Credible as steel
It is a tough job to sell steel on an environmental basis. Its very nature means that the environmental impact per kilogram of plastics is lower. In many applications the better physical properties of steel often cannot compensate for that. Steel is slowly losing ground to other materials and even seems to be on the retreat in traditional fields like construction steel for building and cars. An attempt to exploit the superior recyclability of steel (see 7.4) went astray when applying the life cycle principle. This is obvious; physical and chemical properties of materials cannot be changed by law. What to do to increase the environmental credibility of steel? The key word seemed to be sustainability. Its concept has three pillars: not only environment but also social progress and economic development. If it could be shown that steel is scoring well in the last two departments, it could possibly overcome intrinsic disadvantages such as its higher environmental load per kilogram (or physically equivalent load). Taco accepted this job for his graduation project. I involved myself strongly in the project because intuitively I have never liked ‘one dimensional beauty contests’. The challenge turned out to be a nightmare: how can you measure contributions to ‘social progress’ and ‘economic development’? Can some producers or production locations contribute more than others? Can the sustainability story behind the product be presented? Taco wrestled through a lot of literature and had a problem coming up with an interesting proposal. There seemed nevertheless to be potential in the concept, but the communication problem was there to stay. Even more pressing was the issue of measuring the sustainability performance; how to find a yardstick through which improvement can be measured and managed. There were lots more questions than answers! The graduation project was at a point of near collapse, Taco felt very unhappy - he had put in long hours and a lot of creativity, but had yet to reach a satisfactory result. Somewhere in his papers was the word ‘functionality’. It was decided to move away from broader sustainability thinking and take ‘functionality’ and the ‘Impact of Functionality Realization’ as the core of the approach. Impact was split into direct impact (the traditional environmental impact) and indirect impact (changing - in particular adding -functionality through using a material like steel). The latter is relevant because environmental comparisons are usually made assuming constant functionality.
国际会议
The 4th International Conference on Waste Management and Technology(第四届固体废物管理与技术国际会议)
北京
英文
76
2009-11-28（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）