Paper, Plastic or Sound Design

There is an acquaintance of mine from Vaughan, a city in the greater Toronto area. The average family uses over 300 plastic shopping bags per year ("Seattle officials propose 20-cent grocery-bag fee", Seattle Times). Vaughan has a recycling program but it doesn't recycle any plastic products, causing a large amount of recyclable plastic to be put into the garbage, including plastic bags.

Recently grocery stores in Toronto have been required to charge for plastic bags ("Toronto proposes 5 cent fee for every plastic shopping bag", CBC). This has not been the first attempt to deal with the problem of grocery bags. Back in the 1970's, all grocery bags were made out of paper. Paper bags were biodegradable and could be put to many uses around the home. Grocery stores switched to cheaper and more recyclable plastic bags in the 1980's. During the 1990's there was a short-lived push by the stores to be ask users how they wanted to benefit the environment: biodegradable or recyclable, asking "Paper or plastic?". Paper bags costs extra and most people bought the cheaper plastic bags.

A problem with weighting the community impact of our decisions is that it's hard to measure the impact from the final product. A bag must be created, maintained and disposed of. Paper bags, despite being reusable and safe to throw away, take a lot of energy and processing to make. In some places, biodegradable plastic bags are now availiable. ("Paper or plasic - what's the greener choice?", NBC).

With City of Toronto charging people for not using reusable bags, is the environment actually helped? Reusable bags are lower in pollution to produce (Wikipedia) However, they may not biodegradable or recyclable themselves, are a temptation to shop-lift, are less reusable for household tasks (increasing sales of secondary paper or plastic products) and they may pose health risks if not properly cleaned and maintained ("Plastic industry warns of health risks of reusable bags", CBC, and Wikipedia cited above). Canadian grocery stores have a lot to gain from promoting reusable bags, which provide better a better platform for advertising, may promote overspending with the larger bag size and make it easier for large chains to compete with smaller no-frill's stores that already charge for plastic bags.

To paraphrase Scott Adams, questions like "paper, plastic or canvas?" are "not so clear" when it comes to an environmental impact. It may be less about the environment than social, business and political advantage. For 79 cents, a shopper can carry around a colourful status symbol, and that's a cheaper investment in self-righteousness than a luxury car. For the city of Toronto area which ships its waste to distant landfills, ("Toronto Solid Waste Management", Wikipedia), reusable bags may be more about saving money than saving the environment.

Meanwhile, the city of Vaughan still lacks a basic plastics recycling program.

It is similar to discussions on computer design. For most businesses, using smarter programs means doing more with less, saving equipment, Internet and power costs, better quality testing, easier maintenance and delivering a superior product to the customer.

The people who accomplish those feats of design are called computer architects. An "architect" is a computer professional who specializes in the design of large system design. The term "architect" is used in some countries as opposed to "engineer" for legal reasons, but both terms refer to modeling of complex systems.

According to TOGAF, architecture is creating design that meet the goals of the software, business and technology, particularly in terms of reliability, scalability and sound design.

Or, at least, that's the theory.

The self-proclaimed architects I know differ on what an architect does:

• Architecture consists of reassuring people--telling them that everything will be alright--even if you don't have a design that will work.
• Architecture is politics, creating systems that make your boss look good, like creating designs that use too many machines to be more impressive.
• Architecture is marketing, selling your designs to critical and disinterested people.

I suppose the role of an architect depends on the company. Some people want superior designs, and some people what to "look like the sort of company that cares about that sort of thing". But being reassuring, playing politics or being a salesman is useless unless you have prepared a sound design.

So I have a question: "paper, plastic, canvas, or a soundly designed waste management program?" What kind of computer department does your company reflect?

July 26, 2009