NOT LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT
Many 'green' initiatives do not add up, often causing more ecological impacts in one area than they minimise in another. As a result, there have been many attempts to create Life Cycle Assessment systems (LCAs) that can provide definitive answers about which initiatives are, overall, the 'greenest', by measuring all the impacts associated with a product from raw material extraction, through manufacturing and use, to disposal.
LCAs come closest to being sustainments when they teach us to see the devices that make up our built environments as relational systems that change over time. LCAs indicate that sustainment is an on-going process which can only be achieved by working in many integrated ways.
However, in struggling to provide definitive conclusions about 'greenness', LCAs have become limited as a source of sustainments:
1 The purported scientificity of LCAs conceals the relativity of judgements about key parameters of LCAs (eg should the risk of heavy metal contamination be given more weight in the analysis than the risk of global climate change) which cannot be avoided. Sustainments do not claim to be definitive instances of sustainability, but are up-front about the partiality of what they have been designed to sustain, and open to modifications that would allow them to become more sustainable in other ways.
2 To create the appearance of objectivity, LCAs have become unnecessarily complicated and prohibitively expensive. Sustainments emerge from the insights that can be gained from what is known as a 'scoping LCA', where the nature and relative size of different ecological impacts across a product's life-cycle can be estimated without the need for precise data. This is all that is needed, because the larger-scale changes that a sustainment aims for render accurate measurement irrelevant.
3 Many LCAs negotiate their inherent relativity by being comparative. But this means that the conclusion of LCAs often get perverted; they are reported as concluding that X is 'green', when in fact the LCA only claims that X is only 'greener' than Y. Further, in this context, LCAs are made descriptive rather than prescriptive: they become ways of measuring 'greenness' rather than briefs for making a product more sustainable, recommending changes at points A, B and C in its lifecycle. Sustainments are multiple level interventions into a product's lifecycle aimed at improving not only its sustainability, but the sustainability of all that is associated with it.
4 Like many modes of measurement, LCAs must average out what is being measured. Use, which is often the highest source of impacts associated with a product (eg the resource consumption involved in the use a long-life product or the resource consumption resulting from the volume of short-life products), is highly variable, yet most LCAs work with a projected mean use-life period. In so doing, LCAs obscure the fact that different modes of use (eg careful versus irresponsible), can alter enormously the life-cycle impact of a product (by for instance extending the use-life of the product). Sustainments are products that always promote more careful modes of use to make up for all the impacts associated with their whole life-cycle.
