sourcemap.org
There are major issues with sustainability. No one knows what it is. No one knows how to measure it. Emerging as one of the answers to both of these questions, LCA has been championed and criticized. There ought to be better alternatives, but the questions are complex and so are the answers. In the midst of the what-the-hell-is-sustainability debate, LCA is one of the few quantitative tools available. It is the closest thing we have for informing the public and ourselves about the “impact” of a product.
Life cycle analysis is meant to give a comprehensive look at the energy embodied in an object. The best public example is carbon labeling, which allows consumers to better understand the origins of the product.
Database -There are several out there. It goes by country. It has been done using value systems (hierchist, anarchist, etc)
Manufacturing Diversity -There is no way possible for someone to know exactly where things come from unless they are inside the company.
Unit of Comparison -What is the functional unit for comparison between the products?
Translation into Impact - From material, energy, to impact.. how do you compare the impacts between mercury poisoning to air pollution effects on lungs to noise annoyance effects on your stress levels? These are all impacts that LCA needs to be able to quantify.
I believe that LCA can be used internally to aid companies make industrial and economic choices about their products. Until the process becomes mainstream and standardized, I think it is foolish to believe that regular people on the streets can be expected to be so close to their consumption of material goods. The opacity of the manufacturing as well as the loss of value for “craftsmanship” in the global economy (buzz!) prevents ol’ Joe from the streets from being able to accurately identify the components in an object.
Although sourcemap.org is a seemingly interesting idea, it cannot become useful until there is a reputable inventory built up or involvement from several sources willing to be watchdogs on each other. Unfortunately, I don’t foresee progress in this direction. Compare the situation to citizen investigative journalism. Without incentive to be as accurate as is necessary for something so finicky and detail-dependent as LCA, the program will not be able to count on aggregated information from several semi-anonymous user source.
Sourcemap.org is useful for really visualizing the impacts. I think it could be made really great if there was a way to tag the location with pictures of the mining site or a way to link it to newspaper articles to describe the socioeconomic conditions in the area. It would be cool to be able to color the zones in with political associations to show what system you are “supporting” with your purchases. Sourcemap could become a great tool if our society was more aware of where things were coming from (which is one of its goals). I don’t know if “carbon footprint” is the best unit of comparison, but maybe it is the most understandable to the user. Maybe monetary or “real values” would be a different choice to consider?
