When “Reuse” is Wrong
Paper by Faungg
You’ve just dropped a spoonful of yogurt on the kitchen floor and instinctively, you reach for a handy, disposable paper towel. Then, with a twinge of guilt, you pause, remembering that “reuse” is a watchword in your environmental mantra. You reach for the cotton kitchen towel, only to feel a new pang over the thought of all that hot water, soap, and dryer time awaiting your linens. What is a conscientious treehugger to do?
If you’re a geek, you’ll think about embodied energy. Very simply, embodied energy is a cumulative count of all the energy it takes to make, operate, and dispose of the products we use every day. It’s a system-wide look at the life cycle impact of our actions, and it’s a helpful way to optimize our choices.
To get a better understanding of how embodied energy can answer the great towel debate, we’ll turn to Catherine Mohr, a robotics engineer and self-professed geek. In her recent TED talk, she unpacks the ways that embodied energy can inform our purchases and behaviors.
Her premise in the talk mirrors my own position on this blog, that many environmentalist are “long on moral authority and short on data” and that “sometimes the things which you least expect have a bigger effect than any of the other things you were trying to optimize.“ She gives a rather surprising answer to the question about paper towels versus cotton, and then tells how she and her family are trying to build a house with a data-driven approach to reducing the structure’s embodied energy.
In the end, maybe the best answer is to get your dog to clean up the mess for you. Then again, pets have an environmental impact too!
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