,
Sweden, is an example. The target of this development was to build
affordable homes that use half the energy and water that a conven-
tional Swedish home did in the early nineties. Rather than homes
operating independently, heat and power are provided by a central
plant. Combustible waste is sucked through a system of tubes, rather
than being collected by trucks, and burned in a combined heat and
power plant to provide electricity and heat. A dedicated wastewater
treatment plant generates biogas from sewage and uses it to power
local buses. Even warm wastewater is made to yield its energy, which
is then used for space heating. A similar project in Abu Dhabi is
developing Masdar City, a ”green” community in the desert with
50,000 residents, which will utilize advanced energy and transporta-
tion technologies to achieve zero net carbon emissions and zero waste.
While “systems thinking” sounds good in principle, it is not easy.
Many analysts are tempted to model complex systems from a static
perspective, as if they were in “equilibrium.” In truth, the ecosystems