RGE Design

06/02/2025

How can we be Sustainable?

Ben’s lecture on sustainability really gave me pause. Is sustainability really possible?

In a world steeped in a throw away culture, where single-use plastics and overconsumption are rife, sustainability can’t just be about everyone doing a little bit. But, why is this?

Doing only a little bit overall is only doing a little bit. Essentially, while better than doing nothing, it is having basically no impact when as a society we need to have an entire cultural shift. When the biggest polluters aren’t doing anything to reduce their impact and pushing the responsibility onto the consumer, the pollution is only going to continue to get worse.

Does this mean we need to be holding to account the companies doing the polluting? Absolutely! But, we also need to acknowledge that without systemic change to our society that we won’t reduce our negative impact to the environment. This involves realising that just because something is labelled as sustainable doesn’t actually make it so. Sustainability is not just about using renewable energies, recycling properly and changing our personal habits. Everything happens within a system and for something to be sustainable then the entire system needs to be sustainable, from production to end of life.

As a result of the systems within our society, we cannot separate the economy and the environment! Companies build up their profits and sells by designing for obsolesce, design parts to break so that people will replace their products, all of which has an impact on environment. Something we replace every few years or whenever the next model comes along is phones. Phones which to make 1 uses the same amount of power as boiling a kettle for 28 hours, something that no even thinks about when they buy a new phone.

This issue is far deeper than we are lead to believe. We can’t just change to using fuel and power sources that are renewable, biodegradable or carbon neutral. Why? Because lots of these use up space, space that we don’t have. Ignoring the issues surrounding the use of palm oil, if we were to change to using it for a replacement for jet fuel, we’d need 30 to 40 football pitches to fuel 1 full range Boeing 777 flight and this is just assuming that there are no losses during the conversion of the palm oil into fuel.