Sustainable design
Environmentally sustainable design is the philosophy of designing physical objects, the built environment, and services to comply with the principles of ecological sustainability and also aimed at improving the health and comfort of occupants in a building.
Sustainable design seeks to reduce negative impacts on the environment, the health and well-being of building occupants, thereby improving building performance. The basic objectives of sustainability are to reduce the consumption of non-renewable resources, minimize waste, and create healthy, productive environments.
Theory
The sustainable design intends to "eliminate negative environmental impact through skillful sensitive design". Manifestations of sustainable design require renewable resources and innovation to impact the environment minimally, and connect people with the natural environment.Design-related decisions are happening everywhere daily, impacting "sustainable development" or provisioning for the needs of future generations of life on earth. Sustainability and design are intimately linked. Quite simply, our future is designed. The term "design" is here used to refer to practices applied to the making of products, services, as well as business and innovation strategies — all of which inform sustainability. Sustainability can be thought of as the property of continuance; that is, what is sustainable can be continued.
Conceptual problems
Diminishing returns
The concept of diminishing returns, commonly illustrated by the 'S' curve in the technology life cycle, refers to the reduced incremental benefit gained from continued investment or effort. In fields such as industrial ecology and life cycle assessment, this concept is associated with the finite useful life of systems. Management literature suggests that when traditional approaches reach diminishing returns, it may prompt organizations to reassess their strategy and explore alternative opportunities.See also:
Law of diminishing returns
Marginal utility
Jevons paradox
Unsustainable investment
A problem arises when the limits of a resource are hard to see, so increasing investment in response to diminishing returns may seem profitable as in the Tragedy of the Commons, but may lead to a collapse. This problem of increasing investment in diminishing resources has also been studied as a cause of civilization collapse by Joseph Tainter among others. This natural error in investment policy contributed to the collapse of both the Roman and Mayan, among others. Relieving over-stressed resources requires reducing pressure on them, not continually increasing it whether more efficiently or not.Negative effects of waste
The designer is responsible for choices that place a demand on natural resources, produce waste, and potentially cause irreversible ecosystem damage.About 80 million tonnes of waste in total are generated in the U.K. alone, for example, each year. And concerning only household waste, between 1991–92 and 2007–08, each person in England generated an average of 1.35 pounds of waste per day.
Experience has now shown that there is no completely safe method of waste disposal. All forms of disposal have negative effects on the environment, public innovation, and local economies. Landfills have contaminated drinking water. Garbage burned in incinerators has poisoned air, soil, and water. The majority of water treatment systems change the local ecology. Attempts to control or manage wastes after they are produced fail to eliminate environmental impacts.
The toxic components of household products pose serious health risks and aggravate the trash problem. In the U.S., about seven pounds in every ton of household garbage contains toxic materials, such as heavy metals like nickel, lead, cadmium, and mercury from batteries, and organic compounds found in pesticides and consumer products, such as air freshener sprays, nail polish, cleaners, and other products. When burned or buried, toxic materials also pose a serious threat to public health and the environment.
The only way to avoid environmental harm from waste is to prevent its generation. Pollution prevention means changing the way activities are conducted and eliminating the source of the problem. It does not mean doing without, but doing differently. For example, preventing waste pollution from litter caused by disposable beverage containers does not mean doing without beverages; it just means using refillable bottles.
Industrial designer Victor Papanek has stated that when we design and plan things to be discarded, we exercise insufficient care in design.
[Waste prevention] strategies
In planning for facilities, a comprehensive design strategy is needed for preventing the generation of solid waste.Improper waste disposal is associated with increasing pollution, climate change, and other hazardous emissions that pose risks to human wellbeing. Therefore, a good garbage prevention strategy would require that everything brought into a facility is recycled for reuse or recycled back into the environment through biodegradation. This would mean a greater reliance on natural materials or products that are compatible with the environment.Any resource-related development is going to have two basic sources of solid waste — materials purchased and used by the facility and those brought into the facility by visitors. The following waste prevention strategies apply to both, although different approaches will be needed for implementation.
- use products that minimize waste and are nontoxic
- compost or anaerobically digest biodegradable wastes
- reuse materials onsite or collect suitable materials for offsite recycling
- consuming fewer resources means creating less waste, therefore it reduces the impact on the environment.
Climate change
Loss of biodiversity
Unsustainable design, or simply design, also affects the biodiversity of a region. Improper design of transport highways forces thousands of animals to move further into forest boundaries. Poorly designed hydrothermal dams affect the mating cycle and indirectly, the numbers of local fish.Sustainable design principles
While the practical application varies among disciplines, some common principles are as follows:- Low-impact materials: choose non-toxic, sustainably produced, or recycled materials that require little energy to process
- Energy efficiency: use manufacturing processes and produce products that require less energy
- Emotionally durable design: reducing consumption and waste of resources by increasing the durability of relationships between people and products, through design
- Design for reuse and recycling: "Products, processes, and systems should be designed for performance in a commercial 'afterlife'."
- Targeted durability, not immortality, should be a design goal.
- Material diversity in multicomponent products should be minimized to promote disassembly and value retention.
- Design impact measures for total carbon footprint and life-cycle assessment for any resource used are increasingly required and available.^ Many are complex, but some give quick and accurate whole-earth estimates of impacts. One measure estimates any spending as consuming an average economic share of global energy use of per dollar and producing at the average rate of 0.57 kg of per dollar from DOE figures.
- Sustainable design standards and project design guides are also increasingly available and are vigorously being developed by a wide array of private organizations and individuals. There is also a large body of new methods emerging from the rapid development of what has become known as 'sustainability science' promoted by a wide variety of educational and governmental institutions.
- Biomimicry: "redesigning industrial systems on biological lines... enabling the constant reuse of materials in continuous closed cycles..."
- Service substitution: shifting the mode of consumption from personal ownership of products to provision of services that provide similar functions, e.g., from a private automobile to a carsharing service. Such a system promotes minimal resource use per unit of consumption.
- Renewable resource: materials should come from nearby, sustainably managed renewable sources that can be composted when their usefulness has been exhausted.
Bill of Rights for the Planet
- Insist on the right of humanity and nature to co-exist in healthy, supportive, diverse, and sustainable conditions.
- Recognize Interdependence. The elements of human design interact with and depend on the natural world, with broad and diverse implications at every scale. Expand design considerations to recognize even distant effects.
- Respect relationships between spirit and matter. Consider all aspects of human settlement including community, dwelling, industry, and trade in terms of existing and evolving connections between spiritual and material consciousness.
- Accept responsibility for the consequences of design decisions upon human well-being, the viability of natural systems, and their right to co-exist.
- Create safe objects of long-term value. Do not burden future generations with requirements for maintenance or vigilant administration of potential danger due to the careless creation of products, processes, or standards.
- Eliminate the concept of waste. Evaluate and optimize the full life-cycle of products and processes, to approach the state of natural systems in which there is no waste.
- Rely on natural energy flows. Human designs should, like the living world, derive their creative forces from perpetual solar income. Incorporating this energy efficiently and safely for responsible use.
- Understand the limitations of design. No human creation lasts forever and design does not solve all problems. Those who create and plan should practice humility in the face of nature. Treat nature as a model and mentor, not an inconvenience to be evaded or controlled.
- Seek constant improvement by the sharing of knowledge. Encourage direct and open communication between colleagues, patrons, manufacturers, and users to link long-term sustainable considerations with ethical responsibility, and re-establish the integral relationship between natural processes and human activity.
- Placing environmental and social sustainability at the core of practices and professional responsibilities
- Developing and continually improving practices, procedures, products, services, and standards for sustainable design
- Educating the building industry, clients, and the general public about the importance of sustainable design
- Working to change policies, regulations, and standards in government and business so that sustainable design will become the fully supported standard practice
- Bringing the existing built environment up to sustainable design standards.
These activities are an indication that the concept of sustainable design is being supported on a global and interprofessional scale and that the ultimate goal is to become more environmentally responsive. The world needs facilities that are more energy-efficient and that promote conservation and recycling of natural and economic resources.