Material Parsimony: Biosphere Rule #1

The first biosphere rule is materials parsimony and it is, quite simply, about simplification. Materials parsimony is minimizing the types of materials used in products. I want to be careful here because I’m not talking about minimizing the amounts of materials. Minimizing the amounts of materials is a different sustainability strategy often called alternatively eco-efficiency, dematerialization or even lightweighting. We’re not talking about volumes in Rule 1, we’re talking about types of materials, an important distinction. We’ll see why minimizing the types of materials is so important as a foundational starting point for the biosphere rules. The power simplicity is something that humans thinkers way back through the ages have understood. Aristotle said, “the more perfect a nature, the fewer means it requires for its operation.” Jump ahead a couple of thousand years and we have Leonardo Da Vinci saying, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” And then in the 21st century architect Mies van der Rohe actually said what all these other sages were trying to say with, “less is more.”

So this is a really important idea and we’ve understood it for a very long time. Less complex is actually far more sophisticated and more effective, something that was lost in the last century. Humans are smart, but the master simplifier of all is the Earth’s biosphere. As discussed in the introduction, our founding principle is that the biosphere is the only model of a sustainable production system we have and what’s important in the 1st Rule is that the biosphere is founded on materials parsimony. Let me show you what I mean. If you look at the periodic table of the elements you are looking at the material foundation of everything in the universe. Everything in the universe we can see is made up of some combination of these fundamental elements. Now what is amazing is that out of those 90 or so naturally occurring elements, all of which were available to life when the biosphere is formed, the biosphere chose to focus on just four elements — hydrogen carbon nitrogen and oxygen — to build every living thing we see. Organic chemists call this CHON (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen) and it is the material foundation of life. So if you were able to decompose any living object, a tree, a bush, a fox, you would find that it is made up of some combination of these elements. And if you add calcium and phosphorus to the mix you get to about ninety-eight percent of every living thing. That is amazing if you think about it. The diversity and the variety in nature is founded on dramatic materials parsimony. When look out the window at nature, everything you’re looking at from flowers to grass to trees to birds to animals everything is fundamentally built out of those just four elements.

In contrast to nature, when humans industrial engineers, materials designers and chemist look at the Periodic Table they get excited. They see a big sandbox and ask, “what can we do with iron? What can we do with cobalt? What ways can we use bromium? How can we use a strontium?” They innovate new materials and complex synthetic materials that are not naturally occurring in the biosphere. So instead of materials parsimony what we’ve gotten since the Industrial Revolution is materials proliferation. Estimates are that there’s thousands of new chemicals and new materials synthesized every year. It’s hard to get an accurate estimate on an actual number of chemicals the world because they’re being fabricated at such a high rate so we don’t really know the full extent of material proliferation.

When the same we’re engineers look at the periodic table and look at the fact that the biosphere chose just four elements, they say, “why would the biosphere waste all the opportunities of those other materials?” The reason is that materials parsimony is the foundation of a functional closed-loop production system.

It’s very important to recognize that materials parsimony has not in any way inhibited the ability of the biosphere to innovate in ways unimaginable for human beings. The earth is populated by millions of different species that create advanced materials slug slime or abalone knacker, which is a high performance ceramic or even cranial supercomputers we carry around in our head. Materials parsimony has not inhibited the ability of of species to infiltrate and establish a habitat in every possible ecosystem niche on the planet.

Materials parsimony goes against the grain of the way we think about innovation, but we’re becoming increasingly aware of the negative consequences of materials proliferation. DuPont’s motto was “better things for better living through chemistry.” DuPont was a leader in the chemical innovation boom and industry the high-tech leader of its time. We have to admit these companies produced a lot of really fabulous materials and we have benefited from all of them but there are consequences. These materials came with unwanted surprises and our ability to create new materials is much faster than our ability to understand their environmental and human health consequence. This guaranteed that we produced stuff without knowing if anything negative that might come out of it .

I began my career as an environmental consultant working to understand the extent of the pollution and try to clean it up in Silicon Valley, California. Silicon Valley is the home of high-tech computer manufacturers and chip makers and at the time everyone thought that was the clean industry of the future. If you go to Silicon Valley you don’t see factories with giant smokestacks belching out pollution. What you see are these nice, manicured corporate campuses. But behind the facade of the corporate campuses the truth is manufacturing high-tech products required a lot of really aggressive chemicals including highly toxic solvents, acids and other materials. Through mismanagement a lot of these toxins got out of the plant and into the soil and groundwater. Our job was to go figure out the extent of the pollution and try to clean it up. What you learn very quickly when you do this is that it is a very difficult job. If you’ve ever squeezed too much toothpaste out of a toothpaste tube and then trying to get it back in you know you can never get it all back in. Its the same thing when pollution gets into the environment. It’s very hard to get it all back and this is important because a little bit is a big deal. Many of the materials are highly toxic in small concentrations. We were trying to clean up these sites to the parts per million, parts per billion level which is the equivalent a Dixie cup of a chemical poured into an Olympic-sized swimming pool. It turned out to be a real challenge and an example of the consequences of materials proliferation.

DuPont was a the high tech company their age the innovative fast growing company and they produced a lot dramatic chemicals withreally interesting properties . Take for example the chemical a family of perfluorooctanes, or PFS. PFS don’t break down in the normal atmosphere where we live. They are synthetic so that bacteria doesn’t attack them and they’re stable in the lower atmosphere. They are very resistant to high temperatures so PFS found applications in things like Teflon and Scotchgard.

Dupont had been producing PFS for many years when a health and safety scientist at 3M manufacturing plant decided to do a routine check of employees’ blood. They sampled all the employees and as expected the blood samples of all of these employees has small concentrations of these PFC in them. But what was disturbing was that samples from the control group, people that had never been in the factory, showed concentrations of PFCs and their blood as well. This was disturbing so the scientist went to the Red Cross and got samples from blood donors across the country tested them. He found PFS in all of them. It turns out PFCs are found everywhere even in tissue samples from walruses in the North Pole from whales in the South Pole.

The discovery was shocking and 3Mm executives after evaluating the situation decided to shut down their PFS factory. Perhaps they did this because it was the responsible thing to do when you discovered that you’ve put chemicals in the in the tissue of every living thing in the planet, but there were business reasons for doing so. Superfund laws include something known as joint and several liability which basically means that any company that has used a chemical can in the future be held for the entire cost of cleanup; the manufacturer can be held responsible as can a supplier that uses that chemical to formulate a new compound, as can the company uses the chemical to manufacture a product basically everybody who touches that product can be held responsible for the entire cost of cleanup. So think about this from a business perspective. If, as some scientists suspect, PFCs are proven to cause human health problems, what is the cost of trying to clean up a chemical that’s found in the tissue of every living thing on the planet? That’s the reason 3M got itself out of the PFC business.

Dupont, however, didn’t get out. They continued to produce these chemicals stopping only when forced by government regulation to halt production. DuPont’s actions show that it understands the risk. It’s taken all of its manufacturing plants that were producing these types of chemicals and other risky chemicals and packaged them into a new company that it calls Chemours. DuPont intends to pass the responsibility off to Chemours and the investors that buy the stock. We will see if they are successful but it illustrates the costs of the unwanted surprises and the delay in reacting.

This is a important outcome of materials proliferation. Business are discovering the unwanted consequences and that you can’t take what a company like DuPont or anyone says about the safety of their chemicals if you can be held responsible in the end. One executive put it succinctly saying, “it’s no longer acceptable to us to use materials without understanding their full impacts. We want to know what’s going into our products.”

A tool helping companies do so is “green screening” which is a systematic way to screen or evaluate materials choices in order to eliminate human health or environmental toxicology risks. A good example of a relatively straightforward green screen would be the Swedish clothing manufacturer H&M. Back in the 1990's(?)H&M was confronting new regulations and the German government began restricting chemical dies. In the manufacturer clothing H&M used natural and synthetic fibers to make the clothes and use number of different dyes to provide the color. The government action called the attention of H&M management and they decided to look more systematic at how should they evaluate the risks associated with their materials choices. It appeared to H&M management that regulations were trailing way behind the ability of industrial companies to produce new chemicals and that company itself take responsibility understand and control those risks that come with new materials. For guidance H&M looked to the precautionary principle, which comes out of international law and basically what it says is the indication of risk, not proof, is all you need to take action. You don’t have to wait till there’s a smoking gun. If there’s an indication of risk it’s incumbent on us to take precautionary action to ensure that that risk doesn’t come to fruition. This is important with chemicals right because it can take a very long time to prove that a chemical is actually toxic. Just think about cigarettes how long it took to prove that cigarettes actually caused cancer. So precautionary principle says you don’t wait till people are getting cancer from your product, you take action ahead of time.

So H&M began looking around the world and identified the toughest regulations and applied them to their company globally. They also began speaking with researchers and think tanks to understand what these risk chemicals. The result is a document known as the H&M Chemical Restrictions policy, a list of chemicals that the company shares with its suppliers and contractors and says you can’t use any of the listed chemicals in the production of the products that we’re going to put on the shelves and our customers are going to wear. The company updates the list every two or three years.

So a simple list is a pretty straightforward approach and one end of the spectrum. On the other end of the spectrum are very sophisticated protocols that systematically go through and evaluate all of the materials in your product down to the CAS or Chemical Abstracts Standard level. The leader of this approach was Michael Braungart, founder of the European nonprofit the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency (EPEA). EPEA uses protocol to evaluate all of the chemicals systematically down to a fine grain level and put the chemicals in different categories using a stop line classification where Green is good, Yellow is acceptable, Red is don’t use and Orange is we don’t have enough information. Companies then systematically select green materials for production, if they’re available.

A major challenge for this approach obtaining the information need to evaluate materials. Chemical producers are required to provide a Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) to customers that provides health and safety information but it’s not detailed enough to know the material makeup and the potential risks of these chemicals. Of course you could ask producers what the chemical makeup of their materials are but individual suppliers are loath to share that information with their customer because it’s their secret sauce. The chemical formulation is their trade secret so it’s like asking Coca-Cola tell you what the secret recipe for Coke is. They protect the information for a couple of important reasons. One they don’t want people to be able to copy their formulation. Two, if you tell your if your customer what is in your product they customer backwards engineer your production process figure out how what your costs are and then use that information against you in price negotiation.

So with the structural reasons why companies don’t want to share this information an innovative approach was required. A third party like EPEA is brought in. The supplier provides information to the third party who and runs it through their protocol and the information goes into a materials database. Instead of detailed information, suppliers can only see the material category as green, yellow, orange or red. Likewise the information is shared back with the manufacturer supplier who can use it to optimize the sustainability of its offerings by finding substitutes or reformulations for red materials.

This is a nice process that does away with some of information concerns but for many companies it amount to putting their trust into a black box. If the assessment protocol is proprietary, neither the supplier nor the customer have access to it and so they don’t know what’s going on inside. As a result a manufacture might say, ”Hey why are you guys eliminating my chemical and why I can’t know why you’re eliminating my chemical?”

One of the collateral effect of green screen is materials parsimony. Evaluting your materials pallet solely for human health and ecotoxicology to get the get the nasty chemicals out of your material supply but that’s just the first step in the first important

Importantly there are business benefits pursuing materials parsimony. The biosphere rules are set up to be implemented stepwise you can take the first step generate business value. Early success sets you up you have a nice foundation to move on to the next levels of the biosphere rules. So what is the business benefit of materials parsimony? Well we can ask the opposite question what are the hidden costs of materials proliferation? What are the costs of complexity in your manufacturing system? There’s been many academic studies done around the costs of creeping complexity as companies add new features and new materials in the process of “new and improved.” One study by a major global consultancy of just the top companies in Germany found that the cost of complexity in that in their systems was estimated to be billion euros a year. That money could be recovered just by simplifying their manufacturing processes and their supplier relationships.

Materials parsimony drives cost savings by concentrating demand around a smaller number of materials. This means you need fewer suppliers which lowers your transaction costs. if you move from managing ten suppliers to managing five suppliers the costs and the complexity of managing those relationships is reduced. You’re also concentrating demand on fewer materials which means that you’re buying more in larger quantities. And if you’re buying more from your remaining suppliers you’re a better customer so you’ll likely get better service. Furthermore, demand concentration means higher volumes which translate into volume discounts. If have fewer materials you also educe the production complexity

Take the example of True Textiles, which wanted to pursue materials parsimony through green screening. They expected that doing so would raise their procurement costs by several thousand dollars. Insteand the effort resulted in a three-hundered-thousand-dollar saving on an annual basis, savings that came from a reduction the complexity of managing the supplier base which meant they needed fewer staff and less time and energy. They also got better service and volume discounts from the demand concentration

Beyond the cost savings green screening and materials parsimony can help eliminate the costs associated with handling, managing, manifesting and controlling toxic materials. You’re going to reduce your compliance costs. If you’re eliminating toxic by preferentially selecting materials that are healthy for both people in the environment you’re going to improve your worker health and safety. This can leader to increased worker productivity because the are less likely to be made sick by working in your manufacturing plant. You reduce your risks of a toxic spill or Lockheed Martin, the aeronautics company, for example used multiple chlorinated solvent systems for cleaning high-tech components. In an act of materials parsimony, the company moved away from those multiple different solvents and consolidated around a single water-based system. In doing so they saved over half a million dollars in eliminated the solvent procurement costs. But that didn’t take into account to reduced complexity of managing multiple solvent suppliers. And because they were no longer using these hazardous chemicals they eliminated much of their compliance costs. Obviously if you’re using water you there’s not as much to regulate. This also eliminated all the manifesting and regulatory requirements to stay compliance toxic chemical laws. They also eliminated the disposal costs of spent solvents that become hazardous waste. The materials parsimony based on water also facilitate the creating of a closed-loop system reusing that water based solvent over again. This led to a decrease dramatic decrease in water use, saving about two million gallons of water a year. On top of that was the improved environment and lower risks for their workers inside the plant.

Okay so that’s the beauty of materials parsimony. There are reasons to do it purely for commercial reasons without even thinking about whether we’re trying to create a closed-loop cradle-to-cradle circular manufacturing system. We can pursue materials parsimony purely for the potential business benefits and the simplicity benefits that we generate out of it. However, I recommend as you do this you be thinking about the future steps because the choices you make about materials sourcing decisions will implicate the capability of your materials palette in the context of a closed-loop system.