A1. Object-Oriented Sustainable Solutions

Object-oriented “sustainable” solutions The Light Conundrum Artificial light has been essential for our devel­ opment. It has extended our working day, providing increased productivity, safety, and quality of life. But these little fake suns come at a big energy cost. As society expands, so has their burden on our energy resources. Thus, the European Commission banned the tungsten filament light bulb in 2009, the trusty mini sun that has lighted our homes for over a century, because it emits most energy in the form of heat and is therefore not efficient for lighting purposes. The only alternative at the time was the Compact Fluorescent Light (CFL), commonly known as a power saving bulb. Sounds good. But few of us knew that CFL’s use mercury vapor to do its thing, a highly neurotoxic substance. Even the most perfect recycling program won’t prevent some of the lamps breaking, impacting our health and the environment. So for the sake of energy savings, we have introduced a toxic substance in our lives and nature, a substance we spend large amounts of effort on trying to get rid of. This is a typical example of ‘trading pain’; we save some energy, but at the expense of damage to our health and ecosystems. CFL’s can be a beneficial addition, depending on how its energy is produced and how the lamps are used, but just substituting one for the other is not necessarily a sustainable act. Thankfully we have good ’s sustainability perfor­ mance overnight. As with most object-oriented solutions, there’s no free lunch and bioplastics, most commonly in the form of (but hard to differentiate by the consumer), bioplastics degrade the quality of the plastic batch, making the normal plastic batch near useless, and crashing recycling performance. Secondly, bioplastics do not dissolve when thrown in nature; they require industrial composting under pressure and elevated temperatures. This means the big plastic waste issue that haunts our environment isn’t anywhere near closer to being solved when using them. Bioplastics need their own, separated, and controlled recycling stream to perform well, and this is hardly present. Lastly, some feedstock for bioplastics comes from lands that could otherwise grow food. Food is a more critical resource than waste-plastic, so we’re trading productive land for waste, which isn’t a sustainable solution. Bioplastics can be useful, but only when applied in a systemicly appropriate way.