the three Rs return

As long as I can remember, we've been told about the three Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. At some point we've added Repair (to extend the life of a product) and Repurpose (when it isn't suitable any more for what it was made for, use it for something else). That's all very well, but most products aren't designed with this in mind, so it's difficult to take the mantra seriously. With the focus on carbon though, we're starting to move from cradle-to-grave analysis, as a way of looking at a product's lifecycle impacts, to cradle-to-cradle analysis that is intended to encourage products to be designed never to enter landfill sites.

Buildings are given recognition under green accreditation schemes like LEED, BREEAM and Green Star for being designed so that the materials that go into them can be used for something else when the building is disassembled. Products can also be C2C certified, which means they are designed not just to be carbon neutral, but to produce zero waste: either recycled or reused endlessly, or returned to a natural, ecologically benign state. If things are designed this way, then the three Rs become a meaningful paradigm, and the goal of zero waste might just become reachable.

new lives for old products

Looking for inspiration on how to reuse products that have been discarded or reached the end of their first lives? Superuse is an online community of designers, architects and everybody else who is interested in inventive ways of recycling. Users are encouraged to register and submit their own examples.

measuring green performance can be tricky

Sustainability is about performance, not about picking the "correct" technology. No individual strategy is right for every occasion - it's a question of what moves the world forwards instead of backwards. Responding to a Popular Science ranking of America's 50 greenest cities, Alex Steffen of WorldChanging raises the interesting challenge of how to define "forwards" and "backwards", and makes a few initial suggestions:

• Instead of measuring the amount of electricity coming from renewable sources, compare energy use with GDP: who's getting most prosperous using the least energy?
• Instead of counting how many people use public transportation, measure vehicle miles traveled per capita and car ownership rates: we should be reducing the need to travel, and distance travelled.
• Instead of assessing the best buildings in a city by counting the number with green accreditation, assess building codes and what the average building is like.
• Instead of assessing how comprehensive recycling systems are and how much material they take in, consider the percentage of solid waste that still goes to landfills: we want to reduce total waste, not just increase recycling.

Unfortunately for the politicians, it's often the more mundane actions and low-profile strategies that make the biggest impact. They are also harder to measure, but I believe we'll have to try.

the road to fame

Pop rock meets tarmac. Well, not exactly the music, but the CDs. Industrial-strength recycling for an industrial juggernaut.

we'll pay a high price for the world's cheapest car

If I was in the market for new wheels, I suppose I'd be pleased that Indian car manufacturer TATA (which includes South Africa as one of its markets) is planning to release the world's cheapest car. Just as the original Volkswagen Beetle was developed to provide transportation for the masses, the new 'People's Car' is expected to be cheap enough to achieve the same objective in India. It's expected to sell for £1,200.

This is bad news: not good for the energy crunch, or carbon emissions, or urban life in general. We don't need more cars on the roads, we need fewer. And those that are on the roads must be more efficient. One of the biggest problems with vehicle emissions is that cars are so darn heavy. Most of the energy they use is to propel the car, not the people inside. I haven't seen the numbers, but at a guess I would say that if you could reduce car weight by 50%, you would probably use less fuel than the current generation of hybrids.

Enter Hyundai, whose QuarmaQ concept car uses new materials and manufacturing methods to reduce weight. If you read the details, though, you'll see that the weight reduction is a measly 60kg - the equivalent of one passenger. Hardly a big deal, but credit for trying. They have also replaced some toxic materials with more benign ones, and one QarmaQ re-uses approximately 900 PET bottles that would otherwise become landfill.

The next stage would be to replace the plastic panels with biodegradable panels: now that would be environmentally responsible. It probably wouldn't be any lighter, but it could still be greener. After all, a big part of the environmental impact of a car is not its emissions from driving, but the emissions generated in its manufacture, the space it takes up in landfill sites, and the toxic chemicals left behind. Imagine a car made from modified corn starch - if you damage a panel in a collision, just unbolt it, stick on a new one, and throw the damaged one onto the compost pile.

I am not making this up - the Mini-Bimoke uses biodegradable panels impregnated with palm tree seeds. And there's a new tyre manufacturing technology from Yokohama that enables them to make tyres from orange rinds.

compostable utensils

I can't believe it's taken this long, but I have finally eaten my first meal with biodegradable utensils, at the Stellenbosch Organic Farmers' Market today at the Stellenbosch Waldorf School. The supplier claims that compostable plates, bowls, knives, forks and spoons will degrade in ideal composting conditions within six months or less, depending on what they are made from. The cutlery is made with plastarch (PSM): modified cornstarch combined with several other biodegradable materials. The cornstarch is modified in order to obtain heat-resistant properties, making PSM one of the only bioplastics capable of withstanding high temperatures. They even feel stronger than a lot of petroleum-based disposable knives and forks that I have used.

Other products suppplied by Green Home are made from polylactic acid (PLA) or bagasse. Frankly, I am amazed that more caterers and retailers aren't using these products.

what to do with that old engine block

How to recycle cars that just won't run anymore: turn their parts into multimachines that are accurate drill presses, sanders, grinders, metal mills, wood or metal lathes, and just about any other tool you can imagine. Pat Delany has invented the ultimate high-precision, low-cost machine. And the best part? The plans are freely available online.

upcycling

We generally assume that the initial use for which something is designed is its primary use, and any opportunity to give the thing a second life by using it for another purpose is just a fortunate way to avoid sending it to the dump. Here's an idea that turns that concept on its head: a water bottle that is shaped deliberately so that it can be used like a brick in a building, by filling it with soil. One product, two uses. The designers call it the united bottle.

The Earth Architecture site has loads of other ideas and information on building with natural materials. Which brings me to the thought that while it is certainly a worthy achievement for the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center to be the first-ever LEED-platinum carbon neutral building on the planet, and for this office building to use LED lighting as the only source of artificial light, let's not forget that over the millennia, billions of people have lived in carbon neutral, zero-impact dwellings.

the last resort

No matter how efficient we get in using resources and diverting waste as inputs to various processes, I imagine there will always be some waste remaining. So maybe its not so bad that the last unused bit should just be incinerated to squeeze out whatever energy is left. Of course, burning anything to get energy from waste will emit carbon, but that impact has to be weighed up against the carbon that would be given off through generating electricity from other sources, and also against the environmental impacts of dumping the waste instead.

The real problem right now is that so much waste is toxic (when did you last separate your dud batteries from other trash?) that incineration can only safely use a few waste sources. But after writing yesterday's post about the coming recycling revolution, I started wondering if the pressure to sort waste efficiently would eventually increase the proportion of waste that would be safe to incinerate. I hope that in 10 years, we'll be using fewer toxic materials in consumer products anyway. Maybe our resource use will be so efficient (reduce, reuse, repair, repurpose - and only then recycle) that the problem will be a shortage of waste to feed the incinerators. Now that would be a good challenge to face.

earth audit: turf wars of the future

It's not just established technologies - like those relying on oil - that are facing a resource crunch as supplies decline. As reported in New Scientist [subscription required] we are mining a whole raft of minerals and ores at such a rate that even new technologies will soon be affected.

Gallium and iridium are two minerals that some analysts say may only last ten more years before they run out, but are being used in a new-generation solar cell that promises to be twice as efficient as current technologies. Gallium is also used for making LCDs, which raises serious questions about the long-term future of flat screens for computers and televisions; and for LEDs, which are hailed as the next generation of lighting that will replace compact flurorescent bulbs. And even the CFL bulbs are threatened by the supply of terbium, which could be used up by 2012.

Of course, nobody knows for sure when any mined resource will run out, but without a global storekeeper watching over earth's underground supplies, we are in danger of banking on the wrong technology to address current environmental or energy challenges. What happens if we all switch to LED lighting to reduce energy consumption, and find there's only a five-year supply of the raw materials needed to make them?

We can keep hopping from one technology to the next - or make some drastic changes to the way we consume resources, and completely revolutionise the concept of recycling. As raw materials become more scarce and costly, companies are starting to look at new ways to extract material from what has historically been treated as waste. Mine dumps are one such source. Another, believe it or not, is roadside dust. In countries like the US, where catalytic converters are in widespread use, platinum is lost through vehicle exhausts, and ends up literally everywhere that vehicles go. Platinum is also in short supply (with an otherwise promising future in fuel cells), and geologist Hazel Prichard wonders if there's a way to collect it from road-sweeping machines for recycling.

Is Hazel Prichard the bag lady of the future, wandering the streets in search of platinum? "Hey, buddy, step away from the trash can. This is my turf." The revolution is nigh.