Don't Forget Embodied Energy

How often are you told about sustainably harvested bamboo or other flooring or other materials from across the globe that ends up in local buildings. While those products are usually great products, the energy expended to bring them into your house probably greatly offset the benefits of using it. Or how about the everyday common sense decisions we make that we think are better for the environment, do we actually know how much energy is used to create these? By quantifying the products in our lives through their Embodied Energy, we are able to compare products on a level field.

Let's back up a step here. Embodied energy is the sum of the energy that was used in the work of making a product over it's complete life cycle. This sum includes the energy used for raw material extraction, transport, production and assembly, installation, deconstruction and disposal. This sum can be quantified, and them compared across products. Doing so if a bit of a challenge for an everyday consumer, but just being aware that a thing can be done should open your eyes and let you question things a bit more.

Why should you be concerned? This is a great factor in determining if a product or service truly is green. While you may have thought that your new bamboo floors are green because they were advertised that way, the material is actually very hard to process. The energy expended to create those floors overshadow the end product. Local, privately owned forests can often produce a high-quality product, and deliver it with less energy and comparable cost.

So here's a simple question: Which is better for environment? A Ceramic cup/mug, a Paper cup, or a Styrofoam cup?
At first glance, many of us in my Green Materials class assumed a ceramic mug would be the best product. But it gets more difficult when we start crunching the numbers on each products estimated life cycle analysis. We took cost to make, cost to re-use, energy per usage. The results are that it depends on the usage. To be more efficient than a paper cup, you must use your ceramic cup at least 39 times. To be more efficient than a Styrofoam cup, you must use your ceramic cup at least 1,006 times! That's once every day at work for 4 years!

How long have you had your mug? What else in our lives do we easily overlook?