WattzOn Connects You With the Real Story of Your Stuff (3 of 3)

The Problem Areas

Fuzzy Details For Important Product Features

There are particular pieces of a product's puzzle that significantly add to the complexity of calculating watts, but are nevertheless important to factor in. For instance, transportation methods are as important as distance - the same product can be shipped the same distance, but shipping it by boat versus plane will dramatically change its embodied energy. So when WattzOn asks for a user to input where the product is made, we also ought to be inputting how it was shipped from manufacturer to distributor, and from distributor to our hands.

But yikes!! That's a lot of variables and information that is tough - if not impossible - to find out. Unless the manufacturer plays a significant role in relaying this information, then we're going to have a hard time getting the most accurate calculation.

We're always be left with estimates because we're never going to get at these tiny, but important details.

Finding Information Without Deconstructing The Product Yourself

This was a frustrating area for me. Even scanning manufacturer specifications for the product, reading product reviews, and scouring used parts websites wasn't enough to tell me some of the important details about my LG phone, which I need to know to make accurate inputs.

Instead, I need to go the iFixIt route and take the phone apart, weigh it on a scale (which I don't have, and that means heading to the produce section at the local grocer or deli), take a good guesstimate at what the material is, and then input it individually.

There are certain inputs like "circuit board" that already have that info for you - but circuit boards vary in size and content within electronics, so this generic input for "circuit board" might not be very accurate if we're looking at a small, older flip phone versus a larger smart phone.

Getting at specific information for a products components can prove difficult if you're not willing to dive right in with both hands and figure it out for yourself. While it's a lot of fun, it does take time, research, and a love of digging for answers.

Know Your Green Materials? Take This Quiz

Product Details Left Out: Packaging, manuals, chargers, power source for manufacturing facilities...

There's more to a product's embodied energy than the product itself. With a cell phone, for instance, there's a charger, a manual, sometimes a software CD, and so on. Even though a charger is technically a separate product, we don't buy one item without the other, so it seems it should count towards the product's gross embodied energy - or at least be available as an option to calculate the product with or without that component.

We need to be able to factor in everything that comes with the product when we purchase it so that we get the full picture of the impact of our product consumption.

User-Generated Content Leaves Lots of Room For Errors

Like a wikipedia, anyone can input and edit information on a product in WattzOn. They don't have to be experts, and WattzOn doesn't require citing sources of information - that leaves lots of room for miscalculation. While this isn't a big deal here and there, if someone inputs several pieces of incorrect data for a product (especially if its on big ticket items like a circuit board or lifespan that dramatically change the total embodied energy), the calculation for the product's watts can be thrown way off.

If we're trying to calculate our personal energy footprint and that is dependent upon the sum of many, many products, then having the most accurate data for individual products is key.

We own A LOT of stuff

There is just so darn much to input. Look around the room you're sitting in, the computer you're reading this on, the clothes you're wearing, the tea inside that mug on top of that coaster on top of that desk...and so on. There's a lot we need to input to fill out a database like this. And so far what is included in WattzOn is barely a scratch on the tip of a gigantic iceburg.

Using Watts As a Translation for Our Consumption and Impact

It's important to look at the embedded energy of a product, but arguably even more important is translating that information to consumers effectively. After all, we're the ones making daily choices on which products to buy.

WattzOn states, "We chose watts because we want to change the conversation on personal accountability in climate change away from the common "carbon footprint" and towards collective energy reduction. Measuring in power rather than carbon emissions recognizes that it will not be possible to support our current lifestyles with any energy technology that we could implement in the near future - our needs are not sustainable."

It's true that looking at energy consumption in order to reduce total consumption should be a goal. But to a public getting used to hearing about carbon footprints and finding out the "tons of carbon" released from different activities, is it really so important to make that change?

We understand that to be sustainable, each person on the planet has a carbon budget of 2 tons per year. To know what percentage of our carbon budget a product takes up, we have to translate the watts calculated by WattzOn back into carbon emissions.

Could a product's impact not be calculated in terms of both carbon emissions [i]and[/i

And, similar to the problem of carbon, with watts we need something to relate them to. How many light bulbs left on does that equate to? What percentage of a power plant? Is the final watt calculation a big number or little number for a particular type of product? And watts still relate back to carbon emissions since we think of watts as coming from power plants, and power plants release carbon emissions.

With the rest of the world getting better at, and more used to, speaking in terms of carbon emissions, watts can simply be confusing.

The Positive Areas

We Don't Know What's In Our Stuff

It might seem like a negative, but in reality this is a great feature of WattzOn. As you explore inputting products, you go on a hunt to find out what they're really made of. You make some surprising discoveries about how little you know about something you use every day, like a cell phone, and the complexity of things we take for granted as being simple, like a t-shirt.

WattzOn opens up our minds to the intricacies and impacts of our products.

Discovering Which Pieces of the Pie Make The Biggest Difference

One thing that surprised me again and again during this project was how aspects of a product we don't think too concretely about can dramatically change its impact.

For example, we're always talking about manufacturers needing to design products that have a long life span - but why is this so important?

Well, when I inputted the lifespan for the LG phone as 4 years, which is easily how long the product can function before needing to be replaced, the embedded energy added up to about 26 watts (based on the data I'd inputted so far). But when I inputted it's lifespan to be 18 months - which is how often most mobile phone users upgrade their phones - it shifted to a whopping 74 Watts.

The lifespan of products makes a HUGE difference in how much energy they embody. The longer the life, the less of an impact they make. WattzOn helps hammer this home by providing real numbers to show just how important this part of a product is.

Also, this can open designers' eyes for where to focus their efforts. A circuit board is listed at contributing 34,000 MJ/kg. Plastic is listed at contributing 100 MJ/kg. So should designers and manufacturers really be focused on switching to bioplastics to decrease the impact of their products, the portion of the device that is most easily recycled anyway? No way! They need to be looking at the guts of the product, the electronic components that make the biggest difference.

Getting more people to see this will push manufacturers to make meaningful changes in their designs.

Comparing This Versus That

Over at TreeHugger, we're constantly being asked - and constantly working to find out - about which is the greener choice to make in many conundrums. Is a Roomba better than an upright vacuum? Is it greener to get a microwave or a toaster oven? WattzOn helps with these calculations so we know what to bring into our lives and what to leave out.

For example, if you're trying to decide whether or not to buy that solar charger bag in order to get your gadgets off grid, you might be dismayed to find out that its embodied energy is so great, you'll never actually save enough grid energy to offset what it took to make the product in the first place. Perhaps it's better to skip the bag altogether for your gadgets, and consider a rooftop solar array for your home in order to be effective at reducing your total energy consumption. The calculations can be sticky, and WattzOn has the potential to help.

Outlines The Path Towards Transparency and Responsibility

What did playing around with inputting a product into WattzOn really do for me? It made me flat out mad that manufacturers aren't more transparent with the details of their products. It surprised me at how quickly some components add up, and how much that can alter my total footprint. And it made me crave having more information like this for responsible decision making. In other words, it tweaked my perspective on "stuff" and if all of our perspectives get tweaked enough, it'll put us all on a path towards manufacturers and consumers both making better decisions about products.

Finding Out Where Our Stuff Comes From

So, how do we find out more about the sources of the products we consume? Well, once you start inputting things on WattzOn, you'll hopefully get curious and want to learn more about the specific materials listed for you to choose from for your product's ingredients. One way to explore is with a great online resource called Source Map. It pulls together the sourcing of a products components, looking at embodied energy, carbon footprint, energy use and so on. But like WattzOn, it is user generated content, so you're dependent on the accuracy of fellow users. Here's a video showing how SourceMap visualizes the sourcing of precious metals, fibers, and other common ingredients.

Getting Started with Open Supply Chains from Matthew Hockenberry on Vimeo.

Transparency in materials and supply chains is key to understanding the full impact of our products on the planet. But manufacturers - especially electronics manufacturers - are secretive, not wanting to divulge proprietary information. It makes short-term business sens, but this secrecy only increases the impact of the product on the environment, since it can limit a recycler's ability to recycle the product at end of life. We just simply need more transparency from manufacturers.

Information about the supply chain is getting better as manufacturers have stepped up. HP, for example, has started the ball rolling. But we have a long way to go. Even things as seemingly benign as packaging has a fuzzy face.

To check out the guts of gadgets, visit iFixIt, a website that tears apart our most popular electronics and shows you what's inside them. While the purpose is to encourage you to get familiar with your electronics so you're more easily able to fix them yourself (a fabulous goal, by the way), what the site can also do is show you how complex our devices are, what they're made up of, and were their impact is greatest.

We've Got A Long Way To Go

I have a lot more work and research to do before my LG phone entry feels complete, or accurate. But I'm finding that it is well worth the work. This kind of information is invaluable if we want to really get a grasp about our impact and make changes where they most matter.

So dive in, start inputting your stuff so that you can know what sort of energy footprint you have, so that you can help others do the same, and so that all of us can make more savvy daily decisions about energy consumption.