Sustainability involves either becoming much more efficient in energy usage or killing a lot more people a year than we are right now.

The likely outcome is probably a little too little of path one followed by a whole lot of path two.

check the passage 'definition' in this wikipedia entry for why this is so hard to pin down:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability



i learned the UN definition, which is useful but has its own political and practical challenges. for what it's worth:

“sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

By what population standards? For a 9 billion person planet? 12, 15, 30?

This is why sustainability as an idea is currently stale imho. I does nothing to target the real issues like global population numbers...because those issues are rife with political pitfalls...no one wants to tackle the real issue of sustainability...TOO MANY PEOPLE. and an exponentially growing population. There is no definition that resolves that reality. And leed as a solution is nothing more than building industry green washing.

"everyone is doing it and talking about it, but a very few knows what it is...."

that's how the bubble gets starts (example- dot.com, subprime)

the day when inhabitat stop showing silly green gadgets(at least 3-4 a day), there still may be a chance to save the world FROM HUMAN.

''It is time for our civilization to rethink the way we live, work, travel, design, build and consume. To think that we are doing our part simply by driving a hybrid car and recycling our paper, bottles, and cans is a dangerous illusion. For years, environmentalists have been telling us to do more with less in order to make change happen. This is simply not enough. We are going to have to fundamentally change the way we design our products, industries and cities. Our current recycling methods are inefficient and only serve to perpetuate the “cradle-to-grave” manufacturing model that we’ve been using for hundreds of years. ''


http://www.alternative-energy-news.info/cradle-to-cradle/


crowbert and aspect, if the solution to becoming sustainable is simply to consume less [whether through a reduction in population or not] who decides who gets to consume what and how much?

This sort of mentality is extremely rooted in social darwinism, and I feel is nihilistic. Consuming less, but still wasting, is just a question of scale rather than a cynosural change in production and consumption ideologies and methods.

Excuse me while I go throw up.

Chupacabra: too many people is part of the issue, but not the only part. It's an easy way to brush off any responsibility, but it is also naive. Environmental issues are a result of population, amount of consumption and the 'quality' of that consumption (i.e. how sustainable are the products?).

Regardless, this still doesn't answer the question of what sustainability is. Not that I'm really planning on addressing the question either. I think systems like LEED can help with certain aspects of sustainability, but when it comes down to it, good design is sustainable. If a building lasts (both physical and aesthetic longevity) and has an appropriate relationship with its site, addresses its program appropriately, etc. then it is easy enough to slap on 'green' technologies and materials. Architects should be concerned with designing well, while leaving the add-on items to engineers. Designers have to adapt and make individual decisions. If this can be done effectively, sustainability will inevitably follow.

I don't know if that's clear; it's early-ish.

Well technically if we do a conversion of income-to-kWh...

For the US, the average per individual is $32,000. That means the average person in the US is capable of consuming (at US production cost of $0.08 per kWh) 400000 kWh worth of energy.

An average person in Ghana makes $1,500 dollars a year or 18,750 kWh per year. Essentially for every American who dies, 21 people could live in a pre-industrialized or industrializing society.

Like someone point out above, the current quick technological fixes are not sustainable. Neither is WWS schemes because every wind turbine, damn and solar power is itself a construction of energy and money.

A 1MW windmill runs ballpark 3.5 million dollars not including land, legal and other externalities cost. Let's just round that up to an easy 4 million.

That's an investment of 50,000,000 kWh or rather money that can be used to buy energy to do things with.

At 50,000 MWh, it will obviously take 50,000 hours of production to recoup the cost. Or 2083 days. Or 5.7 years with no mechanical error and at 100% capacity.

Since it is known that windmills operate 90% of the year, 10% given to maintenance and reach only 30% capacity over an average... it could take as much as 18 years to recoup the cost in terms of energy.

Assuming a 20 year life, this machine will run in the black for as little as 2 years as a complete economic and energy positive.

Conversely, a bag of malt-o-meal cereal is 30 oz. It costs about 4.00 a bag and represents 50 kWh worth of energy. And in milk 5.00 (62.5 kWh) a gallon and 3 lbs ($4 or 50 kWh) of bananas.

Breakfast for a week is worth 162.5 kWh. Assuming a consumption factor (the amount of food your body turns into feces) of around 15%, we are left with 11.8 pounds or 5.3 kilos of household waste.

That's roughly 42.2 to 63.6 MJ worth of potential energy. Assuming an average of 53.1 MJ, If you burned your collected used cereal and recycled it electrically, you would get 14.75 kWh in return.

It is not much. However, the cost (and energy savings) come in terms of the money you're saving on utilities.

However, if this is a five person family and 53.1 MJ (14.75 kWh) is made per day... Then about 50% (assuming losses from incineration) of a home's average energy consumption is provided by eating cereal, bananas and milk and poo'ing in a toilet.

The issue with digesters is the bio gas is roughly 50% methane, IE usable, and 50% carbon. Conundrum.

Rather than direct energy feedback loops, perhaps indirect energy feedback loops pose a greater potential? Have you seen the BIG project on the urban adjacencies? [I forget the title, perhaps someone can help me out.]

Anywho, the jist of it is that different types of buildings require different types of energy for different reasons. IE one of the biggest consumers of cooling in a city is a supermarket, and one of the biggest consumers of heating is an olympic or public pool. If you placed these next to each other, one could being to concieve of feedback loops to being to augment the 'capital' energy coming into the both buildings.

interesting stuff so far....

I found some interesting concepts.

Bill Dunster of BedZed mentioned designing for the 'ecoslob' a person who lives in a environment where their footprint is extremely low even through they could not care nor know about any environmental issues. The building/urban area does it all for them.

Mictchell Joachin mentioned designing for a carborexic city, the city needs to move to being anorexic to remove the current build-up of carbon dioxide.

Also the concept of energy slaves is very interesting by Buckminster Fuller, working out many slaves one would need to power their life, basically expressing your energy need in a number of slaves needed...

I think the have less children concept is a little bit scary as it makes complete sense...but still hard to consider for myself...

An ecoslob gets into the debate between democracy, technocracy and meritocracy.

Concsiously depopulating the earth is a hugely despicable moral question in my opinion. Also, enough solar power hits the earth in an hour to take care of our energy needs for a year. The earth can produce a lot more, we just need to be smarter and more ethical to be able to take advantage of it.

Either that or bombing the moon.

I wasn't talking about biogas per se... but rather degassing the sewage, drying the remainder sludge, pelleting it and then floating in a co-generation fluidized bed reactor using the methane from degassing.

Incineration is a dirty game but far cleaner that fossil fuel alternatives. That and partial valorization (breakdown and oxidation) is a much better and more environmentally byproduct.

All this combined with advancements in thermal depolymerization means we'll be able to burn about 60-70% of current household waste.

if population is the problem, then at least we've already got a viable, even architectural solution. 1.1 million people eliminated...up to 20,000 per day! truly breathtaking in scope and how wonderful it's been for the planet.

i haven't been following leed closely, but could somebody tell me how many points it awards for an extermination camp?

for me, i can sum up "sustainability" in three words: waste of time.

and my advice, probably just let your kids (i.e. next generation) worry about it...that is, should you dare have any

consume what u need... that means alot less for the americans...

u don't need to got to fastfood restaurants/starbucks everyday to use up the landfill, can make ur own food.

u don't need to live in the suburb and drive to work everyday, can live in the crowded city.

u don't need to buy those fancy green gadgets @ inhabitat, think about how much extra energy is consumed by making those.

u don't need to have lots of children and live in a single family house @ suburb, the majority of ppl in asia has 1 child and happily living at smaller apartment building @ city...

apparently sustainability means not using the extra sixteen bits necessary to actually spell out a word in the queen's english.

Bunch of bullshit.

Want to be sustainable? Stop building.

Anyway it's such an OVERUSED trendy-money making
bullshit term right now. It's nothing NEW.

The idea of the toilet was new once, and when it was first
conceived regarded as a concept...and now, of course, it is COMMON SENSE to have toilets in a damn building; we lose track that it once was a brilliant idea!

The thing with sustainability is that..it was never even a good idea, it is JUST PLAIN COMMON sense. HMMM lets maximize sunlight to save energy...seriously.

and oh yeah..fuck LEED and the bullshit institution it is.

some of the comments here really confirms my bubble theory...

since no one believe its a bubble, that's one of the major characteristic of an early bubble.