Sustainability in Audio ...

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Hi again,

I'll start out myself with an example from WIMA capacitors:

WIMA - Kondensatoren für die Elektronik

which describe (part?) of their environmental policy in their datasheets (image below). Thus with reference to the LCA chart it seems that WIMA is making an effort in the materials/acquisition, manufacturing (energy & resources optimization according to DIN14001) & packaging fields of a product's life cycle.

I don't know, though, if this is "good" or other manufacturers do more - or maybe less?

Any other examples?

Best regards,

Jesper
 

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Sustainability. I think that everyone should do whatever they can to be certain that they use little to no resources whatsover. The degrees of their sacrifice should be commensurate with their activism. Yes true, some will pay a the ultimate price, but their honor will serve as fine examples for the rest of us. Their names will be spoken with reverence. In fact if we had enough of these exemplary activists as examples, the end goal could be achieved and all resources will once again be deemed to be abundant.
 
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Trees grow a lot faster than phytoplankton becomes oil.

I wrote a paper in econ many years ago about trying to find the true cost of something. That's cost, not price. When you buy oil, you are only paying a processing fee, the cost was paid over the last few million years. I concluded the only measure would be in solar units. How do you determine the cost of an idea? Not easy. Even the cost of labor is not easy to add up. Price is, cost is not.

If you try to look at cost, you will find oil is very very expensive. It is finite right now. We are just now becoming capable of producing oil out of other organics, but again, very expensive.

The flip side of DIY is the new junk being sold that is only designed to last as far as the front door. Sustainable is when I re-cap a Hafler from the 70's or keep buying Parasounds off e-bay instead of the garbage being sold in the retail stores now.

ROHS does not sound as green as recycling when it uses materials that are no more sustainable and sometimes not as functional. Kind of like the incandescent light bulb fraud, If yo total the actual cost ( not price) of a CLF it is way higher in even just energy used over the total life. 6 light bulbs take less energy to produce and use from mine to disposal than one CFL.

On the DIY side, my engraved front panels use less energy that the vacuum fluorescent displays in store bought stuff.
 
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Hi all,

Hmmm ... Reading through the posts from beginning to now I notice that this topic of sustainability in audio appears to have quite some emotional aspects to it as well. This may be as it is and also fine ... I'd just like to invite all to remember keeping a respectful tone, implicitly and explicitly, whatever their opinions or feelings about something ... Given that fully sustainable production to my knowledge has not yet been made possible outside of simple product cycles (very local food production for example) I assume there are many potential ways to look at this and also offer solutions.

To this end my personal approach is the cradle-to-cradle (C2C) philosophy:

Cradle-to-cradle design - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

which in my opinion/understanding offers a path/direction to pursue: Produce and use in ways that lead to nature compliant waste or re-used waste (put somewhat reduced), although currently production is some way from being there.

An example from another line of business can be a clothes linen producer in Switzerland which, some years ago after a C2C analysis, went from using some thousands of different substances in their production to about 20 (& I understand that these were more sustainable. I remember my source for this being the C2C book by McDonough & Braungart: "Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things" but I'm not quite sure about this).

Could something similar be done in the audio industry, what would it take, and who does it?

My reason for posting the LCA chart above is to invite diy'ers here with other knowledge to - in a practical & solution oriented way - post their insights on what actual companies/technologies are doing in terms of sustainability initiatives with respect to various parameters. The LCA chart IMHO offers a reasonably structured way to look at this and to exchange about it ... My reason for suggesting it used is to be able to focus an exchange here which could otherwise become quite wide ... (please feel free to post better/more feasible suggestions).

@tvrgeek:
I wrote a paper in econ many years ago about trying to find the true cost of something. That's cost, not price. When you buy oil, you are only paying a processing fee, the cost was paid over the last few million years. I concluded the only measure would be in solar units. How do you determine the cost of an idea? Not easy. Even the cost of labor is not easy to add up. Price is, cost is not.

Thanks for your input. Sounds like a very interesting approach you have - would you be willing to share your paper with me (moensted1 at hotmail.com)? Myself I've been much inspired by this paper:

http://web.pdx.edu/~kub/publicfiles/MeasuringWellBeing/Talberth_2006_GPI.pdf

which appears to address the topic from a somewhat different angle by e.g. looking at the difference between GDP and GP (GP=genuine progress, i.e. production value when considering the side-effects of production). But from reading what you write the message could be along similar lines.

Greetings,

Jesper
 
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Sorry, when I moved to Maryland, I had to make everything fit in a U-Haul. All my papers and most sadly, a box of tubes were left behind.

You might have gotten a kick on a paper I did on redevelopment of an East African country. About all they had was an empty but very stable desert. The jist of it was to lease it to France as a nuclear waste dump. Really freaked out the professor. He wanted me to publish, but I had a full time job and it takes way too much work to turn a business paper into an academic paper. I suspect the country I was assigned to analyze would not have been amused and I wish them no ill will.

I wrote another paper just for fun on what computers should do for us. How a personal agent should behave and how one can make money doing it. I showed it to an engineer at RIM and he admired the industry could easily do what I proposed, but companies are so focused on getting a bigger piece of the pie rather than making the pie bigger it would never work. Probably 90% of what I put down was in Star Trek or Time Enough For Love. Heinlein was only wrong on the size. My voice activated agent would be named Oh Sh!& , so when I go into the kitchen at midnight to get a snack, open the fridge and say, "Oh Sh!&, we are out of milk" The agent would know to respond, "Would you like me to add that to the shopping list?" The next morning, when I wake to my personal news feed five minutes early, it reminds me I need gas as the car agent told it so, and prints my shopping list for me. Basically, I had about 20 scenarios like this. The business plan is that a service provider, Verizon, or whomever, provides a framework as part of your basic communications service. You then plug in services like phone, car agent, personal agent, bank agent etc. You get nickeled and dimed to death on all the ala-cart services. All it takes is standardized APIs for the various frameworks. We have all the technology. A fortune is there to be made if we ever develop a vaccine for the very contagious disease the infects almost every board room, ACIS*

*Axxx-Cranial Inversion Syndrome

PPS: My new laptop I had to buy only because my old one was obsoleted in IO technology, has a sticker claiming Toshiba will take it back at any time for recycling. I gather that may be mandatory in the EU. Here we still toss our "green" CFL's in the trash.
 
In reference to GDP vs GP, we still have the age old problem: Lies, Damn lies, and statics.

The problem with tracking real growth is our expectations change too fast. If I lived with the same expectations as my parents at the same age, I would be vastly better off. If I measure by our current society expectations, I have fallen considerably.

The problem with macro measurements is they are macro. Our (US) economy is recovering on a macro scale, but it is doing so by generating a less uniform distrubution of wealth. So, is revenue per worker relative when the distribution is shifting? Or is a measure of progress per household per demographic more informative to real progress? Unfortunately, multi-factor measurements won't sell papers. We only read headlines and the talk show pundents who twist them to their bias, where understanding would take reading a complete reporters column. Is our recovery actually at the expense of the future? Not in dollars, but in solar units and time required to replace the materials we are consuming? Time. That is a factor I have not figured out how to equate. Maybe if someone would give me a few million in a grant I'll go work on it.
 
Did some consulting for a guy. I'm going to change the details a little bit but understate them. His kitchen was adjoined to a swimming pool, the pool was adjoined to his garage in which sat a car under a cover. Not going to even go into what was under that tarp. Let there be no mistake, there is serious money to be made and being distributed. Go green baby, but don't kid yourselves.
 
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Back in the 70s I realized that we were heading for shortages, Oil is only one.

Another is going to be clean water. Ariable land is becoming a problem.

Our basic problem is overpopulation.

That aside, I recycle as I can. Unfortunately the USA is not well educated and the cattle masses are too lazy to be bothered with it.

On an up-side, the town I live in (60K people) acutally has an E-Waste facility and does moderate recycling. They accept CFLs, computers, TVs, etc. Curb side recycling takes Al, plastic, paper, but not steel.

I salvage parts from old equipment to use for breadboarding. When I finish a bradboard project I disassemble it, unsolder components and put them back in drawers if they are still in good shape.

When I build an amp or some other piece of equipment I want to last I use new parts.

I just bought new handles for my wheelborow which is 30 years old.

I repaired a watering can with RTV so I don't have to buy another one.

I hate to throw anything away if I can coax it along another couple of years.

In the grand scheme of things, I expect vacuum tube audio is a grain of sand on the beach of life.
 
In the 70s we were running out of spirit. Much as now. There really is no oil shortage. There never will be. Bury that myth. If you want to do something real for humanity keep your country productive, make money and spend some time and money in a place like Haiti where there are real problems. Like people who need industry. Industry that buys water. Like they have right next door in a productive country. Shortage? Oh yes we have a shortage. We don't think. Think. Not thinking is killing people. A lack of industry is killing people.
 
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Yes and that is my point. We are not killing the planet with our hifi gear. There is a human being near you that you can actually do something for by being over productive. Then you can really slap yourself on the back and know you did something of actual value instead of promoting some big shots Gorey agenda. Pssst....hey bud you go along with us and we will let you keep your green but you gotta help us go after the little guys where the real green is. Go green baby green. Yeah right. Actually recycling is fine. Without the feel good guilt "aren't I a great citizen" bull.
 
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