How difficult is it to assess the environmental impact of products?

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If I understood that correctly, LCA is used to compare production variants of specific products and to evaluate the environmental impact. Can you describe the course of LCA with a recent example?

Vladimír: As for projects related to design, we're currently processing a database of environmental properties of materials for design as such. We are collaborating on the project with my doctoral student, a designer from the Faculty of Architecture at the Czech Technical University, Jan Kulhánek. We’ve created a database of materials that can be used in the field of packaging and we record data on their sustainability. This is a larger and more general project because many designers ask us what they should make their products from – whether this or that material is better. We also cooperate with matériO Prague but, in that case, we’ve limited the range of materials to just packaging. Usually, we work on specific projects for certain companies. Whether it's beer or yogurt packaging, or the food supplement packaging materials that I happen to have on my desk at the moment. Recently, companies have been trying to invent ecological or, at least, greener production systems. It's a pretty hot topic now. And we compare different variants and combinations of those materials. Recently, we’ve been paying a lot of attention to food packaging or packaging systems for distribution and logistics. I think it's a promising sector and it definitely has a future.

How do you plan to make the database of packaging materials available? Is it possible to monitor the progress of the project?

Vladimír: We are in the process of preparing a website.

Imagine a designer/student who is trying to create their own company, their own product and would like to adapt its production and choice of materials so that the production is sustainable. Ideally, how should they proceed?

Vladimír: I know that in America and other more developed countries, some LCA experts are already part of the design studio. It then depends on the size of the company and its financial capabilities whether they can afford one extra specialist. So far, in my experience, Czech companies don’t usually have the financial resources for it, and it doesn't even have to be a small start-up design group, but also large companies. Therefore, they tend to look for external experts who make a living from LCA. In that case, I recommend coming up with a basic concept of production or what you want to do, and the person in question can roughly estimate it for you and basically point you in the direction that the design should take according to the LCA. At that point, the LCA will not tell you the exact value of those parameters but whether it is better to optimise the technology or supply chain of the material. Of course, it also has some limits. For example, when it comes to plastics, there is still the question of what plastics do in nature. We can't quantify that with LCA.

At our faculty, for example, microplastic tests and related toxicity tests are performed but it’s still not possible to say clearly what this will actually cause and how serious it is when you leave a PET bottle in the forest. Both ideological and methodological problems arise there. An LCA still cannot quantify how to determine what something means and how serious it is, even if it’s being worked on. On the contrary, if we talk about the emission of greenhouse gases or specific toxic substances, we can quantify them. One of the things we come across the most is the use of paper vs. plastic. Plastic bothers us in the way it consumes raw materials but production is quite finely-tuned and usually doesn’t produce much in the way of emissions (unless it’s PVC or some problem plastics). Ordinary plastics usually don't have such a significant negative impact in production, they’re quite functional, but the problem is waste management, which we haven’t fully grasped yet. It's probably a good thing that we’re preventing this and trying to reduce plastics in waste but replacing them with paper at all costs doesn't sound so good to me. Because why was plastic packaging created? Well, because 50 years ago, we wanted to protect forests. There was a search for packaging that could handle it and it resulted in the use of plastics. We operate in such pendulums - from extreme to extreme. At this particular moment, reusable materials are the solution, and it actually can be plastics. We can reuse them quite well.

How costly is the LCA analysis process? If it's a smaller production.

Vladimír: Recently, a colleague from the Faculty of Architecture came up with a certain project and, because I found the project interesting and fun, we're discussing it and there’s no need to deal with money at the moment. It depends on who you find and establish cooperation with. Needless to say, a detailed LCA study is expensive. We're talking about tens or hundreds of thousands of Czech crowns, depending on the complexity. On the other hand, it's not that much more expensive than going to a structural engineer to make an assessment. That would be a similar amount. If, as an architect, you need someone special, you’ll also look for an expert and it’ll be expensive. From this point of view, it doesn’t seem that expensive to me.

On the other hand, I can imagine someone coming to me and saying that they have a product that’s made up of 5 grams of polypropylene, 3 grams of polyethylene and has a piece of paper in it, and all of that can be modelled on general data that I have from previous work. Then it's a matter of hours. When you multiply it by some average hourly wage, you get a fairly decent amount. At the moment, for example, we’ve been doing a number of school projects for small and medium-sized businesses in the form of innovation vouchers, which were financed with a grant. Or we're working on small assessments, e.g. for Pilsen breweries. We've done something for them before and recently I developed a kind of packaging materials database for them. That took me around two days.

I noticed the Pilsen brewery and its optimisation of packaging material a few weeks ago. So that's your work?

Vladimír: They've just removed the aluminium part because we calculated that it amounts to quite a lot.

That's great and really interesting. How far are we from the possibility that such an LCA could become an established standard, at least partially funded by the state? I understand that some countries use analysis to calculate their impact in general.

Vladimir: Which country do you have in mind? (laughter) Well, the problem is that the state, basically any of them, but definitely ours, pushes economic advantages for certain interest groups. It's in the state's interest to generate a lot of production (because that makes a lot of money for the state), sell a lot (because that generates taxes) and finally, when there’s a lot of waste, the state also earns more because you need to pay for some services and tax is paid on those, too - regardless of the fact that landfill and waste management as such is big business. There's really a lot of money to be made there. And that is in the state's, or the state leadership's, interest and they will not introduce measures to reduce waste. So, it's not yet well understood in our country that sustainability is really about economic settings. And unfortunately, we're still very far from thinking about the circular economy and any state funding. As technologists, we are able to create recycling technologies to remove waste materials but it doesn't really pay off economically. Because what’s the difference in value between a clean brook and a dirty brook for the state? Nothing. People don’t know how to appreciate the quality of the environment. So, from the point of view of the classic economy, money for cleaning up the brook is wasted money. But raising the value of the environment is, in fact, well-invested money.

Unfortunately, it's not generally perceived that way. Our state cannot evaluate it economically. And as soon as it comes to certain measures, the state doesn't latch on to them. We touched on this with Mattoni and the PET bottle deposits. I'm not saying that deposits are the best solution, that it would be such a great help - again, it has a commercial underpinning. The principle that the company providing the service - bottled water - doesn't want the packaging material to go directly to waste management after consuming the contents, but tries to get this material back to them, is a reasonable consideration. But the state opposed it. The waste companies opposed it. It was simply taboo to think that something would be deposited in our country. Because they would run out of the waste they count on, which is a business problem for them. In the field of plastic recycling, all yellow containers and all plastic handling are supported through PET bottles. These have a value that can be obtained on the market and, if the consumer throws the bottle away, and the manufacturer who placed it on the market no longer has access to it, it falls directly into the hands of waste management. They suddenly have something they don't want to lose.

Therefore, the ministry said they could not support the deposits on plastics, because suddenly there would be no money to remove other plastics. At that point, it becomes a political decision that I can actually respect, at that point it's probably rational. They argue that, otherwise, plastics would be everywhere. So, isn't it better to leave things as they are? In the short term, probably yes, but it would need some further strategy and development of the industry and in a different way. But there will always be a line of business like those landfillers who won’t support it and will present arguments against it. That’s very easy to predict.

So, it seems such an interesting aspect to me. Because I’m independent, impartial in this case, I find the circular economy and the fact that the materials should stay in the system as long as possible interesting. I was originally a water management expert, so packing drinking water seems absurd to me. In general, with some exceptions, we have high quality, drinkable tap water in the Czech Republic. So, we’re not really in agreement on that with the manufacturers (Mattoni). Therefore, the solution would be to design things without waste, or with waste that can be reused - and that's why I started designing in the first place, because I realised that many products and services can be designed differently. In the case of water, the design doesn't affect that much - that’s the water manager’s job. What I find important is the rejection of composites.

According to the concept of a circular economy, its priority is to prevent the generation of unnecessary waste. However, if any waste has already been generated, it’s important to design and gradually move to take-back systems, as you mentioned. If we talk about composites, part of the texts on this platform are devoted to them - it emphasises that when creating combined materials, it is essential to think about choosing the right combination of components (fillers and binders) in terms of further use and recycling or decomposition. Unfortunately, the ill-advised combination of such elements often leads to problems when, for example, hard-to-decompose or synthetic material is combined with natural material. This can significantly affect the possibilities of their separation during recycling or prevent their degradability in the soil.

Vladimír: At this stage, it's really necessary for developers to consider in the initial design phase what will be the consequences of materials used at the end of their useful phase. Many combinations of materials are created primarily with regard to their technical properties. This is, of course, crucial but it is the growing demand for recycling that can enter the product design phase with new impetus. Sometimes, we want to make products from natural materials at all costs but, in order to meet the technical requirements, we need to join them with epoxy resin and this will significantly reduce the subsequent use of those natural materials. There’s a lot of work to be done here.

In terms of eliminating negative environmental impacts in general, there is a Climate Change study programme in Denmark, for example. In one of their practical courses (Climate Solution), students help assigned companies and enterprises reduce their carbon footprint. When we look at the issue from a design perspective, you mentioned in one of your interviews that product transport/distribution does not represent such a large percentage of negative environmental impact. As an example, you mentioned manhole covers (the raw material is produced in Australia, then it travels to Hamburg and later to the Czech Republic). Energy has a far greater share in the negative impact of the product. I know some beginner designers who try to import the necessary material from neighbouring countries at least, if it's not possible to get it locally. Is there any other general advice or established procedure that a designer can follow?

Vladimír: Of course, it's good to reduce and manage traffic, no doubt about that. But from the LCA's point of view, it doesn't play such a big role. So far, apart from some special projects, it hasn't proved to be dominant. Even when products or materials are transported almost all over the world. However, it depends on the kind of product and its lifespan. If we are talking about some cast iron element that will be here for fifty years, it turns out that if you can conveniently produce it somewhere else, the difference in transport doesn't have such a significant role, even though the product is heavy. Energy and material are key. What is the element/product made of and how energy-intensive is production? What about power engineering?

For example, aluminium, which we measured for the automotive industry. When produced somewhere in the Middle East, it has almost twice the carbon footprint of aluminium produced in Europe. This may be due to the technologies used as well as due to power engineering. The question of competitive advantage is also interesting. It's great that companies are starting to monitor the situation and are putting more emphasis on greener suppliers. And we can help them with that. We are looking for possible lower negative impacts. And that's the domino effect. That’s why companies are beginning to find out what impact their production has, because these results become a tool of competitiveness. Which is a fantastic change for environmental protection. We didn’t have that at all five or ten years ago. The environmentalists were seen as the ones who tied themselves to the trees in Šumava and they were regarded as an obstacle. But the situation is really changing and companies can consider nature conservation an advantage. If you can apply some measures in the company that will help protect nature, it can help the business. At that point, it becomes advantageous for the designer and the product ecologist.

In the context of interdisciplinary networking of designers and, as you say, product ecologists or scientists in general, groups and institutions (e.g. Neri Oxman and her Mediated Matter team at MIT) are formed abroad that then link these fields. Different types of such collaboration are also an important part of design studies abroad (e.g. in the United Kingdom or the Netherlands) and I see great potential in the fight for a better/greener future. For example, Neri Oxman argues that in the classic process of developing and exploring things, disciplines such as art, science, design and engineering meet at a crossroads: art expresses, science researches, engineering invents and design communicates. What role do you think design could play alongside science?

Vladimír: I admit that we’re also struggling with this question. Of course, it's about people but this question is about institutional support for such an interdisciplinary system. I see that there’s a problem. We’re a chemical-technological school and, so far, LCA has been perceived as something strange that doesn’t belong here. But we have more projects lately and there’s more visible interest as well as some impact. The size and seriousness of the topic is starting to become obvious. Grants and support between universities don't work very well yet, I see a problem in that, too. But it takes time. It's the same with environmental protection in general. Thirty years ago, we were completely different. The things we deal with today have become run-of-the-mill and automatic. Back then, they were perceived as taboo or nonsense. For instance, waste separation. Not that I support the waste separation that’s been set up in our country but, twenty years ago, people said it was crazy and that no one would separate, and behold, they are separating waste now. These things take some time...