How could we apply transition engineering techniques to make this situation benign or have a positive feedback loop rather than be a problem?
We can apply Transition Engineering to this problem, just as we can to any problem. We start at the beginning, keep going until we get to the end and then stop.
Let’s define this situation very broadly as “the Tea Bag system” (or Big Tea). We also have to look at what the actual problem is, and when we understand the whole system we can understand what the problem is that needs solving – is it just “how to make a functional tea bag without plastic” or is it something else. In many systems the obvious, simple problem is not the problem that’s of interest to engineers interested in sustainability. In this context sustainability is used consistently to mean “the capacity to continue” not anything like “having ticked the box about recyclability”.
Step 1 do a bit of research into the past and present of the “tea bag system” to see how it interacts with its operating environment, how external changes have led to or forced internal changes, so we can foresee how they might again in future. We would go back as far as we think is relevant, and we can change this as we go along. Suppose we start with the history of tea bags since tea bags were invented (1908, Thomas Sullivan, New York, apparently). At some point plastics were introduced, so we’d look at what external changes were happening then – why perhaps was the plastics industry looking for emerging markets, why perhaps the paper products were causing problems? Was there something about shipping or shelf life or tea-leaf-size or something else that drove the change to plastics? I can only guess. We could usefully look at how cheap or expensive tea has been over time versus average wages, just so we can spot if there has been a trend from luxury item to everyday item etc.
Step 2 would be to get all the data on the current situation – what exactly is the current technology (plastics in paper), which polymers, what %, how are they made, etc. What is the scale of the business (billions per year as you note), what are the supply chains, dependencies (eg transport, primary energy for processing & transport), status of things like FairTrade etc. There are likely to be some unglamorous facts like “all tea is imported”, and “it’s nearly all imported from low-wage economies” and “it’s a cash-crop used to make payments on possibly questionable financial loans from the West”, which has to be part of the whole-system understanding, so that we can address the whole system and not just “plastic in the tea bags”. On price and cost, are tea prices in the shops currently going down or up?
Step 3 – Crash Test, we’d look at what might happen if nothing is changed from business as usual while foreseeable external changes take place. External changes would include market awareness, also circular economy drivers, and we’d want to look at possible changes in global transport in future (eg sensitivity of the whole system to energy cost rises, vulnerability to hiccups like Evergreen in 2021 or Hanjin in 2017. These future-looking questions will probably lead to re-visiting questions about the past, in step 1: when did tea start being shipped round the world and why was it so much in demand? So we’d identify some key vulnerabilities from “business as usual with no change of course”. What will the crash test show up if a tea company continues with business as usual including plastic tea bags? They could lose business to non-plastic teabag suppliers, but the risks are not ONLY associated with the plastics, but the whole system. If a company decides to skip the plastic and leave everything else the same, what does the crash test show us? Are there other vulnerabilities as well? Is a change of course needed to avoid the crash, beyond removing the plastic? It might be worth challenging the assumption that because business as usual has worked so far it must continue to work… actually most businesses, including Big Tea, are headed towards a crash that might have many unpleasant outcomes including going out of business. If they don’t respond to foreseeable constraints then they’re likely to fail.
Step 4 is about describing a better future. This step involves a lot more creativity and imagination and vision, supported by sound engineering and data, rather than just engineering-problem-solving. The step should be done by a group of stakeholders together, including engineers, but also people who know the tea industry and other relevant stakeholders. From steps 1-3 we should by now have a good picture of a non-ideal business as usual future with all its risks and vulnerabilities, so we can now set about describing a future that is devoid of these. From a positive perspective, a future narrative of how the tea system would look if we solve all the whole-system problems. For example:
- All end-of-life material residues are easy to recycle – no material mixes comprising organic / polymer composites. The core product being organic then all the packing could be organic to make end of life easy.
- The system is independent of cheap fossil energy for transport; if there were an energy crisis the system would not be affected.
- The system isn’t dependent on low wage economies; if there were a wage crisis the system would not be affected (this suggests asking the question about how expensive tea used to be…)
- The system isn’t dependent on factors that can change quickly like foreign exchange rates or government policies / treaties.
- The core function of tea is still delivered… hmmmm…. A lovely cuppa!
- Etc.
Step 4 is also when we can use thinking tools to break free from orthodox thinking. We can challenge all assumptions, we can look for un-said assumptions, we can look out for false binaries, we can do thinking exercises to get rid of the unhelpful constraints learnt in decades of education and work… this is why it’s helpful to have professionals in the room who are not engineers, to tell us when we’re behaving like real stereotypical engineers.
Step 5 is about back-casting – a thinking exercise you’ll all probably know, imagining we’ve achieved what we set out to achieve, and looking back to identify what we had to do to get there, instead of taking the normal (dismal) approach of asking “how much can we reduce the harm caused by the current system while still doing what we want to do?” we ask “given we’ve achieved what we set out to, how much of what we were doing did we have to change?”. This back-casting approach, done with the same group of stakeholders, will yield lots of steps taken, lots of changes made, on the way. We can then start to map out a programme of change, which has a very high degree of consensus among all professionals and stakeholders. And will work.
Step 6 is about “Trigger events”. Most big systems have high inertia, it’s like turning a supertanker, or getting out of a rut. We only have very little power and ability to change things so we need a small mechanism that is within our capability but that leads to a big change…like the steering wheel in a supertanker, or a bunch of brash to help get out of a rut on a muddy road. For an industrial system like Tea, we have the wherewithal to publish a paper or an article about this study. With a client who asks us “can you solve my single-issue sustainability problem” (like plastics in teabags, or Electric Vehicles to replace a fleet of vehicles) we can offer to do a low-risk “Initial Review” in which we’d run through these steps of Transition Engineering and highlight the risks and vulnerabilities of business as usual. The idea of a trigger event is to start the ball moving towards a bigger change… so in this case we’d aim towards engaging IMechE/EESG with the tea industry and thus other industries, and then take whatever steps they are amenable to on the route towards designing and delivering a programme of change.
Step 7 is about implementation; after understanding the system dynamics and designing a programme of change with high confidence that it will work and avoid the unsustainability crash, then all the steps of the programme of change have to be translated back into the comfortable existing management systems of the company so that the people running the business know what they have to do. This process would take several years to reach completion.
I haven’t really provided a neat answer to what changes would have to happen if Transition Engineering were applied to the Tea business, but that’s intentional. The process of Transition Engineering is like being a pilot on a ship who knows the safe way through a difficult passage, but it’s the captain and crew who know how the ship works and getting to where they want to get is a team effort.
At a guess I’d say that the more clear-sighted and bold companies will adopt the most bold course-changes, and end up being industry leaders in a very different future… which may or may not include imported luxuries treated like everyday items. I do suspect that the drinks we drink and our grandchildren drink will be different from tea and coffee and hot chocolate. Whatever that different