by Adelheid Fischer

Making an ecologically friendly purchasing decision often means navigating a thicket of thorny choices. Take something as simple as buying a Christmas tree. Real trees seem like the “natural” choice. But are they actually the more environmentally benign alternative?

Consider the wild habitat that has been cleared to make way for tree plantations. Don’t forget the fertilizer, pesticide, and water needed to raise saplings to maturity. All this for holiday cheer that lasts only a couple of weeks.

On the other hand, artificial trees can be reused for years. But fake trees are made of petroleum-based polyvinyl chloride. Many are shipped from polluting factories in China and other faraway places. Worn out after several seasons, most end up pitched into landfills where they are slow to degrade. At least real trees can be chipped and composted.

So what’s better, balsam or plastic?

Philip White wants to know. Making these and other determinations has been the focus of his research for the past 15 years. White is an assistant professor of industrial design at Arizona State University. He is co-director of the InnovationSpace program. White also is co-author of the newly revised Okala guide to ecological product design, published by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) in spring 2007.

White wants to dispel confusion for consumers by appealing directly to the people who design the products they buy. Okala serves as a primer for eco-conscious designers. The title is derived from the Hopi Indian word oqala, meaning “life-sustaining energy.” The publication introduces readers to everything from the ecological state of the world to ecodesign business planning and green marketing.

“Okala helps designers understand the implications of their decisions for the natural environment and, in doing so, the future of human society,” White says.

Doing right by the planet is no small concern for the people who create the toasters, cell phones, automobiles, and medical equipment that we use every day. The practice of sustainability is complicated. Product designers must juggle a mind-boggling array of variables to create even the simplest products. Many of these products are manufactured in quantities numbering in the million. As a result, even seemingly benign products can have enormous downsides for the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the soils we cultivate.

White’s contribution to the Okala guide is unique. He created a set of tools and strategies that can be used to carry out a process known as life-cycle assessment (LCA). LCAs first emerged in the 1980s. People wanted greener alternatives to packaging and such products as disposable diapers. However, in order to substantiate their claims, green manufacturers needed to back up assertions with verifiable evidence. And so the new field of ecological accounting was born. It’s an arena in which White has become an internationally recognized expert.

The ASU researcher first became interested in quantifying design sustainability in 1990. He was working in the Netherlands at the time as a product designer for Philips Electronics, the largest electronics manufacturer outside of Asia. White combined his engineering background with a passion for ecodesign that he explored in graduate school at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. He was the logical choice to spearhead the creation of new ecodesign guidelines for Philips’s design division.

White returned to the United States in 1997 to start his own consulting firm. In 2002, he teamed with two colleagues to write the Okala guide. He took on the daunting challenge of tabulating a complex new set of ecological measurements known as the Okala Impact Factors.

White wanted a list that would be useful to designers. To gather information, he polled product designers. He asked them to name the materials and processes they most commonly specified in their designs.

In the newly revised edition of the Okala guide, White expanded the list from 144 to 248 products and processes. The tally includes a wide range of materials such as granite, carbon fiber, tungsten, and red cedar wood. It also lists manufacturing processes such as injection molding, thermoforming, and film-blow extrusion.

White’s process for tabulating impacts incorporates a scientific assessment method developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It also includes an LCA protocol outlined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), a nongovernmental entity that develops global standards for technical matters.

The Okala Impact Factors take a holistic, cradle-to-grave approach to ecological assessments. For example, determining the ecological fallout from the use of plastic is difficult. It involves calculating the depletion rate of fossil fuel that is pumped from the ground and the emissions from the oil-extraction and refinery process. Add to that the ecological costs of emissions from the manufacture of a plastic product. And don’t forget its transportation from factory to store shelves and ultimately to municipal landfills.

To get data, White plumbed international sources. He sifted through information from the U.S. Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Swiss environmental agency BUWAL (Bundesamt für Umwelt, Wald und Landschaft). These organizations provided reliable numbers for individual impacts. For example, they listed the amount of carbon dioxide released by the processing of a ton of steel or the amount of toxic dioxin produced in the incineration of a pound of paper.

White put the numbers to work. He calculated the impacts based on their contribution to 10 categories of environmental problems and human health hazards. The categories were acid rain, ecotoxicity, depletion of fossil fuels, the ozone layer, global climate change, human cancers, respiratory problems, toxicity, photochemical smog, and water eutrophication. Each material and process was given an overall environmental rating, or impact factor.

“One of the beautiful things about this method is that it consistently treats complex data to deliver results that are not based on assumptions or intuition,” White explains. For example, recycled plastics are more environmentally benign than virgin plastic largely because refining the raw petroleum to create plastic creates more emissions than the recycling process. Precious metals have extremely high impacts across the board. Transportation by rail and water have the lowest values. Air transport is the most damaging.

At ASU, White’s industrial design students have learned a valuable lesson while studying the Okala method. Just because some materials are found everywhere doesn’t mean they’re environmentally benign. Printed circuit boards are one example. They operate a wide range of electronic products, from cell phones to iPods. But circuit boards contain an array of dangerous materials.

Even so-called natural products can have enormous hidden costs. Think about people who suffer from extreme sensitivity to certain chemicals. Advocates of healthy homes for these people have long recommended using carpets and furniture coverings made of wool. After crunching the numbers, however, White found that wool has high impact ratings. It turns out, he says, that sheep manure produces large amounts of methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas.

Sometimes less-polluting substitutes can themselves have surprising environmental downsides. For example, there is new European legislation known as the Restrictions on Hazardous Substances (ROHS). The laws ban a host of toxic and bioaccumulative materials.

The ROHS regulations have prompted electronics manufacturers in Europe and Japan to switch from poisonous lead to tin for soldering wiring in circuitry. But extracting tin from its rock matrix is far more energy intensive than processing lead. It releases greater amounts of carbon dioxide. Nonetheless, the tin received a lower Okala value. The extreme toxicity of lead trumped the additional global warming gases from tin.

Even after years of eco-sleuthing, White still can be thwarted in his data gathering. Sometimes the most common materials present the biggest obstacles. For example, getting inventory data on detergents used in laundry and dishwashing was extremely difficult. Most formulas are proprietary secrets.

Another data-poor material is bamboo. Bamboo is hailed by many environmentalists as a green building material. However, White has not been able to verify this claim. Reliable figures on the inputs used to grow the plant, such as water, fertilizer and pesticides, are unavailable.

The Okala Impact Factors are subject to ongoing revision as new data are released or refinements in methodologies are made.

Waste disposal is a convenient example. In most higher-income countries, solid waste is either landfilled in well-lined pits or incinerated in emissions-controlled furnaces. But throughout the low-income world, trash routinely is tossed into unprotected ravines or burned in the open air.

White points to an alarming absence of information on the fallout from the uncontained burning of materials such as plastics and electronics components. People in low-income countries consume and discard products that emit hazardous chemicals when burned. Future Okala factors will be revised once the data are collected.

The ASU professor says that the next generation of LCAs also should be tweaked to better reflect regional and local impacts. For example, corn-based bioplastics have different environment effects depending on whether the water-intensive corn crop was grown in Iowa or the Arizona desert. Materials processed in China have bigger downsides as well. The coal used to power factories there emits far more toxic substances, such as mercury, than power plants in higher-income countries.

“My goal is to provide designers with objective information that they can apply in the design of more responsible systems,” White says. “Occasionally, however, the data may not be as complete as they could be. For me it’s more important to give designers something, rather than have them rely on intuition alone.”

In the future, White says the LCAs may be used to help consumers as well as designers make more ecofriendly decisions. He dreams of a day when all products are labeled with objective metrics of their impacts such as the Okala impact factors.

They will be difficult to implement. “But science-based ecolabels would help people choose among products,” White adds. “Even if only a fourth of the U.S. population bought in accordance with these ecolabels, which research indicates would likely be the response, it would force the market to switch over to more environmentally friendly systems. It would trigger an urgently needed transformation.”

ASU research on ecologically friendly design is supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Whirlpool Corporation, and Eastman Chemical Corporation. For more information, contact Philip White, Industrial Design Department, College of Design, 480.727.6719. Send email to Philip.White.1@asu.edu Visit InnovationSpace at http://innovationspace.asu.edu/