You might think that over the last couple of decades
production patterns and consumption choices
have become much more sustainable.
Take for instance today’s LEDs
which use 10 times less energy than old incandescent light bulbs,
or flatscreen TVs which are much more efficient
than the clunky cathode ray tube
you might know from your grandparents house.
Or cars, which are now more aerodynamic, lightweight,
and have more fuel efficient engines than back in the 1990s.
There are many more examples of products
that have become more efficient in recent years.
With all these innovations,
surely the environmental impact of our consumption has gone down, right?
The answer is no.
Despite all these improvements, our consumption and production patterns
have overall become less sustainable.
But, why?
The answer is complex,
but has a lot to do with what is called the rebound effect.
Basically what happens is that an increase in technology efficiency
may drive an increase in consumption.
Improvements in production patterns
have made many products like cars and TVs
more efficient, and often cheaper, too.
And in response to this, we have been consuming them a lot more.
Instead of one lightbulb,
we are now using multiple LEDs and in more places.
New TVs are becoming larger and larger,
and making cars more fuel efficient
allows people to trade in their smaller cars for larger SUV type models
and made the smaller ones affordable
for people who previously did not even own a car.
As a result, roads are becoming more congested,
making our commute even less sustainable.
A rebound effect like this wipes out all of our gains in the ecoefficiency.
Hi, my name is Sami Kara
and I’m a Professor of Sustainable Manufacturing and Lifecycle Engineering
at the University of New South Wales
School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering.
Sustainable development must consider environment,
society, and economy, all at the same time.
The well known IPAT equation supports an analysis of the challenge,
that central driving force to the development
of sustainable production and consumption patterns.
It presents the total environment impact,
I, as a function of the central drivers
represented by human population P, human affluence A,
which can be interpreted here as a shorthand for consumption,
and the technology factor T,
which can equate to production patterns.
To get an idea of how challenging it is
to ensure amount of sustainability, consider the following conditionals
for sustainable climate change impact I in 2050.
According to the IPCC we need to reduce
our greenhouse gas emission in 2050 by up to 70% of the current level
to have a reasonable probability to stay below the 2 degree limit
for global temperature rise set by the Paris Agreement.
Meanwhile, the global production P is predicted to increase
by a factor of 1.4 to reach 9.75 billion in 2050.
Average affluence A
and therefore consumption is expected to increase worldwide,
thanks to the economic growth of developing nations
and here a factor of 2 seems to be a conservative estimate.
To achieve a 70% reduction in impact I,
the technology factor T has to compensate the increase in P and A,
so the T needs to decreased by a factor close to 10.
It is important to remember
that the factors in the IPAT equation are not independent.
Consumption and production, or affluence and technology,
often go hand in hand
and as the examples of LEDs, TVs and cars illustrate,
they can create a rebound effect
in which major improvements in efficiency
are outweighed by major increase in consumption.
SDG-12 specifically addresses responsible consumption and production
and aims to ensure sustainable consumption production patterns
with some of the targets concerning sustainable management
in addition to use of natural resources, food waste reduction
through prevention, reduction, recycling and reuse,
environmentally sound management of chemicals,
dissemination of information about company practices
that supports sustainable procurement and consumption.
Irrespective of the product or the industry
an important tool in understanding responsible consumption
and production is life cycle thinking,
because it’s not enough to develop solutions
for environmentally friendly end of life managing of products
such as recycling.
Products provide functions by using background and foreground systems.
Foreground systems are those systems
specific for the operation of the product along its lifecycle.
In contrast, background systems are generated.
They support the operation of the program system
but are not specific to that product.
Let’s take electric cars as an example.
In the foreground system there is the entire lifecycle of electric vehicles
from materials in manufacturing used to end of life.
In the background system there is energy, electricity
or other form used throughout the electric vehicle’s lifecycle.
Although, energy is critical
for the operation of the electric vehicle foreground system,
this is also generic and used by other product systems
such as TVs and cars specifically.
When we think about sustainability of electric vehicles
we need to consider not only the foreground system
but also how the foreground system
interacts with the background system.
In the electric vehicle case the foreground system
can have a lower footprint, however,
if the supporting background system relies heavily on fossil fuels,
then the environmental impact shifts from tailpipe emissions
to upstream energy supply.
Similar examples can be found in other product systems
as simple as beverages in plastic bottles such as Coke and Pepsi.
In this case, the main attention has always been
on the beverage container and how they should be treated.
In reality, the environmental impact hotspot
is in the forming of the corn syrup used
for making the beverage which is in the background system.
But a lifecycle perspective is not enough to achieve SDG-12
because it ultimately assumes that consumption
and production are independent, which is rarely the case.
Remember the rebound effect?
A strong increase in the ecoefficiency of the products and technologies
is clearly needed to ensure a sustainable level of environmental impact.
But examples like LEDs, TVs and cars
illustrate that and focus on ecoefficiency alone is not enough
to ensure sustainable consumption and production in the future.
There is a need to analyze the overall impact
in terms of environmental impact for a product or technology
and related to the share of the operating space
that this product or technology can claim.
Considering the size of its market to ensure
that the improvements lead to the solution
that are not just more sustainable than what they replace,
but sustainable in absolute terms.
Solutions then likely to develop products never to be discarded
or to provide the service without having to own the product.
The point is this; technology alone
cannot achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
without considering society and its ever increasing affluence.
As the rebound effect shows,
we are only need environmentally friendly production patterns,
we also need to rethink consumption.
So, the buck stops with you.
Think about your own consumption patterns.
Try to gain a lifecycle perspective and ask yourself,
what are the environmental impact hot spots in the product
and services you consume?
Are there better alternatives to these products?
And most important, do you really need them?