Fluck emphasises the importance of context in assessing each improvement in sustainability; to avoid chasing rabbits while missing the elephants. There is surely no better illustration of this than flying Maxi-sized yachts around the world… Remember these images the next time you read about an America’s Cup team having meat-free Fridays. For the last Cup in New Zealand every challenger flew one or more of their AC75s out to New Zealand – this (left) is Luna Rossa 2 going into the Antonov which remains the ubiquitous tool for shifting large yachts quickly. Russia’s national airline Aeroflot once had a monopoly in this arena, their own Whitbread challenger Pepsi Fazisi seen (above) being unloaded in the UK in 1989. The Whitbread 60 Silk Cut was also flown up from builders McConaghy’s in Sydney in 1997 to reduce downtime. It’s all going the right way, but avoid glass houses. And please spare us some of the pious PR
because these ideas obviously seem to be good and just because it is intuitive and easy to immediately imagine the reduced emis- sions and the R&D labs producing exciting innovations, these products do not auto- matically make much – if any – positive impact on the planet and/or the climate. As so often in life (as Donald Trump
showed us strikingly), the obvious and easy idea is not always actually the best. Let me give you an example… Flax fibre – that is a really ‘green’ prod-
uct, right? It comes from nature, grows in the forest and if you throw it away at the end of its use it is supposed to rot back into soil. Hence it is carbon neutral too. The perfect ‘green’ product. Well, it is not that easy. So, for this
example, let us do a thought experiment. Assume we want to build a sustainable sail and we decide to use flax fibres. Unfortu- nately these fibres are not as strong as the materials we usually use and at the end we find that 20% of flax is the best we can do in the sail. So ‘OK’, we say, ‘that’s already a good start. Not perfect yet, but you have to start somewhere, right?’ And, yes, you have to start the develop-
ment somewhere and that in itself is good. But to know if your 20% flax sail actually made a positive impact you need to look at the big picture. What is the weight of your new 20% flax sail compared to the
original version? If your new sail is 20% heavier than the original, then you have done an interesting R&D project and hopefully learnt for the next round of development. But despite your good inten- tions you have not done much good for the planet. After all you have merely added 20% of flax fibres with 20% more pro- duction, transport and disposal impact, while the original amount of polyester, UHMW, Aramid and resin has not (much) decreased. With this the environmental impact of
your flax sail has most likely not decreased. Instead, it has probably gone up, as now you need to produce that flax in addition to what you previously needed. But why did I write ‘most likely’ and
‘probably’? To get definite answers a quick off-the-cuff analysis does not suffice. We have not yet looked at the real big picture. For real answers one must also assess
how and where the flax fibres are pro- duced. Questions like deforestation, the use and production of fertiliser, the energy consumption of the fibre factory and the tractor ploughing the field, pollution during the transformation of a flax plant into a fibre bundle, transport emissions, and so on. These must all enter the analysis. If you account for all this, how much ‘greener’ is flax than original materials? The topic quickly becomes very complex.
All in vain – NO! So what should we do? Is all this sustain- ability talk just fluffy greenwashing? Is the world simply too complex to do anything good at all? No, certainly not. It is imperative to change the way we
produce goods, use them and dispose of them. We need to reduce our impact. And we need to continue the R&D and carry on supporting promising new ideas (for example, alternative fibres) that cannot yet make the big impact but maybe will soon. Linking back to the previous examples,
do not get me wrong: flax fibre is great and it can be a good substitute. But we need to look at the big picture and improve the whole product in its entirety! We need to design ‘green’ and think holistically. Here, and in general for sustainable
product design and buying decisions, Peter Drucker’s business principle is helpful: ‘If you can’t measure it you can’t improve it.’ Or flipped around: if you want to improve it, you need to measure what you do first. If we really want to make the biggest
possible positive impact and not just fudge around the edges, it is imperative to follow this approach and start measuring the emissions linked to the products we con- sume and the impact of the buying or design decisions we make. Intuition alone will not be a reliable guide, because the system at hand (the
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