The environment and environmental technology

Detailed solutions and an overall perspective

Anton Trætteberg,
programme manager,
SINTEF Industrial Development

Human activity is part of the ecosystem.

In the humanist tradition, we distance human beings from nature and place them in a cultural context. Basically, culture is simply a question of distancing oneself from nature. However, like other living creatures, we cannot avoid interacting with nature every time we enter its realm. Neither human beings nor animals can avoid treading on the grass. Humanity has the right to exploit nature, but at the same time, we have a responsibility to take care of it. Nature is never in balance, and nature's own inbuilt stresses have always been the cause of both gradual and dramatic changes.

During earlier stages of history, feedback from culture to nature was limited and local in nature and did not make any significant contribution to global development stresses. This is not to say that the environment was unpolluted. In pre-industrial times, people lived in filthy local environments that we would regard today as completely unacceptable. By and large, technology has cleaned up this aspect of life. On the other hand, we have developed new types of pollution. Furthermore, the scope and nature of industrial societies have become such that the very sustainability of natural processes is threatened.

During the Middle Ages, local pollution had the most immediate effect on all our senses. Many of the most urgent environmental problems of today are developing slowly and "sneakily". The greenhouse gases themselves are invisible. We cannot use our senses to make connections between cause and effect; we need advanced scientific theories and measurements made by sensitive instruments over long periods of time. Such phenomena can be understood in theory, but are inaccessible to our intuition. We have a number of activities whose undesirable consequences are uncertain and which take effect only slowly, among them radioactive radiation, ozone layer depletion, acid rain, etc.

We recognise the North American Indians as a culture with a deep intuitive insight into ecological relationships. Such insight was obtained in the course of living closely with nature for thousands of years. Peoples which live close to nature incorporate their knowledge into myths, traditions and norms that they take for granted. Of necessity, our learning processes are quite different. If it is to be able to take wide-ranging action on a global scale, modern industrial society will have to undertake the difficult task of internalizing abstract theory. This will have to be incorporated in our thinking as the integrated theoretical intellectual construction that we know as "ecology," which exists as a branch of science and which must be developed, via discussion in the community, into a set of common norms. Our old norms are no longer capable of providing us with sufficient guidance, and with our rapid rate of development we can gain only feeble support from parallel intuitive learning via experience.

In the consciousness of many people, environmental technology has become a collective term for a group of products and processes that are capable of preventing and/or repairing obvious environmental problems caused by production and consumption. Industry faces ever more stringent standards of cleanliness, and the attitude of industry is moving from that of reluctant adaptation to active initiation.

However, the ecologists point out the necessity of regarding life as a process of interaction with its lifeless surroundings as a whole. In such a perspective, the development of environmental technology becomes a question of how all technology can be adapted to a sustainable environment. In such a situation, cleaning up and dealing with local problems here and there are necessary but not sufficient responses. We must look at the industrial and consumer system as a whole.

The figure above shows a simplified model of the techno-/ecosystem. We obtain raw materials and energy from nature and transform them via industrial processes into consumable end-products. The processes and consumption involved produce waste, some of which is recycled while some is returned to nature. In an industrial society there are many links in the value chain from raw materials to end-product, and the chain is also rich in feedback mechanisms. Within the limits of their own financial horizons, most companies at each stage try to behave decently, and innovations in environmental technology are motivated by what we can perceive within our own horizons. This can easily lead to environmental technology becoming synonymous with cleaning-up technology. At the same time, however, the environmental consequences of individual products may have effects far beyond these horizons. The invisible hand of the market does not work in such cases. So what happens? In advanced societies we attempt to deal with this situation by legislation and regulations, but the relationships can be so complex that it is difficult to identify the core of the problem, let alone legislate our way out of it.

Let us look at one example. We are all car users, and vehicle use results in scrap vehicles. Recycling is obviously a sensible course of action. A compressed car body contains a great deal more than steel, but for the most part we can either remove non-steel components using a reasonable amount of effort or allow them to return to the smelter without serious effects on steel re-use. However, a car contains a large quantity of copper wire which is expensive to remove. Copper has extremely negative effects on the usability properties of steel. So as far as the overall economics of the complete life-cycle of vehicles is concerned, it would be worthwhile to develop cars without copper. In the value chain of cars, however, there are no actors who find it worthwhile, in the context of their local economies and markets, to use anything other than copper. So we cannot expect too much of market mechanisms, but what about the law? In practice, how are we to establish institutions that enable lawmakers to perceive such details?

The detail discussed above was probably not a decisive factor in BMW's decision to study a model of vehicle distribution that would mean that cars are no longer sold, but leased to users. This is intended to ensure that all BMW cars would be returned to BMW for recycling. This would provide much greater opportunities for implementing technologies on the basis of a broadly-based system context. It would take a major step outside current norms and make radical innovations that would certainly be fairly risky in the short term. However, we must assume that BMW believes that the market would finally react positively to the environmental profile on which this concept is based.

We must thus look at details and general relationships at the same time, and one challenge will be to identify mechanisms capable of expanding the strategic horizons of the actors in the value chain. To put it in extremely simple terms, we might say that economists have found it too easy to regard technology as a black box which can simply be plugged into a socio-economic circuit. For his part, technologists have perhaps put most of their souls into developing technical solutions to problems, without considering them sufficiently in an environmental context. We need institutions in industry, politics and research in which the social sciences, ecology and technology work together.