Ecological And Social Footprint

A pair of scissors costs three pounds. Somewhere an ore body was blasted and a hillside of waste rock moved to get at the iron; somewhere a furnace burned for hours; somewhere a moulding machine made the handles from oil that took a hundred million years to form; and a ship carried the finished pair four thousand miles. None of that is on the price tag, and all of it happened because a designer specified those materials and that factory.

This lesson is about the part of a product that never appears in the shop. You will learn the ecological issues the specification names, deforestation, mining minerals and drilling for oil and gas; the mileage of a product from raw material source through manufacture, distribution and user location to final disposal; that carbon is produced during the manufacture of products; and sustainability through the approach of the six Rs, which are reduce, refuse, re-use, repair, recycle and rethink. Then you will cover the social issues: designing safe products, providing safe working conditions, and reducing oceanic and atmospheric pollution while minimising the detrimental impact on others. This is specialist technical principles content, and it produced the single largest question on the specimen paper, an eight mark analyse and evaluate item that carried more marks than any other.