Hasta La Ideas

Sustainability-minded designers have known about Life Cycle Assessment tools for years now, but it’s only lately that they’ve emerged from academia into something closer to their intended use: a means of letting manufacturers and consumers know the hard facts on the environmental impact of products. Stepping up the public notoriety for the process is this post from Friday’s NY Times’ Bits technology blog, in which an assessment from a research team at Carnegie Mellon is used to answer readers skeptical about the efficiency of LED lighting.

The results are no surprise (yes, they’re way more efficient, so there), but more exciting is the acknowledgment by a major publication that these are questions with real answers, and that we now have the tools to answer them. If this keeps up, maybe we start seeing LCA results in product reviews?

>>Read the post here.<<

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