Week 2 Circular Economy Group Post

TEAM Blog Prompts for Feb 8

1. For each of the four steps of the Natural Step Framework (awareness & vision, baseline analysis, creative solutions, decide on priorities), describe precisely how you will approach the step for your project.

 

Awareness and Vision:

To determine our vision for the wall on Lehigh’s campus, the most important thing our group has discussed is our long-term goals and the whys of this project. With a group our size and a project that has many avenues of exploration, it’s especially important that we have a clear idea of the end-goal of the project. In our case, the obvious “end goal” is the implementation of a large-scale, sustainable wall on campus. 

While this is our primary goal, we completed a jamboard exercise to discuss other long-term goals for the project and to brainstorm how we can create the most impact with our living wall. In doing so, we realized that each of us were individually considering the long-term impact of our wall that could extend far beyond Lehigh. Keeping a broader impact in mind, we decided that we want to pursue a scalable design that could be implemented in businesses or homes. 

Through this collaborative exercise, we also brainstormed avenues to which we could succeed in building the wall, throwing out ideas about location, wall-type, hydroponic systems, and any other ideas. These ideas became the basis of areas to research in order to implement creative solutions. 

 

Baseline Analysis: 

In order to determine how to achieve our goals, we must first understand where we are currently at. To gain this understanding, we have conducted research on previous living walls implemented and the different techniques used in these endeavors. Through this, our team is aware of our position within the greater green infrastructure movement and we have found inspiration from previous designs and research. 

Within Lehigh’s campus, we will be administering a survey to assess the desire and need for the wall within the student population and consulting with experts & stakeholders to assess the possibilities for implementation. 

 

Creative Solutions:

A core aspect of having a meaningful impact with an innovation is to ensure it addresses a gap in existing solutions. This requires us to think creatively in order to differentiate ourselves from other living walls. Specifically, we want to look at existing examples and attempt to make them easier to use (potentially through automation, amplify their benefits, and make our living wall more financially accessible through creative solutions.) 

 

Decide on Priorities

We want our living wall to be catered towards the needs of those we want to have an impact on. It is important to us that both our priorities and our project itself is backed with research and surveys to prove the existing need of our living wall. Our end goal and utmost priority is to increase the wellbeing and efficiency of members of the Lehigh community and any other communities that might benefit from increased exposure to nature. This can only be achieved by listening to those people and using their input to direct the next steps of our project.

 

2. Identify the three most important metrics of success for each of the three pillars of sustainability (environmental stewardship, social equity, and economic prosperity) for your project?

• Environmental Stewardship
  1. Growing food locally is good for the environment. One of our hopes for this project is that our wall will be able to grow food–not only will we be providing greenery for Lehigh and the abutting neighbourhoods, but ideally we could also offer fresh, local produce from our wall. 
  2. Having live plants will improve the air quality of wherever we end up installing this wall. If the wall is indoors, we would be able to measure the impact on air pollutants before and after installation.
  3. Negating environmental impact of urban development. Urban development has many unintended consequences on both humans and the environment. While it has allowed us to prosper as an industrial nation, we have created new problems that now need to be addressed. Noise pollution, water contamination, soil contamination, and many more issues could potentially be looked at through the lens of this living wall.
• Social Equity
  1. One of our goals is to provide healthy food for the local Bethlehem community.  Bethlehem is a food desert so having locally grown produce is really important for changing health outcomes. 
  2. We want to provide access to our living wall to all demographics by making it easy to install and inexpensive. While we are choosing our budget, materials, plants, and engineering methods, we will have this in the back of our minds.
  3. Improvement of the environment in urban areas. Urban environments are more likely to experience the harmful effects of pollution, our hope is that living walls can work to undo some of that damage.
• Economic Prosperity
  1. Inexpensive green development. Development that doesn’t cost much to create, and won’t create large costs at the end of it’s life or through clean up measures.
  2. We will raise awareness about our product by marketing it as an easy to install green wall, which will incentivize people to spend money on it.  One way we will do this is by advertising to the Bethlehem community/Lehigh community through flyers, surveys, and publishing in press like the Morning Call or Brown and White on the project.
  3. To be able to continue producing walls, we will maximize profits by keeping costs low during production. This may include searching for local sources for materials, simple design schemes, limited numbers of parts, and more.

 

3. Review various strategies for moving towards a Circular Economy at: https://www.ceguide.org/Strategies-and-examples As a team, review these different strategies (except the ones under “Finance”) and identify five strategies that are relevant to your project. For each strategy, briefly explain how you might apply that strategy.

1. Maintainability/repairability: Considering the accessibility, safety, and disassembly of the living wall are all critical if we want to make it mobile, as we will need to develop plans for upkeep both indoors and outdoors. Additionally, maintenance and repair are important principles in general because we need to ensure that the wall is structurally sound while also keeping the plants nourished.
2. Design for the environment: Building a living wall aligns with this idea, since the wall will be populated by plants, which goes hand in hand with making a design for the environment. We also want to promote sustainable practices in the construction of the wall itself and in how we maintain the plants, whether that be through the use of hydroponics or soil.
3. Resource Efficiency: When designing this wall, it is essential that we configure a way to save resources, since the plants will require water, sunlight, nutrients, etc. In considering resource efficiency, we will design a wall that uses the least amount of resources in the most sustainable way. For instance when thinking about the use of hydroponics vs. soil, we must consider that hydroponics uses 98% less water than soil, however soil uses less electricity than hydroponics.
4. Repurposing: The living wall is exactly that— using plants and redirecting their purpose towards being a part of a structure. We can also investigate how to build the wall’s skeleton from repurposed materials and incorporate clean energy into the maintenance process, allowing us to contribute to a more circular economy.
5. Services Not Products: Building a living wall requires many products. We need to factor in a proper lighting system if the wall is indoors, a watering/irrigation system that may use electricity to circulate water, and various other materials used for construction. Purchasing things such as services reduces our resource consumption and saves money, which is especially critical on a university campus.