Two semesters ago in my sophomore studio we were assigned a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) project tracking a certain product from cradle to grave in conjunction with reading Cradle to Cradle. After our initial research stage wepresented the LCA to the class we then went back and redesigned the product to make it more sustainable. Most of the objects assigned were fairly complex, my group redesigned the TetraPak. others did the Fusion razer, Downy Wrinkle Remover among others. The project really got all of us in the sustainable design mindset, which is quickly becoming the norm among industrial designers.
I have been trying to catch up with my design blogs from the past few days and was suprised to find an excellent article on the LCA of bottled water on Core77.com. I have always been big on using my Brita filter and veering away from purchasing bottled water, but this article is sure to make anyone who hasn't made the switch think twice. Here are a few bits that I found interesting.
In Fiji, a state-of-the-art factory spins out more than a million bottles a day of the hippest bottled water on the U.S. market today, while more than half the people in Fiji do not have safe, reliable drinking water. Which means it is easier for the typical American in Beverly Hills or Baltimore to get a drink of safe, pure, refreshing Fiji water than it is for most people in Fiji.
And...
In San Francisco, the municipal water comes from inside Yosemite National Park. It's so good the EPA doesn't require San Francisco to filter it. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35. Put another way, if the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.To read the entire article go here.
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