Ecoeffective Consulting Services
Offered by Tom Gibson

Inventing

• Develop your design and create prototypes of it
• Test prototypes
• Generate fabrication drawings
• Determine optimum manufacturing plan
• Transition to production manufacturing

Recycling

• Design and specify equipment and systems for material processing facilities
• Consult with manufacturers on designing products for better recyclability
• Research the recyclability of materials and the marketing of recycled materials
• Conduct life cycle analysis on products and materials
• Research and consult on recycling of computers and other electronic devices
• Research turning scrap materials such as tires into useful products
• Analyze effects of downcycling materials

Renewable Energy

Research and consult on:

• Wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass energy as well as fuel cells
• State incentives such as tax breaks and rebates for implementing renewable energy
• Interfacing with utilities and the electrical grid (i.e. net metering)
• Hybrid systems

Green Building

• Research and consult on sustainable building and architecture
• Find specific sustainable materials for architects and their clients
• Design, develop, and find uses for salvaged and recycled materials

For more information on green building services, click here.

Water Conservation

• Specify and design tanks, pumps, and piping systems for applications such as graywater and rainwater collection

Composting

• Research, design, and specify equipment and systems used in facilities

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The Time Has Come for Ecoeffective Services

With a background in mechanical engineering and 15 years experience in manufacturing industries, Tom Gibson offers consulting services with a unique twist that allows them to parallel the mission of Progressive Engineer magazine. He brings a mechanical engineering perspective to the area of sustainability in the field known as ecological or ecoeffective engineering.

What does it mean? Three things come to mind when you look at sustainability in light of engineering: renewable energy, recycling, and green building. While these are distinct and legitimate areas we can all grasp, and you can easily see how engineers can apply themselves within them, a far bigger concept looms on the horizon, one that drives these near-term activities. Call it ecoeffectiveness.

To best illustrate it, let’s look at recycling. We all know this is done in many ways all over the country. It may take the form of a local Boy-Scout-sponsored recycling center where you take your soft drink bottles, or maybe your municipality offers curbside pickup, meaning you sort cans, bottles, and paper into plastic bins, stick them on the curb, and a truck comes by once a week to pick them up. At a material recycling facility, machines and processes designed by engineers grind, shred, crush, and bale the materials for shipment to a manufacturing or processing industry that will use them again. The plastic bottle you bought at the grocery store may come back for a second life as a piece of plastic lumber or maybe in a carpet.

This all sounds laudable, but the truth is, recycling has yet to fully take hold. While no politicians will say they don’t like recycling, they serve up many reasons for choosing not to initiate programs. It usually boils down to economics. With our present economy and system of manufacturing products, it’s often cheaper to just throw our waste in a landfill. And household recycling doesn’t accomplish that much anyway. In his book The Ecology of Commerce, Paul Hawken says even if we recycled all the household waste in this country, it would only reduce our waste stream by two or three percent. Why so little? Industry generates that much more waste than households.

Herein lies the problem driving the call for ecoeffectiveness. Industry has traditionally taken a linear cradle-to-grave approach to manufacturing products. A company extracts resources such as iron ore or oil from the ground and then turns them into materials they use for manufacturing a product, which is used by a consumer for its useful life and then placed back in the ground in a landfill. The materials are lost forever. They call this the take-make-waste mindset.

Cradle-to-Cradle Mindset

Two pioneers in the area of sustainability, architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart, have teamed to form McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, a firm that helps manufacturing companies become ecoeffective. In their book Cradle to Cradle, McDonough and Braungart say manufacturers create what they call monstrous hybrids, mixtures of materials, both organic and otherwise, neither of which can be salvaged after their current lives. Items like shoes, cars, carpeting, and televisions are made with combinations of diverse materials and chemicals that can’t easily be disassembled and separated. For example, when an automobile is discarded, its component steel is recycled as a hodge podge of all its steel parts and other materials, compromising their high quality and restricting their future use.

The steel from a crushed car may go to make something like reinforcement bar for concrete in a scenario analogous to making carpeting from plastic soda bottles. McDonough and Braungart call this downcycling, as the material is returned to the industrial metabolism at a lower level. This is not true recycling, and it only slows the material’s path to the landfill.

Instead, McDonough and Braungart say we should strive for a system of zero waste because all material has value. Waste equals food. They define a technical nutrient as a material or product designed to go back into the technical cycle, the industrial metabolism from which it came. If you recycle a plastic bottle, it should go back to being another bottle, over and over again. A biological nutrient is an organic material that comes from a once-living organism. It can be recycled back to the earth. For example, a damaged piece of a wooden pallet can be ground into mulch and used in a garden.

A concept that goes hand in hand with the notion of a technical nutrient, according to McDonough and Braungart, is the concept of a product of service. Instead of assuming that all products are to be bought, owned, and disposed of by consumers, products containing valuable technical nutrients -- cars, televisions, carpeting, and computers, for example -- would be reconceived as services people want to enjoy. In this scenario, customers would purchase only the service of such a product for a defined period, rather than the item itself. They would not pay for complex materials they don’t want or won’t be able to use after the product’s current life. When they finish with the product, the manufacturer replaces it, taking the old model back, breaking it down, and using its complex materials as food for new products. The carpet industry has already started doing this. Interface Carpet Company manufactures a recyclable carpet in the form of easily-removable tiles. As tiles wear in areas of high traffic, they can be rotated with tiles in little-used areas, and when one wears out completely, Interface takes it back to one of its factories to be put back in the technical nutrient cycle and made into a new carpet tile.

Designing products as products of service means designing them to be easily disassembled and separated. Manufacturers would have permanent responsibility for storing any hazardous materials their products contain and reusing them whenever they can do so safely. Such a system would produce no useless and dangerous waste, would save manufacturers billions of dollars in valuable materials over time, and would diminish the extraction of raw materials and the manufacture of disruptive materials, resulting in more savings to the manufacturer and enormous benefits to the environment.

You can easily see that ecoeffectiveness fits in with our current conception of the environmental movement, but obviously it goes much further. It requires a whole new way of looking at our economy. We think of environmentalism as desirable, but it’s a burden driven by government regulations that only detracts from the bottom line. People like Hawkens, McDonough, Braungart, and many others will tell you it doesn’t have to be that way. With our economy set up properly, the goals of environmentalism and business will align -- what’s good for the environment is good for business. Rather than striving just to be less bad and meeting regulations, we should create restorative systems that actually generate a positive situation, such as those that use solar power or treat wastewater with vegetation. Engineers can participate in this.

Interim Steps to Take

While this whole scenario is admittedly ambitious and will take years to evolve into an overarching, ongoing process, we can take immediate measures now to get started. Recycling in a small community may not get all household wastes and may involve some technologically crude and labor-intensive processes, but we have to start somewhere. And developing the machinery and processes for doing this will show decision-making politicians (engineers should get involved here, too) the need for an ecoeffective way of doing things and that it can be done.

In an immediate sense, the ecoeffective engineering offered by Tom Gibson encompasses green building, renewable energy, recycling, and composting. This may sound like a broad range of expertise for one person to have and do justice to. But through publishing the stories in Progressive Engineer magazine and compiling directories of information, I have knowledge of many companies and individuals in the sustainability field and operate from a position of being able to research them quickly and extensively. For one thing, this allows me to serve as a clearinghouse and referral service. With a broad overview and expertise, I can research many areas and do design work where applicable. I can also monitor research activities and keep a pulse on the state of the art. When called for, I can network with the other companies.

When it comes to mechanical engineering work, I am licensed in the state of Virginia and can obtain licensure in other states as the need arises. For engineering projects, I can supply drafting services and fabrication capabilities through other companies.

The overall mission of ecoeffective engineering fits with that of Progressive Engineer, and the two callings complement each other. This became more apparent when we expanded our directories to include eco-oriented companies such as those that design and install renewable energy systems. Our goal there is to help such firms become more mainstream while at the same time, assist mainstream engineering firms with becoming more sustainability oriented and ecoeffective. We hope you will join us on all these fronts.

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Contact Tom Gibson at 570-568-8444 or tom@progressiveengineer.com to discuss your needs.

Click here to view Tom Gibson’s Resume

Progressive Engineer
Editor: Tom Gibson
2049 Crossroads Drive, Lewisburg, PA 17837
570-568-8444 * tom@progressiveengineer.com
©2006 Progressive Engineer