| September 8, 2006 Vol. 77, no.
4F
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| ECOENGINEERS: ME seniors Jim Gariffo and Mary Asperger are analyzing consumer products for how damaging they are to the environment. RACHEL SHAFER PHOTO |
Buying green products just got easier
ME researchers separate the environmentally safe from the wannabes
You’re moving into a new apartment and you need a microwave. You head down to Target and there are five models. How to pick one? Cost might be a factor … you want to save a few bucks. But you also want a model that is easy on the environment, one that doesn’t just save energy but also has the smallest environmental impact from the time it was manufactured until final disposal. To gather this information and analyze it yourself would be a hassle, until now.
Enter Total Environmental Assessment Rating or TEAR, an Internet-based rating system under development by ME professor Benson Tongue and his undergraduate researchers. The website rates consumer products such as microwaves, refrigerators and vacuum cleaners on their environmental footprint. For example, researchers give the Hoover Wind tunnel vacuum their highest rating: five green trees out of a possible five. (The more green trees the more environmentally benign a product is).
To arrive at that conclusion, the team investigated everything involved in the Hoover that could cause environmental damage. They used criteria such as how the product was manufactured (including how much waste was produced and whether it was treated or untreated), power consumed by the vacuum, its recycle ability when disposed, its reparability and toxins present within its system. The team then assigned each of these criteria a numeric score based on its importance and magnitude. These scores were then calculated to produce a final score from which the “green trees” rating was assigned.
ME seniors Mary Asperger and Jim Gariffo are on the current research team, which is sponsored by Under-graduate Research Opportunities. Asperger joined at the start of spring semester and Gariffo during fall semester last year. Each week, they spend a couple of hours researching products and updating the website.
TEAR has rated air conditioners, vacuum cleaners, dryers, washing machines, dishwashers, microwaves, refrigerators and toasters — 31 individual items so far. Which means a lot of legwork for researchers who pull data from the Environmental Protection Agency and manufacturers. “This job has helped me become a better researcher in the library,” says Gariffo. “My research skills have improved a lot.” TEAR also plans to evaluate food products as well as cars, clothing and furniture.
“I find this research interesting so it’s not hard to spend time working on it,” says Asperger. “I’m just now starting to work on food products so I’m looking into all the agricultural aspects. I grew up in Fresno [an agricultural area], so that’s interesting to me.”
The possibilities are infinite and team members acknowledge they’ve only begun to nick the surface. In fact, they’re recruiting other students to join them. (E-mail tearproject@lists.berkeley.edu.) “The little decisions consumers make can have a fairly big impact when enough people do it,” says Gariffo. “Maybe someday this will have an impact on global warming.”
Visit TEAR at www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~jgariffo/TEAR/index.php3.
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