RESOURCES
Seminar and Workshop
In this sequence of the course, the topic of resources and how to manage and distribute and utilize these in a manner that can be sustained in the long run. Sustained in a way that is sustainable in terms of the environment and social aspects but also enables development and industrial activities.
There to guide and teach us about the topic of circularity and urban metabolism is Leonardo Rosado, associate professor within Architecture and civil engineering.
Seminar
Leonardo started off the seminar by introducing us to the many initiatives, programs, goals and business concepts which are currently going on in accordance with circularity within the city of Gothenburg. The municipality have set goals and action plans and the business segment are creating new solutions, products and memberships. It is a quite complicated setup and one of the tricky parts is to guarantee that all these initiatives are going in the right direction or circularity. This is complicated task to understand since so many factors are affected by small arrangements. Leonardos presented way to investigate this is to classify the information within these thee priority interventions: technical features of resource flows, existing plans and investment programs and new CE businesses being developed. When all these three are clarified, it is possible to start looking on how to prioritize and where to put in the effort and focus.
What Leonardo further focused on in the seminar was the technical features of resource flows. The first thing is to find and apply a research concepts which works in the settings of circularity. Figure 1 and Figure 2 illustrates Leonardos suggested concept, namely Urban metabolism which is a concept of looking at a city/region as if it had an ecosystem.
Secondly, it is suitable to start understanding how much resources are coming into a city, how much are consumed and how much is thrown away. When this is clarified, it is possible to add a dimension of the environmental impact of climate change. The more detailed this quantification is, the more accurate and effective actions can be made later.
Now to the actions which can be taken to achieve circularity. These possibilities where discussed interactively during the session with all course participants. Figure 2 in this blog post is the figure our discussions where connected to and resource efficiency was the main focus.
For resources/production, some solutions and ideas touched upon engines which requires less gas, light weight materials and ecodesign (as for example ecodesign bags instead of plastic). For production/consumption we talked a lot about offering product service systems as rental bikes instead of everyone owning a bike for themselves. However, a key aspect in this topic is to ensure that this leads to people not owing a bike at all while they use the service, otherwise this service will get contra productive if people still have their own bikes. For consumption/decomposition, it was discussed a little bit about product lifetime (to make products better in this aspect) and reuse (flea markets and second hand). Connected to this subject was also to make sure only products that actually add value is existing within the consumption phase. For decomposition/reuse we talked about down-cycling and try to find ways of reusing materials (or waste) for new purposes. For production/decomposition, a key concept was to design for recycling, for example design with modularity. For consumption/resources we talked about making the products in a more sufficient way with the resources to, in the long run, make the products more sustainable.
With this interesting lecture, Leonardo left us with a sentence to keep in mind: Less is more!
Workshop
The workshop was based on the concepts presented and discussed in the seminar. However, during the time available, the focus of the workshop was mainly on the first 4 topics out of the 6 below.
Mapping of activities taking place at campus
Identify the products/resources/materials needed for the mapped activities
Categorize these products/resources/materials according to their lifespan
Select a group of products and explore possibilities for efficient use of resources
Explain how data can be obtained to assess the use of resources for a product
Explain how Chalmers/Students can transition to resource efficient activities
As a first step to understand what activities that are taking place, a general mindmap was constructed to get an overview in the variety of activities. First, the activities on campus were put in big general groups. These general groups represent both more physical activities like mobility and accommodation but also more hardly defined activities like education and development. We also included the activity “sustainable development” as an activity at campus as one of the core focuses of Chalmers University is “Chalmers for a sustainable future”. This can be interpreted like initiatives, partnerships and projects are carried out that can be of high interest and can be accounted for as activities of significance at campus.
Resource categories where defined according to the time related measures as follows. Single use, circular use, short use, medium use, long use, unlimited use. The different categories defined were thereafter used to in combination with the different products needed in order to carry out the activity “education”. See figure 5. What can be seen from the table is that non of the analyzed products are in the category “circular” or “unlimited”. From this easy analysis it is hard to make any general conclusion but it might show a tendency on how the current environment is built.
The chosen product to evaluate in terms of more efficient resource use, the choice of product was computers within the group “technological tools” defined in a previous workshop step. In order to examine and propose solutions and ideas on how to make the use of computers more resource efficient and in the end circular, the Circular Economy systems diagram of the Ellen MacArthur foundation was used as basis and inspiration , see figure 6.
Within the Circular Economy systems diagram, the right side felt the most relevant when examining the product computer. The right side of the systems diagram focuses on the use and flows of finite materials which in a computer is common. For example heavy metals and alloys for the technical compounds included in a computer. The right side of the systems diagram involve recycling, refurbishing/remanufacturing, reuse, maintenance/prolonging of use as well as sharing of the product. When having these dimensions in mind, suitable ways of a more resource efficient use of computers come to mind. For example, a sharing scheme among the students could be away to reducing the number of computers in general. Especially computers with high computational power that might be needed only occasionally for heavy simulations. Another idea related to the concept of reuse could be to design products like computers in a manner that allows changing parts if something brakes, like a battery or a screen. This might result in longer lifetimes for several technological tools (like computers) if allowed by the design.
One idea that could be tried in a place like Chalmers where many people with good knowledge on technology are gathered is to create a maintenance hub where students and staff can support each other on maintaining or replacing parts on technology equipment in order to prolong its lifetime. Using the knowledge and engagement that is gathered at Campus to do some good!
In general, sharing schemes and less personal ownership over things you use in your everyday life seems to be a common theme that could be relevant to many of the segments in the mindmap. When it comes to both mobility and the example computers, ways of sharing things when you do not use them could be a good option in order to ensure that the products that we produced are used rather than being left untouched in a majority of the time.
