Word: lifset
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...LIFSET: I think it is unfair to ask companies to get out ahead of their customers. They have got to make money. They have a fiduciary responsibility, and the market would punish them if they didn't meet it. But companies should constantly be asking themselves, "How do we design processes and make products that are more environmentally benign? Are the things that everybody is talking about worthy of investment...
...LIFSET: Our economy is very effective in driving technological change, and you can see the benefits in terms of resource efficiency and reductions in pollution all around us. Companies as sophisticated as Dow or GE, first-rate companies, will produce good, responsible products. But technological change won't automatically bring about environmental protection. Consider product tagging, which is about to expand in the market in a big way. You buy a hair dryer at the drugstore, and there's a gizmo on the box that looks like a circuit or a circle of wires, and it sets off a buzzer...
Other independent groups are emerging to certify that companies' boasts about particular products are true. "It's getting more and more complicated to 'greenwash,'" says Reid Lifset, a faculty member at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. The Environmental Protection Agency's "Energy Star" label for efficient consumer appliances is the best-known program. Beyond that, Green-e, based in San Francisco, certifies energy that comes from such renewable sources as sun or wind, while Green Seal, of Washington, blesses various consumer products from air conditioners to paper towels...
That, says Lifset, is where nanotechnology plays a role. In this emerging field, which employs just about every kind of scientific and engineering discipline, researchers expect to create products by building them from scratch, atom by atom, molecule by molecule. This bottom-up nanotechnological way of making things differs from the traditional drilling, sawing, etching, milling and other fabrication methods that create so much waste along...
Researchers have made headway toward molecule-size transistors and wires and even batteries thousands of times as small as the period at the end of this sentence. These laboratory feats make talk of sugar cube-size computers less speculative than it was a few years ago. Says Lifset: "A lot of the consumer goods and industrial equipment could become dramatically smaller when nanotechnology comes online. That, plus more efficient recovery of the discarded goods, ought to translate into huge reductions in waste...