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As the concept of
sustainability takes root in corporate culture, many business leaders
today are beginning to measure performance against the triple bottom
line. This triad of concerns—economic growth, environmental
protection and social equity—was once considered an impractical,
blue-sky ethic. Yet today it has begun to define both long-term
strategy and everyday practice for leading manufacturing corporations
all over the world.
Developed by the sustainable business theorist John Elkington, the
concept of the triple bottom line has given corporations a useful
tool for balancing economic goals with a desire to “do better
by the environment.” Unfortunately, the concept in practice
tends to yield strategies that try to meet the triple bottom line
by merely minimizing environmental or social liabilities. These
are important first steps toward identifying problems, but ultimately
they are strategies for managing negative effects.
Why lament our creations? Why not celebrate the things we make?
A New Definition of Quality
One might take the first step toward celebrating human creations
with a new definition of quality. From our perspective, quality
is embodied in designs that allow industry to enhance the well-being
of nature and culture while generating economic value. Designers
aiming for this level of quality follow the laws of nature to create
products, processes and facilities so ecologically intelligent they
leave vital, delightful footprints rather than waste management
headaches. Think materials that become food for the soil after their
useful commercial lives. Think enormously productive factories that
purify water and restore the landscape.
This new measure of quality sparks transformations. Pursuing positive
aspirations at every level of commerce can anchor intelligent design
deep within corporate business strategy. And when good design drives
the business agenda, the path toward sustainability turns from end-of-pipe
solutions to creating value with innovative product design—a
shift from the triple bottom line to the triple top line. If one
approaches the design process asking, right from the start, “How
can I grow prosperity, celebrate my community, and enhance the health
of all species?” the results are likely to be far more positive
and enriching than measuring performance against a bottom line standard.
| The Science Of
Product Quality |
According to the European Inventory of Existing Chemical Substances,
more than 15,000 substances commonly used in consumer products
have hazardous properties. The World Health Organization, meanwhile,
estimates that 70 to 90 percent of all cancer cases can be traced
to environmental influences, especially chemicals. As designers
work to transform this state of affairs by creating products
with only positive effects—the foundation of triple top
line growth—they can use scientific tools to assess the
chemistry of product ingredients and build a scientific foundation
for safe, healthful, high-quality design.
Gas chromatography (GC) is such a tool. A variety of toxic chemicals,
including carcinogens and endocrine disruptors, are released
into the environment by the gaseous emissions of consumer products.
These emissions can be absorbed into the body through the lungs
and skin. Gas chromatography allows researchers and designers
to identify the characteristic pattern of emissions, or “fingerprint,”
of nearly every household or industrial product. The fingerprint
of an electric hand mixer, for example, shows emissions of hazardous
compounds such as trichloroethylene, cyclohexanone, styrene
and BHT. (see figure below)
Alone, the hand mixer GC is a revealing assessment. But as designers
embrace gas chromatography and other methods of scientific analysis,
they can begin to build whole libraries of information on current
products and compare the fingerprints of new products with library
data. Each foray into material chemistry will add to the scientific
foundation of product design. And with a good scientific foundation,
positive results will follow positive intentions. |
Design for the triple top line is as rigorous as it is creative.
Most of today’s consumer goods, from CD players to toys to
electric shavers, contain potentially toxic synthetic chemicals.
Understanding their impact on human and environmental health is
one of the first steps of intelligent design, which makes product
chemistry a key element of product quality. Indeed, designing truly
high-quality products—goods and services that enhance economic,
ecological and social well-being—requires careful scientific
assessment of all product materials. With a good scientific foundation,
designers not only can approach design with positive intentions,
they can produce positive results (see sidebar on page 36).
Understanding Value with the Fractal Triangle
In our work with corporate clients such as Ford Motor Co., Nike,
Herman Miller and BASF, we have found that a visual tool, a fractal
triangle, helps us apply triple top line thinking throughout the
design process. Typically, meeting the triple bottom line is seen
as a balancing act, a series of compromises between competing interests
played out in product and process design. The key insights offered
by the fractal triangle turn this notion on its head: Intelligent
design, rather than balancing economy, ecology and equity can employ
their dynamic interplay to generate value and business opportunities—triple
top line growth.
Representing the ecology of human concerns, the fractal triangle
shows how ecology, economy and equity anchor a spectrum of value,
and how, at any level of scrutiny, each design decision has an impact
on all three. As we plan a product or system, we move around the
fractal inquiring how a new design can generate value in each category.
In the pure Economy sector, we might ask, “Can I make my product
at a profit?” As we see it, the goal of an effective company
is to stay in business as it transforms. The Equity sector raises
social questions: “Are we finding ways to honor all stakeholders,
regardless of race, sex, nationality or religion?” Moving to
the Ecology corner, the emphasis shifts to imagining ways in which
humans can be tools for nature: “Do our designs create habitat
or nourish the landscape?”
As we move around the triangle, questions expressing a complex interaction
of concerns arise at the intersections of Ecology, Economy and Equity.
In the Economy/Equity sector, for example, we consider questions
of profitability and fairness. “Are employees producing a promising
product earning a living wage?” As we continue on to Equity/Economy,
our focus shifts more toward fairness. Here we might ask: “Are
men and women being paid the same for the same work?”
Often, we discover our most fruitful insights where the design process
creates a kind of friction in the zones where values overlap. An
ecologist might call these areas ecotones, which are the merging,
fluid boundaries between natural communities notable for their rich
diversity of species. In the fractal triangle, the ecotones are
ripe with business opportunities.
Triple top line thinkers tap these opportunities not by trying to
balance Ecology, Economy and Equity, but by honoring the needs of
all three. In an infinitely interconnected world, they see rich
relationships rather than inherent conflicts. Their goal: to maximize
value in all areas of the triangle through intelligent design. When
designing a manufacturing facility, for example, they would ask:
How can this project restore more landscape and purify more water?
How much social interaction and joy can I create? How do I generate
more safety and health? How much prosperity can I grow?
Questions such as these allow us to remake the way we make things.
Today.
Triple Top Line Design at Work: Designing New Facilities
In projects already underway—indeed, already completed—triple
top line thinking has sparked an explosion of creativity in our
clients’ decision-making, yielding designs that produce new
value in ways that would never have been imagined when approached
from a purely economic perspective.
Consider, for example, the restoration of Ford Motor Co.’s
Rouge River plant in Dearborn, MI. In May 1999, Ford decided to
invest $2 billion over 20 years to transform the Rouge into an icon
of 21st-century industry. As we approached the design process with
Ford many wondered if a blue chip company with a sharp focus on
the bottom line could take a step toward something truly new and
inspiring. Could inspiration and profits co-exist?
Well, yes. Using triple top line thinking and the Fractal Triangle,
we explored with Ford’s executives, engineers and designers
innovative ways of creating shareholder value. Rather than using
economic metrics to try to reconcile apparent conflicts between
environmental concerns and the bottom line, the company began to
ask triple top line questions. Innovations would still need to be
good for profits, but Ford’s leaders began to examine how profits
could be maximized by design decisions that also maximized social
and ecological value.
Rather than trying to meet an environmental responsibility as efficiently
as possible, Ford opted for a manufacturing facility that would
create habitat, make oxygen, connect employees to their surroundings
and invite the return of native species. The result: a daylit factory
with 450,000 square feet of roof covered with healthy topsoil and
growing plants—a living roof. In concert with porous paving
and a series of constructed wetlands and swales, the living roof
will slow and filter stormwater run-off, making expensive technical
controls, and even regulations, obsolete. All this with first cost
savings of up to $35 million, with the landscape thrown in for free.
This is the power of design for the triple top line.
Triple Top Line Design at Work: Conceiving New Products
Designers can also apply triple top line thinking to the design
of a single product—or even product packaging. Imagine that
you are the CEO of an ice cream company. You sell an all-natural
product you are very proud of. It brings pleasure to your customers
while supporting the dairy farmers of your region and it generates
great profits, too. But you have a problem: after a recent outdoor
event downtown, hundreds of wrappers from your popular ice cream
sandwich littered the city parks. You did the right thing when you
sent out a crew to clean up the mess, but clearly, that’s not
something you want to do for the long-term. You also realize, when
forced to face this problem, that your packaging is also dyed with
chemicals you’d never put in your ice cream. What to do?
If we were advising you, we’d suggest some triple top line
thinking with the fractal triangle to try to generate an innovative
solution. We would not ask how to reduce the chemicals in your packaging
or how to work with the city on litter control. Instead, we’d
wonder what kind of positive effects you hoped to create. Maybe
you’re interested in continuing to provide the pleasure of
a delicious sweet while offering a healthful package that creates
new value for your community.
Working with the fractal triangle, we might begin to see that ice
cream packaging could be designed for biodegradability with new
bio-polymers and safe dyes. This light, healthful packaging could
be economically produced. You might decide to provide added value
by embedding the seeds of a native wildflower in packaging designed
to dissolve in a day after use—when children toss it on the
ground they’d be planting seeds rather than discarding trash.
Suddenly, your problem starts to become an asset: You’re supporting
the population of native plants; your customers are excited to be
young “Johnny Appleseeds;” the city parks are blooming
with colorful flowers; and your sales are through the roof. Not
bad for packaging.
Seeing the Future
These examples begin to suggest some of the ways in which triple
top line thinking and the fractal triangle create business opportunities.
Applied throughout the design process, they introduce a new standard
of quality, adding ecological intelligence, social justice and the
celebration of creativity to the typical design criteria of cost,
performance and aesthetics. Design driven by these positive aspirations
could lay the foundation for a truly inspiring era in which we transform
industry by remaking the way we make things.
We will do so, we believe, by engaging in a true partnership with
nature. Expressed in designs that resonate with natural systems,
this new partnership can take us beyond sustainability—a minimum
condition for survival—toward commerce that celebrates our
relationship with the living earth. We can build factories that
inspire their inhabitants with sunlit spaces, fresh air, copious
views of the outdoors, and cultural delights. We can create fabrics
that feed the soil, giving us pleasure as garments and as sources
of nourishment for our gardens. We can tap into the flows of energy
and nutrients in the natural world, designing astonishingly productive
systems that create oxygen, accrue energy, filter water and provide
healthy habitats for people and nature.
As we have seen, designs such as these are generators of economic
value, too. When the principles that guide them are widely applied,
at every level of industry, productivity and profits will no longer
be at odds with the concerns of the commons. Instead, we will be
living in a world of sustaining prosperity, a world in which both
nature and commerce can thrive and grow.
William A. McDonough, FAIA, and Michael Braungart are founders
of McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, a consultancy that works
with a wide variety of companies to implement eco-effective design
and commerce strategies. For more information, visit www.mbdc.com.
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