“ OK, let’s say we really went for it! I mean full bore—no kidding—things are serious—waste of all wastes—the greenhouse gases, the criteria air pollutants, the toxic releases are really getting out of hand. We have to do something!”

That was close to the statement I made in 1993 when I was on the early American Institute of Architects (AIA) effort called the Committee on the Environment (COTE)—at the time I was sharing the national chairmanship of the Environmental Resource Guide (ERG) with Bob Berkebile and Harry Gordon. Bob had put together COTE and the ERG using the greenest expertise he could find, all of us being more on the edge of the architecture profession than in the middle—people like Paul Bierman-Lytle, Bill McDonough, Sim van der Ryn and others; half of us were non-architects or solar activist architects like Greg Franta. Then there was a scientist from the EPA, Bob Simmons, and many people, who, in general, were not supposed to be doing what we were doing. All this took place under Susan Maxman, the first ever women president of the AIA, who was more than willing to push us forward.

At the time, the proposal I made to the EPA’s Program Officer James White (who was funding COTE) and the ERG was one of those impatient scope creep challenge statements, which to my surprise was unabashedly accepted. Since the ERG’s funding was not really as effective as we had hoped, James decided to fund Max’s Pot (the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems) for a three-year cooperative agreement to create a scientifically robust standard that would hopefully go beyond buildings, one that the Feds could really depend on—one that was not simply subject to COTE’s opinion. A dare for a dare like, “Okay smarty pants, stop the talk, get the team together and do it—here’s the money.” So I put my dream team together and we did it and this is what we did.

We set out to baseline what sustainable really meant from a standards point of view because the Feds were forced to state the words green, sustainable etc. etc. in their procurement strategies for any product or building purchased. The trouble was no one knew what the words meant or how to do it—this was our number one task: what does it mean to be green and what criteria are needed to call yourself green.

To say that everything fell right into place would be far from the truth, but for a nonprofit by the name of Max’s Pot to have a cooperative agreement with the EPA was better than much of the foundation money we had in the past—now, not only were we actually being paid to think about really important stuff but also to develop an operational national model. We were told we could have whatever support the Feds could give us, like the supercomputers at the Research Triangle in Chapel Hill: “They are yours to use—if needed.”

So I put my own magic team together, beginning with a Geographic Informations Systems (GIS) practitioner and general systems thinker, whose work I had admired for years: Bill Bavinger. Bill was in the midst of being fired from Rice University as head of the Advanced Visualization Lab (luckily for me the architects did not know what to do with him—I did). As it happened, Bill also grew up in Bruce Goeff’s Bavinger House, a definite brain-teaser for developing creatively. Then there was my cohort in all argumentative discussions with the EPA, AIA, COTE, you name it: Hal Levine, the person who created the term “building ecology.” Another technically competent person turned team member claiming he understood what we were trying to do and that he had the skill to pull it off was Greg Norris (at that time with the National Institute for Standards and Testing or NIST). And lastly, we had two team members who constantly reminded us how serious this all was and that we were never meeting protocol: Gail Vittori, now my wife and Chair Elect of the US Green Building Council’s Board of Directors, and Joel Ann Todd, our only official Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) person.

The task was daunting, with months going by as we barely satisfied James White enough so that he could justify the next payment. Then we realized it was all sitting right there in front of us.

I mentioned one day that I had witnessed the operational qualities of a national model of the US economy called the I/O model, which was presented to us in the regional science program at Penn’s Department of Architecture and Planning in my graduate school days. Walter Isard demonstrated how the I/O model showed how every business affected every other economically: i.e., how the rising price of silica sand is reflected in all things glass—from windows to eyeglasses—in one gigantic matrix equation linking all business through the flow of money. It was one of those classes whose subject matter I swore I never wanted to get into again (I was supposed to become an architect, but at the time Penn was about the best scope creep place of any university anywhere).

I called Bill Bavinger and Greg Norris and James and said, “Here’s a crazy idea—let’s combine it all, overlay the scientifically peer-reviewed national I/O economic model created by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) that connects businesses monetarily with the EPA’s reporting system showing each business with its associated pollutants. They were all there in the EPA’s reports, all the Greenhouse Gases (GHG), the Criterial Air Pollutants (CAP), the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI)—a considerable amount of the waste-to-land, waste-to-water and waste-to-air in the US. Before we knew it we had the ruminants of the first I/O, LCA, National GIS Model. From this base we could actually create a verifiable baseline that was peer reviewable. If we were lucky, it would tell us the base impacts of a typical house, a typical school, a typical car, a typical anything, as to their materiality impacts along the entire production chain from mining, lumbering, transport, manufacturing on through—even the impact of getting lunch was in there someplace, as Greg would attest. Bill found that one of the off-the-shelf digital US phonebooks had the latitude and longitude together with the Standard Industrial Classification (referred to as the SIC number) of US businesses—all we had to do was make sense out of it and we were off and running. Bill placed everything (all 12,500,000 business) mapped into the GIS, while Greg cross-linked all the economic data from the EPA with the BEA environmental data reporting so that each dollar flow would represent a quantity of pollution or jobs or many other items. Greg and I worked with the AIA and the Master format people in DC so that all the specification language could be cross related to the language of the BEA and the EPA. Then we waited and we waited, even though Bill had some pretty robust computers at the time, all waste probably derived from the Rice University waste stream.

It took days, if not weeks, to make our first run. We did not quite have the confidence to go to the super computers at the Research Triangle in Chapel Hill, although we probably should have because the probabilities of accuracy and other issues needed to be verified by definite mathematical robustness, but we weren’t sure that the idea would even work. But of course, what we were unwilling to admit as well was the importance of what we were doing. As things started to actually spill out of the programming—building-type by building-type, sector by sector, state by state—we were beginning to realize that we had the whole country— one large series of millions of life cycles—placed on the land, including all the jobs, the taxation, the pollutants, for every region at every scalar area, country, state, city, zip code and just about every business.

Now we needed to actually apply it. So we took what was now referred to as BaselineGreen™ and GreenBalance™ and realized that we could redirect some jobs on the table at our center. Tony Gale and Lucia Athens in Seattle said “let’s try it” on the Seattle Justice Center, and that building became an early application, as did the UT Health Science Center in Houston, then the US Pentagon, and then one day someone at the federal level watching the presentation Gail was making to The Pentagon team realized what we were doing— he understood the ramifications, sort-of, and stated that if Vice President Gore was elected President he would see to it that this became national policy. Well, the rest is history; Gore did not get in, funding was gone from the EPA, we could not get enough clients that understood what we were doing, nor the true implications, and things came gradually to a grinding halt.

But let’s say history went our way—what could have happened? Every business’s inputs and outputs of materials, money, energy, waste (air, water and land), out-products coordinated with in-products, cradle-to-cradle, waste for food, economic verses environmental benefits, jobs verses pollution—all spelled out. The big problem was: would the country do it? Would anyone in position stand up and say, “Let’s really get our shit together”?

As I have presented what we did over those years, many folks are dumbfounded. Others have criticized that you cannot plan the economy in this way. When I mention that this could be the start of a new level of enterprise development well beyond eco-industrial-parks (single-site industrial ecology models, such as those in Denmark), forming purposeful business input/output relationships at a city-wide or regional level, others tell me that business does not like to be planned by others. When I say that this is an approach that needs to happen throughout the country, few understand what I mean.

Then I try to bring to the table what I call a closely akin procedure, that of flexible manufacturing networks, once tried in the US as the original basis behind the CDC’s (Community Development Corporations) and also borrowed from great successes in Europe; in my mind, these chains of businesses can be linked in what could be purposefully derived business-to-business life cycle relationships, helping to control life cycle by-product contaminants through reuse in other regional industries, becoming more efficient overall.

But I am told that businesses in this country hide their inventories, hide their production capabilities, their books etc. etc. It’s not part of our culture to do things at this level of cooperation. My answer is that “but it’s happening anyway—it’s just a matter of who is admitting it or who is saying it.” Look at Silicon Valley and the immense degree of cooperation at all levels that takes place there—from shared protocols of all types to financial cooperation to “instep manufacturing,” nearly the same cooperation that is behind just-in-time manufacturing, or the auto industry or the computer industry or, or… With the necessary tweaks the US business community could become large input/output coordinated industrial ecosystems.

So what’s the problem? How serious are we? This is our country’s metabolism. This is our home economics, our building ecology, and we are not thinking in strategic nor systemic terms. With the richest database on earth, instead of thinking creatively, we think of information in weird ways about weird things. We don’t seriously understand what it’s going to take to create a sustainable future, including waste as a re-source.