Is 'Prius Hype' Completely Deserved?

Our family bought a Toyota Prius about two years ago. With it came a great feeling - we all thought we were getting a great-quality car which also had a lower environmental footprint. Although it was a bit more expensive up-front, and would take some time before our actual savings would appear, the Prius' direct impact on the environment while it is being driven is easily apparent.

But what's trickier to determine is the car's total impact, or net impact, on the environment. Is this technologically advanced, fuel-efficient, energy-recycling car really helping the environment any more than a regular old Ford coupe?

One journalist, Chris Demorro, seems to have a strong opinion on this matter. He's written an article comparing the environmental footprints of the Prius and the Hummer, cars perceived as being on completely opposite ends of the 'green' spectrum. He claims that the Prius is actually worse for the environment - not as a result of gas mileage, or size, but because of manufacturing. The Prius battery contains nickel, a highly toxic substance which is terrible for the environment when processed. And shipping parts back and forth across the world doesn't help matters either.

You can read the rest of the article yourself if you want all his details. I'm not sure how much I trust his facts, as he's cited no sources for the data. However, he is shedding an important light on the bigger picture, and has gotten me to think about green issues a bit differently. Sometimes the most environmentally friendly things to do aren't even quantifiable at the consumer level.

For example, I might choose to use a toilet paper with thinner sheets per role to save paper on my end, but if the manufacturing practices of that brand over another that makes thicker sheets is more environmentally detrimental, then ultimately I'm hurting the environment, not helping it. As I touched upon in my previous post, manufacturing design and practices are one of the largest contributors to environmental destruction. So looking at a product from this stage (before it gets to market) is where the change has to really start happening. The Prius may be environmentally beneficial to drive around, but Toyota should know it has a duty to make it safe to manufacture as well.

Designing be(for)e Disasters

Insurance companies can seem to be stupid sometimes.

The idea of insurance is inherently preemptive - it's something you think about ahead of time. It's proactive, in a way. So when my insurance company rejected coverage of a device on the grounds that I was "too healthy to warrant it", I was surprised. I needed to be sick enough to receive coverage? Wouldn't it be in the insurance company's best interest to keep me healthy, rather than wait until I became sicker, in which case they'd end up paying a lot more? I don't ultimately know why my insurance company initially rejected the proposal (luckily, they did eventually accept it), but my guess is that they weren't thinking ahead.

Being proactive and creating indemnity for disasters is not something humans seem to be good at. Generally, we address problems only after they have already occurred once - and once is one too many times. Herein lies a major problem with disaster relief efforts.

Hurricane Katrina is a prime example of this lack of design pro-activism. Everyone knew that the levies in the area were not up to spec, yet nothing was done to fix the problem. Now it's getting attention (although arguably still not the attention it deserves), but only after the catastrophe had struck. Kate Stohr, of Architecture for Humanity, tells us "You can’t design for disaster after the fact. Unless it's strategically thought about in advance of disaster, these ideas don't work" (Wortham).


Although obviously not intended as temporary, these dome houses clearly had some foresight behind them. They were designed with a solution to a specific problem in mind, and were created before that problem actually manifested.

So how does a design like the one above translate into a temporary structure? Two British engineers, Peter Brewin and William Crawford, have designed an inflatable concrete house which actually hardens into a permanent dome-like structure. The use of a new material called concrete fabric allows these shelters to be incredibly sturdy and last for up to ten years.

Because of their many positive characteristics, these "Concrete Canvas" shelters can address more than the need for disaster shelters. Aside from handling temporary or semi-permanent disaster shelter, they can be used for military operations. They're flame-retardant, can handle snow build-up, and are quite sterile inside. They're also modular and can be customized incredibly easily.

Designing for disasters can be viewed on the immediate scale, but recently I've been thinking that we all have an obligation as designers to look at a larger, global-level disaster that's occurring as I write this. It's not what you'd normally think of as a disaster, but it's been happening for a while - the slow destruction of our planet, and the continuing depletion of our resources, is quite a disaster indeed. What can we do to address this disaster? Should we stop designing things all together? That's obviously not the answer, because if we don't design and manufacture a cheap, popular product, someone else will. What we have to do is change the way the mass-produced products already entrenched in the consumer world are designed and manufactured, so we can begin to reduce our environmental footprint. Then maybe we can stop the climate from spitting out such terrible tsunamis and hurricanes!