ELSI: Cross-Domain Effects Part 2 (continued)

Where This Fits

This unit concludes the cross-domain series, focusing on Harmony parameters in detail: equity, justice, inclusion, and access. These are the most human-centered measurements in SiD, connecting the framework to lived experience.

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For food self-sufficiency, we determined that its degree of self-sufficiency was to provide the essential need for basic nutrient intake for all its inhabitants in case of total disconnect from the rest of society for a period of at least 3 weeks. Self-Governance This is the ability of agents within a system to determine their own actions, especially concerning the basic resources that make up its self-sufficiency set.

For example, the ability of a town’s local population to be able to make their own decisions concerning their water supply, power, food production, etcetera. For a company, this may relate to employees having the authority to make their own working environment workable, and to have a say in the basic resources and parameters of production. Self-governance has a strong relation with Harmony’s ‘Power balance’ and ‘Equity’ parameters.

Self-Governance focusses on forces of control from outside that may be acting on the system. The parameters inside Harmony focus on the interrelations of the agents inside the system. Circularity A system’s Circularity is the degree with which its (essential and non-essential) resources are reused within the system. A system whose resources retain its value and quality when reused requires less replenishment from outside its system.

Consequently, the system becomes self-reliant and efficient. Circularity is a panacea for imminent material shortages, pollution generation, and waste production. Circularity is measured against the degree to which resources are, and potentially can be used in a circular way. Circularity seeks a healthy balance, because not all resources can be re-used, and it is not always desirable for all materials to be reused.

Circularity also encompasses value retention or transition that resources undergo during their life cycle. Consider a town that recycles its drinking water (from its water fountain) into grey water. This is a case of down-cycling, as the water by means of its transformation, deteriorated in value. On the other hand, value retention is evident in the case of toner cartridges that are designed to be disassembled, refilled, and returned to the store shelf.

The same goes for products. If a product-life cycle recycles a piece of plastic only as throwaway plastic bags, it is degrading the value level of the resource, and while it’s recycling, it’s not actually all that circular of a system. Circularity is a factor that has received much attention in northwestern Europe, under the approach called the ‘Circular Economy’. Because of this attention, more existing tools are available for circularity than for other parameters.

See the tools section for more explanation on the Circular Economy. levels of circularity Circularity is expressed in lower or higher levels of preference, as can be seen in the SiD Rocket diagram on the right.

They are categorized from the best to the worst: Super-use Direct re-use Refurbishing Remanufacturing Recycling Waste This same idea can be found in other frameworks used in the field of Circularity, such as the Waste Hierarchy / Ladder of Lansink (diagram below), and its counterpart, the more popular Circularity mantra of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

While circularity commonly applies to the lower ELSI stack tiers (energy & materials), it is equally relevant to the higher ELSI stack domains (life, society, individual).

In fact, interesting connections can be established with the upper ELSI stack domains. For example, household waste used as a building block for a local vegetable garden improves food production awareness, and the community’s wellbeing by means of better nutrition and biophilic exposure. Measuring circularity There is a variety of tools available to measure circularity, for example the ‘Material Circularity Indicator’ of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

This basic formula uses the following inputs: Input in the production process: How much input is coming from virgin and recycled materials and reused components? Utility during use phase: How long and intensely is the product used compared to an industry average product of similar type? This takes into account increased durability of products, but also repair/ maintenance and shared consumption business models.

Destination after use: How much material goes into landfill (or energy recovery), how much is collected for recycling, which components are collected for reuse? Efficiency of recycling: How efficient are the recycling processes used to produce recycled input and to recycle material after use? For more information on developing specific indicators for material Circularity, see the free publication CIRCULARITY INDICATORS, An Approach to Measuring Circularity”, Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2015.

Please note that these standardized indicators do not (yet) take into account the full spectrum of ELSI’s categories. Network Support Network support measures to what degree the system can provide support to external systems in times of need. In a sense, it is a sister indicator to the Redundancy network parameter. It measures the ability of the system’s resources covered by the self-sufficiency scope to be delivered to neighboring systems to support shortfalls in their operation.

We’ll get to specific system dynamics later, but it’s good to note here that the system dynamic Law of Decreasing Marginal Returns is strong in this one.

As a network of systems starts to break down, each individual system’s capacity to support failing neighboring systems goes down with it, until the entire network becomes brittle and collapses. A high rate of Network support in a system is therefore not just nice to have as friendly neighbors, but a primary sign of a healthy system.

This can then also be seen as a feeder of Resilience to external systems. A Network support capacity of zero shows that the system can only take care of itself, which usually means it is at the brink of its own capacity to survive. If Self-sufficiency is low, Network support can become negative. Then, the system relies on external systems for the supply of critical goods and services, and burdens those systems around it.

Efficiency Efficiency is a measure of how well a network is servicing its intended goal compared to the resources it needs to achieve this performance. Efficiency in itself is not a goal, but when comparing systems, this parameter is useful for finding optimization strategies. Note that a highly efficient network may not be a resilient one, and Efficiency and Resilience may be opposed at times.

Typically, you want Efficiency to be high as high as possible until it starts interfering with the other parameters that help to establish a high Resilience. It’s often easy to improve Efficiency by reducing parameters such as Redundancy and Connectivity, but that usually reduces Resilience. A focus on Efficiency can therefore be dangerous, especially when it has been made into a goal, which it should never be. Efficiency in itself should never be a goal for a sustainable system.

SiD Rocket This diagram is a generic representation of the stages of an object’s life cycle through a system. It shows the main steps of the object’s life cycle in the blue arrows, and the required inputs and impacts at each step. When investigating a life cycle, each of these is detailed to make an assessment of the costs, impacts and benefits of the cycle as a whole.

It’s helpful in establishing the necessary autonomy for various services and indexing impacts of an object within its system, and to observe the different stages of circularity. ““We can’t surge forward with certainty into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises, learn from them, and even ‘profit’ from them.

We can’t impose our will upon a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.”

• Donella Meadows, 2008n