Commodity Ecology Model for Achieving All Sustainable Development Goals
* Article: A Circular Economy for the World: The Commodity Ecology Model for Achieving All Sustainable Development Goals. by Mark Douglas Whitaker and Geon-Cheol Shin.
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Contextual Citation
1.
“If we are to create a sustainable world—one in which we are accountable to the needs of all future generations and all living creatures—we must recognize that our present forms of agriculture, architecture, engineering, and technology are deeply flawed. To create a sustainable world, we must transform these practices. We must infuse the design of products, buildings, and landscapes with a rich and detailed understanding of ecology. Sustainability needs to be firmly grounded in the nitty-gritty details of design. Policies and pronouncements have their place, but ultimately we must address specific design problems: How can we design our products and manufacturing processes so that materials are completely reclaimed? How can we create wastewater treatment systems that enhance, rather than damage, their surrounding ecosystems? How can we design buildings that produce their own energy and recycle their own wastes? How can we create agricultural systems that are not dependent on subsidies of pesticides, fertilizers, and fossil fuels? Design problems like these bridge conventional scientific and design disciplines. They can be solved only if industrial designers talk to biogeochemists, sanitation engineers to wetland biologists, architects to physicists, and farmers to ecologists. In order to successfully integrate ecology and design, we must mirror nature’s deep interconnections in our own epistemology of design. We are still trapped in worn-out mechanical metaphors. It is time to stop designing in the image of the machine and start designing in a way that honors the complexity and diversity of life itself.”
-- Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan, (in Ecological Design, Tenth Anniversary Edition, 1996)
2. Shadow Cities vs Smart Regions
"Current smart cities by themselves are unable to handle up to 3 billion people by 2050 potentially living in the ‘Shadow City,’ the unofficial slum communities around the urban areas of the world that are growing now (Neuwirth, 2004) However, smart regions can be seeds for starting to address social and environmental externalities of the ‘shadow city’ that the world is developing. The Commodity Ecology Mobile platform by enfranchising these ‘smart regions’ can address material handling problems of ‘Shadow Cities’ as they begin to arise as well. There are two scenarios about the future, one pessimistic and one optimistic.
For the pessimistic scenario, picture one future for the year 2050, in which a handful of tiny, rich, urban, and green-living populations enjoy their late 20th century ideas of a ‘smart city’ in the year 2050 yet by then surrounded by the 21st century’s inequalities of massive rural slums of “gray” material degradation and misery without services."
Source: A Circular Economy for the World: The Commodity Ecology Model for Achieving All Sustainable Development Goals. By Mark Douglas Whitaker and Geoncheol Shin. J. APEC Studies Vol. 12 No. 2 (December 2020), 77-99
Abstract
"The Commodity Ecology Mobile (CEM) platform is an online platform to enfranchise the world in its own sustainable development. This is a review of the three main design decisions in this platform to reach cheaply and durably [1] all people, [2] all regions, and [3] all material uses to aid a clean circular economy. Respectively, it does this by [1] creating a long-term civic deliberation space taking advantage of the existing network value of over 5 billion mobile phones, [2] by using 867 ecoregions as a global yet detailed geographic space in which to debate and build such regional sustainable development, and [3] by using the Commodity Ecology model which is the most detailed framework of a circular economy with 130 different social uses of materials. The platform is recognized by the United Nations Academic Impact Office (UNAI) as a good way to achieve Sustainable Development Goal #12 (Encourage Sustainable Production and Consumption). The 17 SDGs will not be achieved by 2030 without a world strategy to enfranchise billions in their own development. Mobile-accessible platforms and virtual communities can build real geographic community participation toward sustainable goals worldwide. Moreover, a strategy to achieve SDG#12 first uniquely catalyzes action on all other SDG goals. A conclusion discusses technical and social plans of the project for the future."
Excerpt
"How the platform works: three design decisions merge into a single online platform
The CEM platform brings together all ecoregions and 130 material uses through a mobile phone network. The mobile platform allows all ecoregions to effectively exchange information on sustainable materials and waste management in a quick, easy, efficient, and affordable way. The conceptual image of Fig. 3 for the Commodity Wheel has been converted into the CEM platform as a clickable wheel in Fig. 4, and the ecoregional map has been converted into a clickable map in Fig. 6 above.
To summarize the above discussion, the CEM platform:
1. Reaches all individuals via mobile phones: over five billion people from 2019.
2. Reaches all specific regions and all local knowledge globally in ecoregions: 867 nuanced regions of decision making and deep deliberation are allowed by the greater digital parity of mobile networks now as well.
3. Reaches all material uses by using the same framework of a circular economy in all regions, simultaneously, called “Commodity Ecology”: 130 social uses for materials creates equally a detailed regional-level circular economy in a long-term discussion, planning, and business incubation for particular areas while sharing knowledge across ecoregions’ different versions of circular economy on the same platform, globally.
CEM platform users can:
1. post as producers or as consumers about current sustainable materials available in any of the regions; posted information can be classified in one or multiple categories simultaneously; posted information can be classified either in only the user’s home ecoregion or both the user’s home ecoregion and a global level discussion simultaneously.
2. post about future goals or business incubation desired in a particular region in a particular commodity category
3. post about tradable wastes per category to remove wastes from being dumped into the air, the water, or the earth.
4. search for posted information via a search function based on how posters’ classified the information, or search via scrolling through the past posts on 130 threads of information in each ecoregion like a newswire.
5. view each ecoregional newswire or a global level newswire; the global newswire is the live feed of all changes on the platform across all ecoregions as well.
Thus, users can view and communicate on all regional projects and share ideas for linking sustainable materials and wastes in a circular economy. This feeds the CEM platform with the latest information on sustainable materials and consumption. Below, two images from the platform are discussed for how they link together. The first image in Fig. 6 is the homepage, which is the global ecoregional map. Users register and log in on this page. Users register to particular ecoregions. In Fig. 6, note the author is logged in as a user, seen in the top bar. Equally note the arrow in the ecoregion over the Central Korean Deciduous Forests in the image below. In this case, that is the geographic registration location of the user was recorded when they registered via a satellite network of the current geographical location of the registering user. In this way only users geographically associated with a particular region can enroll in the platform. (There are always problems in automatic technical details of assignments like this, though this automatic digital vetting by the platform itself is an important general principle. Exceptions like misaligned users can be handled on a case by case basis by user appeals to the administrator of the platform.) Only registered users to a particular ecoregion can post in a singular ecoregional zone and a shared global-level zone. This is to avoid ‘trolls’ and ‘spam’ on the platform from anonymous posters and commenters, and this is to use the virtual community toward encouraging a real geographic community of virtual users as much as a global platform of debate and sharing about sustainable materials. Anonymous users only view information posted on the platform and are unable to post or comment. Of course this encourages anonymous users to enroll in order to participate in their ecoregion and in the global conversations about sustainable materials—and eventually to buy, sell and exchange sustainable materials and services facilitated via the platform itself in the next iteration once the Blockchain service is arranged.
In Fig. 6, note the digital conversion of the ecoregional map. In the earlier Fig. 4, note the digital conversion of the “Commodity Ecology Wheel” in the earlier Fig. 3. Merging the functions of these two digital images (Commodity Wheel and ecoregions) via links in the platform, the same “Commodity Ecology Wheel” of 130 material categories of discussion exists for ongoing posting, debate, and business incubation in each ecoregion. Any users (registered or anonymous) can click on any ecoregion (Fig. 6), and see the same view of the 130 material categories of the Commodity Ecology Wheel, though each ecoregion has unique information for each ecoregion’s material categories of posts. This is because the platform earlier vetted and sorted registered users to particular ecoregions based on the geographic locations of users when they registered. This is an easy way to manage sustainable materials and consumption in a quick, efficient and cost-effective way globally and to use a virtual community for real geographic communities. The rainbow colors on the outside of the digitized Commodity Ecology Wheel are without symbolic meaning per category, per se. However, the colors as a whole indicate a positive colorful rainbow of many options per ecoregion to discuss.
Merging these two functions conceptually, any Commodity Ecology wheel will show the same material categories in each ecoregion as the same, though will have distinct area-related information for each region and for each material category. This allows people to compare and contrast different circular economy plans and progress, taking inspiration or caution from each other to learn laterally. A faster parallel social learning can take place if the platform is catalyzing the same rubrics of a circular economy around the world.
In short, users on the platform build information and business incubation toward their own ecoregional circular economies. They learn about this via their growing knowledge of material and social relationships per ecoregion, and they learn laterally and faster for how to do this across the platform from others globally involved in a similar circular economy project. This is contrasted to applying only abstract social rubrics for SDG goals that can have highly varied national interpretations for how or when they are achieved. Instead, the rubrics for Commodity Ecology comprise a set of the same 130 different material/technological categories in which we can ask three interrelated questions: “do we have enough sustainable choices available in this category yet, in this particular region?”, and “are we choosing well in this category toward sustainability yet, in this particular region?”, and “how might we help out local consumers, producers and environment by understanding what products or wastes in one commodity category might be more productively used in other categories?” These three questions are aided by the durable connections of a shared mobile-accessible platform used by practitioners, citizens, consumers, and producers alike in an area to talk to each other. In an ongoing way, they can talk about what material choices are available sustainably in a region by category, as well as in turn (equally important) note immediately in what categories they are deficient, for improvement; what useful wastes or products that are found in a region that might be applied well as inputs into other regional categories; and what sustainable choices are dreamed of in a region that are not available yet. Thus it is very clear whether you have good ideas or lack them in any category of the Commodity Wheel, in a particular ecoregion. It raises all material uses to civic debate in particular ecoregions for how well or poorly integrated they are in the choice itself or their waste flows between them."