System Boundaries and Time in Sustainability (Part 2)

Example: Bioplastic Not So Fantastic

Bioplastic is another invention that promised to improve our society’s sustainability performance overnight. As with most object-oriented solutions, there’s no free lunch and bioplastics, most commonly in the form of PLA, can do great damage when not applied well.

Firstly, when swapping normal plastics for bioplastics, the bioplastics can end up in existing recycling streams. Being a different type of material (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. Example: a systems level IQ test This is a non-essential background story. Feel free to skip it, or read it if you like an anectdotal story on the systemic use of IQ tests.

Do you have thoughts about the value of IQ tests? Have you discussed the usefulness and applicability of such tests? There’s a big chance you have. In my circles, including myself, most people seem to hold the belief that IQ tests are incapable of assessing the whole of a human being’s capacities, and thus are of limited value.

Until I heard this story. This story demonstrates a great example of something that is contentious on an object level (testing individuals on their IQ score), but is massively valuable on a systems level when used right. I heard this story first on a US podcast by Radiolab, called “The Miseducation of Larry P.”.

A more expansive and detailed account of this story can be heard by listening to that show (freely available online). The nature of an IQ test There are a variety of IQ tests available, and the tests have evolved through time, originating in the work of psychologist William Stern in 1912.

Their use includes: as a means to determine the suitability of potential employees for jobs, the performance of education systems, the mental health and wellbeing of individuals, and as a means to regulate entrance to social clubs (eg. Mensa). I remember doing one in high-school as part of a voluntary scan to determine what professions I would be suitable for.

I also remember a mental feedback loop while doing it, about being nervous on how my performance would influence the choices about my future, and how my nervousness would affect this. I spent half of the test in near panic about my nervousness itself.

As these tests have found various places in society over time, so too have criticisms on their usage. Some argue that the tests can only ever determine a (small) part of an individual human’s capacities, risking misrepresentation of a person’s value.

Others argue that the nature of performing such a test in itself is highly susceptible to context and psychological anomalies, and will invalidate any usable result. All in all, there’s much opposition to the tests being used for anything other than voluntary testing without consequence. So too, I thought IQ tests had little societal value. Until I heard this story.

Example: The Story of Leaded Gasoline

And the story requires a bit of background to follow, about leaded gasoline. The origin of Leaded gasoline Tetraethyllead is an additive used to raise the octane rating of combustible fuels, allowing for substantially higher compression, and thus higher performance. This property was first used by DuPont, and applied by General Motors in 1921 for gasoline engines.

Knowledge about the toxicity of lead gasses had been known for 3000 years already, from the Greeks. Lead being a strong neuro-toxin was widespread knowledge from the 19th century. Because of the strong existing negative associations with lead, DuPont called it ‘Ethyl’.

Which, by the way, shows the importance of calling things by their rightful name. Already in 1924 public controversy rose after workers died in the refineries. Experts publicly warned of the dangers of leaded gasoline for several years, to no avail.

There were even alternatives to lead as an additive to solve the problem of ‘knocking’ in engines, but through many years of public manipulation and health reports, its use was continued. Leaded gasoline was universally adopted around the world from that time. The discovery of the damage Around the 1950s, a scientist named Clair Cameron Paterson was performing research into the age of the earth.

He used very old rocks he

He used very old rocks he found from around the world to do so. In the process of analyzing them, he found that lead contamination invalidated his results. After solving this by working in a clean-room (and determining the age of the earth fairly accurately), he became interested in lead contamination.

Why was all this lead there? He started to study different soil and ice samples from around the world and found high presence of lead everywhere on earth, specifically tied to recent time periods. He correlated it to the start of the use of leaded gasoline.

Because he knew the health dangers of lead, he continued this research and contributed greatly to the opposition to the use of lead in gasoline over time. Following this, reports were published in the 1960s on the health effects of leaded gasoline.

The reports proved direct health effects, due to the presence of lead, in virtually everyone alive. This had been challenging, because of the insidious and long-term nature of lead toxicity on human health and mind. The reports were devastating, showing significant mental health reductions, especially in children.

After some backlash from industry, the Environmenmtal Protection Agency (EPA) in the USA eventually made regulation in 1973 to “phase down” the use of leaded gasoline from 1976 onwards. You’d think things were over and settled with by then. But then you’d be wrong. on the brink of return The early presidential administration of Ronald Reagan in 1981-83 intended to release industry on all kinds of environmental regulation.

They used economic cost-benefit analysis as a means to oppose environmental regulations. All kinds of ‘costly’ regulation was overturned in this time. DuPont formally requested to remove all lead regulations, and the EPA, under new Reagan-controlled leadership, was eager to comply.

They claimed that it cost the US industry over $96 million per year to replace lead in gasoline with other stuff. For this reason, the EPA announced to remove all regulation for leaded gasoline across industries. When the news broke, a public uproar ensued. So, the EPA commissioned a cost-benefit analysis from its own EPA scientist Joel Schwartz.

Schwartz however did not agree with the proposed plans, and went rogue... The cost-benefit of the population’s IQ Schwartz assembled research done earlier by scientists such as Herbert Needleman in the 60’s and 70’s. Needleman had shown proof of general population health effects of leaded gasoline.

He did this by using widespread IQ testing. While the IQ tests didn’t say anything useful about the individuals, they were used by Needleman as a systemic test, measuring the general population’s mental health. Needleman showed that the influence of lead caused the whole population to go down by several IQ points.

He showed this to be true especially in children, who are 4-5 times more sensitive in their development to the presence of lead. While a reduction of a few IQ points may not seem much, as a statistical measure, it means a in increase in the amount of people with a very low IQ (~80) of about 20-30% and a decrease in people with a very high IQ (~130).

Schwartz took this research, and made the commissioned cost-benefit analysis of the EPA to include costs due to the financial impact of this lower population IQ. He included higher social care costs, the lost earning capacity of the reduced mental health of the population, medical care, and increased mortality rates.

Schwartz’s cost-benefit calculation at the time showed a $3.5 billion a year per 1 ug/dl lead in the bloodstream benefit of the regulation. The total net benefit of the leaded gasoline restriction as a whole came out in total to US$ 6.7 billion from 1985-92.

This beat the intended result of the cost-benefit comparison on the Reagan administration at their own game. Consequences of the analysis The expected industry backlash, and the attempts to undermine, discredit, and disprove the research, only served to strengthen the case.

It was proven beyond doubt that leaded gasoline restrictions were doing more good than harm, by a large margin. In 1985, not only did the EPA retain the regulations, they sped up their phasing in. The results are that between 1976 and 1980, lead use in gasoline dropped 50%, and blood level lead presence dropped by 37%.

Between 1975 and 1984 lead use dropped by 73%, and airborne lead by 71%. In 1993, additional and updated research by Schwartz reset the total benefit to US$ 17.2 billion per year in reduced medical costs for children and hypertension in adults, and lost earnings. By 2011, the United Nations announced it had been successful in phasing out the use of leaded gasoline worldwide, although there were still a few countries where it was for sale until 2017.

While sounding like a victory, the damage by use of lead in gasoline has left a big scar on the development to life on earth. There has been a statistically significant correlation proven of leaded gasoline use and violent crime rates, in the US as well as in South Africa.

Researchers including Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, Rick Nevin, and Howard Mielke say that the banning of leaded gasoline amounts to up to 34% decline in crime from 1992 to 2002 in the USA. Besides this, the lead put into the atmosphere is still there, and will impact all life on earth for centuries to come. what can we learn? This story started with a question about IQ tests, and questioning their use and validity.

As the story hopefully demonstrates, something that may seem of limited value on the level of the individuals, may become one of the most valuable tools when regarded on a systemic level.

On the system level we’re not necessarily looking for completeness of perfection. In many cases, we’re looking for a general ‘thermometer’ that gives us an average of the system’s performance. The value of the IQ test does not lie in its capacity to evaluate individuals compared to one another.

Its value lies in its use as a general thermometer of the population as a whole over time, or in different scenarios. The case for integrated value assessment The story also shows the value and importance of using more integrated impact assessments, rather than economic parameters alone.

In this case, the inclusion of medical costs and reduced earning potential was already enough to show a huge discrepancy in cost-benefit. To continue to make our world a more healthy, fair, resilient place, it benefits us to push for more integrated measurements to be used in all policy decision making, as well as in corporate governance.

With lead, We knew before the

With lead, We knew before the birth of Christ that lead was extremely poisonous, so that should have been an easy one to avoid. What decisions do we make today that we’ll regret later, just because we only measured the cost-benefit on an economic level?

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Takeaway

System boundaries define what you include in your analysis. Draw them too narrow and you miss cascading effects. Draw them too wide and you lose focus. Time boundaries are equally important: a solution that works for five years but creates problems at fifty is not sustainable. The examples in this unit (bioplastics, leaded gasoline) show why boundary-setting is not academic but deeply practical.