Islands of Excellence: Time to Bridge the Gaps? A Guest Comment by Dr Richard Farr
Islands of Excellence: Time to Bridge the Gaps?
Richard Farr
Researchers in ‘green’ manufacturing sometimes encounter a great new idea, or a fantastic piece of technology that might one day contribute to a more sustainable lifestyle. Examples that I’ve seen include business practices that have slashed energy bills, and others where a company uses the waste from a neighbouring business as their raw material, to achieve what is called ‘industrial synergy’. Elsewhere, energy-efficient products are being developed, as are ‘low carbon’ manufacturing processes and recycling techniques that recover useful material from low-grade, mixed waste.
There are scores of such examples: some were reported by practitioners at the recent ICRM 2010 conference, and it was a delight to spend time with so many people who are working to protect our shared future. I think of these examples of sustainability as islands of excellence. They’re important stepping-stones on our way to a greener lifestyle… but they are still islands, and this is something of a mystery. Why do these isolated islands of excellence exist at all? If a practice really is sustainable and profitable, shouldn’t it soon be replicated, all over the world?
Unfortunately, when we look more closely, we may find that they aren’t quite as excellent as they appeared to be – or rather, that while the practice exhibited at a particular ‘island’ is the best that an individual or community might achieve, it’s a local optimisation, and therefore contributing to a sub-optimal whole. To use an example from my neighbourhood, there’s a non-profit organisation that refurbishes used domestic appliances, and sells them second-hand. This meets some important social needs, and is preferable to the present-day alternatives of landfill or material reclamation… but can’t we do better? When we examine the bigger picture, we can see that the reason this business is able to exist is because so many of us are throwing away so many appliances that could have been useful to somebody else. Many require trivial repairs, or have nothing at all wrong with them. In other words, it is the wasteful lifestyle of many people that makes this token ‘green’ project possible.
Similarly, one of our conference presenters described a system of component classification, meant to identify parts that can be removed from end-of-life products and reused. A computer-aided approach to remanufacturing and reuse is another island of excellence; it’s a very useful capability to have… but only if we can be sure of getting end-of-life products back, in sufficient quantity, on a reasonable timescale, and in a predictable condition. In the present day, with a few exceptions for very high-value equipment such as aircraft and industrial machinery, that’s just not happening.
There is a need to move beyond the islands of excellence, valuable though they have been, and start building interlinked archipelagos of excellence, where sustainable living is promoted and facilitated politically, economically, socially and technically. Instead of applauding the organisation that refurbishes scrap household appliances, we need to ask why owners find it necessary to discard products when a fault develops (or with no faults at all). We need to understand how products returns and ‘producer pays’ legislation can best be handled in the context of global trade. We need to have a means of investigating the relative environmental impact of extending the life of older machinery, compared to that of manufacturing and operating new, and we need to understand economics well enough to reward those who make, buy and use the ‘greenest’ equipment – and to provide disincentives to those who choose otherwise.
Nobody has all the answers to these problems, and while we continue to work in isolation within our own specialist areas, we can’t hope to create anything but more islands. Instead, we need to build multi-disciplinary networks, and demonstrate to legislators, entrepreneurs and citizens that facilitating and living a more eco-efficient life can still be financially viable, safe, ethical and enjoyable.
Next time you are about to build an island (and I don’t doubt that it would be an island of excellence)… scan the horizon and think about building a bridge instead.
