The whole picture

I was happy with the new stainless steel water bottle I had purchased to avoid the evils of plastic—the leaching phthalates and Bisphenol A, the burdened landfills.

I was not alone—I began to notice more and more stainless steel bottles in yoga class and at the gym. A great bottle shift was taking place.

Then I read an article in the April 19 New York Times titled “How Green is My Bottle,” ( nytimes.com , search the article title), which took me down a couple of notches in water bottle smugness. Turns out I hadn’t considered the whole picture.

To assess the true environmental impact of a stainless steel bottle, Daniel Goleman and Gregory Norris use a method called “life cycle assessment,” evaluating the five stages in the life of things we buy: extraction and processing, manufacturing, distribution, use and disposal.

Goleman and Norris reveal that making steel requires the mining of chromium ore, which exposes workers to “a heightened risk of cancer.” Processing the ores burns “enormous amounts of fossil fuels” and “releases greenhouse gases, carcinogens, particulates and toxic materials into the air, water and soil.”

Making stainless steel results in about 10 times more pollution than making regular steel, shipping the bottle burns fossil fuels and washing the bottle in my dishwasher requires energy consumption (admittedly better than throwing a plastic bottle away). And what about that pesky plastic top I had conveniently ignored?

A few days later, I heard an enthusiastic radio report about a new lithium battery, still in the testing stage, that can charge a cell phone in 15 to 20 seconds. My immediate reaction was, “Great! What a savings in electricity!” But then I began to wonder about the environmental costs of extracting lithium.

It turns out that half of the world’s lithium lies under the Bolivian desert. Extracting it exploits the indigenous Aymara, destroys a unique landscape and all its creatures, uses huge amounts of water and poisons the remaining drinking water.

And that’s just the extraction process.

Life cycle assessment makes it impossible to ignore the whole picture when it comes to hyped “solutions” to burning fossil fuels. There’s a lot of talk, for example, about how the electric car will eliminate our addiction to oil and decrease the amount of greenhouse gases we spew into the atmosphere. But if we consider the whole picture, it becomes more complicated. Electric-car manufacturers are developing lithium batteries for future vehicles because they weigh less and store more power. So even though electric cars have been touted as eco-friendly because they don’t burn fossil fuel, the extraction of lithium is anything but eco-friendly. And when the electric car becomes a mass-market commodity, will solar technology or coal-fired electric plants power our millions of cars?

While there is no easy way to transform our complex industrial systems so that they become earth- and people-friendly, innovators William McDonough and Dr. Michael Braungart are convinced that we do not have to create toxic pollution and waste. Instead of “cradle-to-grave” design, the old “take-make-waste model of the last century,” they promote “cradle-to-cradle” design.

In this paradigm, products do not end their lives in landfills; their components are reused to make equally valuable new products. McDonough and Braungart use natural, safely biodegradable materials that can be returned to the soil to feed ecosystems.

For example, they helped design an upholstery fabric by combining pesticide-residue-free wool with organically grown ramie. The fabric is dyed and processed entirely with nontoxic chemicals. Fabric trimmings are used as mulch for growing fruits and vegetables, returning the textile’s biological nutrients to the soil. The innovators have also developed perpetually recyclable carpeting.

Isn’t that a pretty picture?

- Marcia Nehemiah