Page 51 - Design for Environment A Guide to Sustainable Product Development

30 Chapter Thr ee

risk is virtually impossible, some cutoff point was needed to avoid
spending absurd amounts for pollution control and cleanup. For
example, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has often
used the level of one in one million lifetime risk of cancer as a regula-
tory threshold.
To further confuse the issue, laboratory detection limits have
improved greatly, so that we can now detect contaminants in air,
water, or food at levels of 1 part per trillion or less. Some environ-
mental and health advocates have invoked the precautionary prin-
ciple (see Chapter 2) to support an extreme position that no amount
of contamination is tolerable. One of the most frustrating aspects of
dealing with the “how clean is clean?” question has been our inabil-
ity to measure low levels of risk empirically. Instead, risk analysis
practitioners are compelled to use dubious mathematical extrapola-
tions (see Chapter 9), so that measuring “cleanness” became a some-
what hypothetical exercise.
Today, a similar question arises in a different context; namely, “how
green is green?” The appellation “green” is used widely and gratuit-
ously, but when applied to a product or a company it usually connotes
environmental responsibility. However, “greenness” is even more diffi-
cult to measure than risk; in fact it suggests a multidimensional set of
characteristics that include emissions, energy use, water use, and
many other attributes. The expanding field of eco-labeling is dis-
cussed later in this chapter, and Chapter 7 describes how compa-
nies have dealt with the challenges of environmental performance
measurement. Establishing meaningful standards of com parison for
compet ing products is even more daunting than comparing hypo-
thetical risks.
Finally, a new riddle can be posed; namely, “how clean is green?”
In other words, when we speak of “green” design or “clean” manu-
facturing, what level of pollution or waste reduction should we strive
for? There are definitely two camps. Some believe that zero waste is
an attainable goal, as demonstrated in the practice of industrial ecol-
ogy where one firm’s wastes become another firm’s feedstocks (see
Chapter 8). Others argue that by the laws of thermodynamics we can
only prolong, but not prevent, the inevitable progress of entropy,
which causes matter to decay into waste. In either case, companies
are increasingly forced to confront this question as they deliberate
over what voluntary goals to set for future reductions in emissions
and waste. As shown in Chapter 4, even if zero waste is achievable it
may not be desirable because of diminishing economic returns.

Confronting Climate Change
Today, the term “green” is often equated with being “energy-efficient”
or “climate-friendly.” Concerns over the “greenhouse effect” were