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  3. Designing for sustainability: what are the challenges behind green materials? [A] Learning to surf in California’s icy breakers,

Designing for sustainability: what are the challenges behind green materials? [A] Learning to surf in California’s icy breakers,

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问题          Designing for sustainability: what are the challenges behind green materials?
[A] Learning to surf in California’s icy breakers, Todd Copeland, a design master at the Patagonia clothing company, concluded that wetsuits (潜水服) weren’t cutting it. Sure, a traditional Neoprene (氯丁橡胶) suit could keep him warm, but the suit’s material could be synthesised only from non-renewable, energy-intensive resources such as petroleum.
[B] In spring 2008, Copeland blogged about the need for a truly green alternative. And, later that summer, his cry found its way to Yulex, an Arizona-based company working to bring back a low-energy, low-poison recipe for rubber from guayuie (银胶菊), a desert bush native to North America. Research on the plant peaked during the Second World War but was then shelved. Yulex had restarted the work around 2000 and was making hypo-allergenic (低过敏的) surgical gloves, but was seeking a new market. It saw Copeland’s post, and soon its representatives came knocking.
[C] Yulex’s efforts are set to pay off later this fall, when Patagonia releases a full wetsuit made from a 60:40 blend of guayule and conventional Neoprene, five years after Copeland initiated the search. "We hope to get that to 100% guayuie, but it takes time to learn a new material," says Copeland, now Patagonia’s environmental product specialist.
[D] This lucky match between designer and material maker is, unfortunately, a rare exception. The tale of Patagonia’s eco-wetsuit offers a lesson of the larger challenge facing green materials on the path from lab to market. The process remains a complex web that few materials survive. But a recent survey of design leaders reveals that while eco-materials still face a tougher journey than their conventional peers, the process of green technology transfer is making progress.
[E] Though spotty, statistics on green materials markets are all pointing up. The building industry is one of the largest shifting towards lower-impact practices. In the US, the green construction market is worth roughly $100bn, a ten-fold rise since 2006, according to the 2013 Dodge Construction Green Outlook. As a share, green construction now accounts for 44% of total US commercial and institutional construction, up from near zero a decade ago.
[F] Evidence suggests that big corporations are deepening their commitment to these priorities, as well. For example, Green adoption has also been accelerating at Ford. A decade ago, engineers at the No. 2 US automaker were distrustful of the cost and performance benefits of alternatives. Today, following a storm of successful material substitutions, design engineers are required to evaluate and pick green candidates where they equal or exceed conventional materials.
[G] Ford’s shift didn’t come quickly. "We were kicked out of conference rooms," laughs Debbie Mielewski, technical leader for Plastics Research at Ford Motor Co, recalling her efforts in the early 2000s to pitch bio-based plastics to the car maker’s internal development engineers. "They saw only risk and additional cost," she says. But thanks to the protection of Bill Ford Jr, the company’s then CEO, Ford’s bio-plastics R&D program had the time and funding to mature new offerings to the point where today soy-based polyurethane foams (大豆聚氨酯泡沫塑料) are used in the seat cushions, backs, and headrests of all vehicles built in North America. A focus on value and performance has helped reverse early disbelief. "Our goal has always been to match the price and performance of any material we’re hoping to replace," she says.
[H] As its commitment to recover and re-use waste carpet materials started to take root in the 1990s, Atlanta-based Interface, a $lbn-per-year manufacturer of carpet used primarily in commercial spaces, recognised it could push this goal only as quickly as a key fibre supplier, Italy’s Aquafil, was able to develop and scale-up processes to harvest fibers from recovered carpets and to then re-melt them for use in new carpeting. "This was more of us pushing recycled materials," by Interface, "rather than a pull" from the market, says Nigel Stansfield, Interface’s vice president and chief innovations officer. "We had to overcome a perception that recycled was more costly, or performed less well."
[I] Interface also faced a reverse logistics (物流) challenge: it had to work with existing and new partners to learn how to capture and truck tons of carpet back to its partner plants. "To make this work, we’ve had to focus on all parts of the product’s life cycle at once," Stansfield says. At the installation phase, for example, this has meant educating flooring installers to abandon long-standing practices of gluing carpets down, which damages the material at the later recovery stage. Interface instead relies on gravity and strong gluey patches to link its carpet tile and keep carpets locked down. And at the end-of-use stage, the move has meant developing reverse logistics flows, to steer carpet waste away from landfills, and back to re-processors such as Aquafil.
[J] Designers are widely frustrated by a lack of consistent, reliable services that can verify green materials’ virtues. The industry needs a "greenwash monitor (漂绿监控)," Patagonia’s Copeland says. There has been some movement toward this goal, with efforts including Nike’s MAKING app, Material Connexion, and the Sustainable Packaging Coalition. Green materials can fail an evaluation for many reasons. A few years ago, Patagonia became interested in bamboo-based fabrics. The cultivation of fast-growing bamboo was appealing as a sustainable raw material. But on deeper investigation, Patagonia passed on the new fabrics because the process to convert bamboo into fibres proved just as poisonous as the standard method.
[K] "Most clients think that sustainable design is simply a case of switching existing material for a greener option," says Chris Sherwin, head of sustainability at Seymourpowell, a London-based design advisor. "Same product, new material: that’s wrong on many grounds." Sherwin argues that it’s critical to understand that the stuff from which a product is made often accounts for only a tiny fraction of the impact of the use-phase of a product’s lifetime. Hence, it’s smarter for laundry soap makers to improve the performance of their cleansers in cold water rather than focus solely on revising packaging. "We should start with more fundamental product redesign," Sherwin says. "We must start by asking, how will the consumers’ needs best be satisfied, and design accordingly."
Nearly half of the US commercial and institutional construction is now green.
选项
答案E
解析 本题涉及美国的建筑，全文只有E段提到相关内容，再根据commercial and institutional construction可以进一步确定本题来自E段。该段最后一句话提到“环保建筑占了44％”，题目中的nearly half对应原文的44％，文中的account for意为“占据”，本题表达之意与原文相符。
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