Grade 2 Industrial Design Engineering TU Delft summary Sustainable Impact (IOB3-5-22/23). A brief summary of the reader "SUSTAINABLE
DESIGN FROM VISION TO ACTION 2023 Edition".
Sustainable Impact
2023-2024
Chapter 1 – Sustainable Development Goals
“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future
generations to meet their own needs.”
Earth Overshoot Day, the day when humanity has exhausted nature’s budget for the year.
A more detailed definition of sustainability is the “Triple Bottom Line”. It says that organizations should measure
sustainability by their environmental, social, and economic impacts (or, People, Planet, and Prosperity).
Solutions that benefit the planet as well as the economy are considered “viable”.
Benefting both people and the planet is “bearable”: it always requires external fnancial support,
but it improves lives and sustains the planet.
Benefting both people and prosperity is “equitable”: it helps rebalance society.
The UN Sustainable Development Goals (“UN SDGs”) are considered the most encompassing
vision of what global sustainability means.
1. No poverty: End poverty in all forms and dimensions by 2030.
2. Zero hunger: End all forms of extreme hunger and malnutrition by 2030.
3. Good health and well-being: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.
4. Quality education: Inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all. Education
is a key to escaping poverty.
5. Gender equality: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.
6. Clean water and sanitation: Ensure access to water and sanitation for all.
7. Affordable and clean energy: Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy.
8. Decent work and economic growth: Promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment and
decent work for all.
9. Industry, innovation, and infrastructure: Build resilient infrastructure, promote sustainable industrialization and
foster innovation.
10. Reduced inequalities: Reducing inequalities in income as well as those based on age, sex, disability, race,
ethnicity, origin, religion or economic or other status within a country.
11. Sustainable cities and communities: Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.
12. Responsible consumption and production: Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.
13. Climate action: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.
14. Life below water: Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources.
15. Life on land: Sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, halt and reverse land degradation, halt
biodiversity loss.
16. Peace, justice and strong institutions: Promote just, peaceful, and inclusive societies.
17. Partnerships for the goals: Revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development.
The SDG compass was developed to help business (and designers) to define priorities and set goals that align with the
SDGs. This can be done in three steps: defining priorities, setting goals, and integrating:
1. Defining priotities
- Overall
- Raw materials & production
- Distribution & retail
- Use & reuse
- Recovery & disposal
2. Setting Goals
3. Integrating
- Sustainability must be integrated into the core business and design process.
The SDGs are used to identify new (green) growth opportunities and/or to lower companies’ risk profiles.
Points of critique on the SDGs:
- The sheer number of socio-economic goals (14 in total) can result in these being perceived as more important
than the planetary goals (three in total, numbers 13, 14 and 15).
- The SDGs perpetuate the idea that economic growth and technological innovation are needed for
sustainability, for instance through SDG 8 and 9.
Maureen Kint
1
, Sustainable Impact
2023-2024
Chapter 2 – Planetary Boundaries
How do these Earth system processes stabilize or disrupt ecosystems?
- Climate change
- Freshwater change
- Stratospheric ozone
- Atmospheric aerosol loading
- Ocean acidification
- Biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus)
- Novel entities
- Land-system change
- Biosphere Integrity
It is important to realize how interlinked all the Earth system processes
are. This means that we do not have the luxury to concentrate our efforts
on any one of them in isolation from the others.
Another thing to keep in mind is that you shouldn’t compare the red bars
with each other.
“Core boundaries”: climate change and biosphere integrity. They are core because they “have the potential to drive the
Earth System into a new state should they be substantially and persistently transgressed”.
Climate change and biosphere integrity are however on a different level – they are crucial to Earth system functioning.
Responding to climate change and other boundaries involves two possible approaches:
- Mitigation is reducing and stabilizing impacts.
- Adaptation is changing infrastructure or behavior to adapt to changes already in the pipeline.
The ‘biosphere’ SDG targets are included in the Planetary Boundaries.
The wedding cake figure is a plea to give more weight to the biosphere targets in the SDGs,
which currently seem to be relatively underrepresented, compared to the many societal
and economic goals.
Critiques on the planetary boundaries model:
- The possibility that the boundaries may be misused by policymakers to “justify
prolonged degradation of the environment up to the point of no return.”
- The model is expert-driven and technocratic.
- The model lacks attention for basic human needs and values. (This is the reason why they developed the
‘doughnut’ framework.)
The “Doughnut Economics” framework of sustainability targets, combines planetary boundaries as an environmental
outer limit (ceiling) with a social inner limit (foundation) of basic human needs and values. It says that industry and society
must not overshoot the nine Planetary Boundaries, but at the same time must not fall short of the twelve social targets of
the UN SDGs.
Maureen Kint
2
, Sustainable Impact
2023-2024
Chapter 3 – Ecodesign
Ecodesign is a sustainable design approach with the explicit goal of minimizing the environmental impact of existing and
newly developed products along their entire life cycle. The core concept is eco-efficiency: maximizing the economic value
of a product while minimizing its potential negative environmental impact.
The idea of using a product lifecycle as the basis for environmental assessment comes from the theory of Industrial
Metabolism. The metabolism of industry is defined as the whole integrated collection of physical processes that convert
raw materials and energy, plus labor, into finished products and wastes in a (more or less) steady-state condition. Robert
Ayres uses the term ‘metabolism’ because of the remarkable parallels between biological and industrial activities, “both
are materials processing systems driven by a flow of free energy”.
Mapping the product lifecycle and its inputs and outputs in this way is the starting point for quantitative assessments like
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) but it can also be used to do a qualitative assessment.
The ecodesign strategy wheel is a tool that helps you consider all stages in a product’s lifecycle. It can be used in different
ways, for instance to:
- Suggest ecodesign strategies for ideation.
- Assess a product on its environmental merits, and identify improvement options.
- Compare a product before and after redesign to understand how its sustainability profile has changed.
The better a product meets the strategy (or list of sub-strategies), the higher the score, with the best scores marked on the
outer ring of the wheel and the worst scores close to the center. As all scores are based on educated guesses, and are not
calculated, the strategy wheel cannot be used to determine the actual ecological impact of a product.
The Ecodesign Strategy Wheel comes with a
few drawbacks and warnings:
- There will be trade-offs.
- Assessing a product with
educated guesses is not easy.
- The wheel was developed with
consumer durables in mind.
- The wheel has a bias towards
environmental sustainability.
- The first question you should
always ask before starting with
the Ecodesign Strategy Wheel is:
do we really need this product?
How could we make users happy
with less stuff?
Maureen Kint
3
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