The Dow Corning corporation was considered one of the most ethical and progressive corporations in the world with a code of conduct that was cited as a model in case studies by business schools. In the 1977 version of this code, the company agreed that, "Dow Corning accepts as our responsibility a recognition, evaluation and sensitivity to social needs. We will meet this responsibility by utilizing our technological and management skills to develop products and services that will further the development of society." The Dow Corning code focused primarily on conduct in the global marketplace, covering issues like refusing any kind of payment or bribe, avoiding political contributions and respecting the rights of employees.
Here was a company that, on paper at least, was committed to making the world a better place. But one of its products, a silicone breast implant, became the focus of an ethical controversy that would force the company into bankruptcy and make it a pariah.
The Dow Corning Corporation was created in 1943 by The Dow Chemical Corporation and Corning, Incorporated as a jointly-owned business centered non-silicone technology. Dow Corning's first triumph was a sealant used to protect the ignitions in Allied fighter planes from failing at high altitudes during the Second World War. When the war was over, Dow Corning explored non-defense applications of silicone, eventually creating more than 5,000 silicone products. Dow Corning continued to emphasize research and expansion throughout the 1950's and 1960's.
During this time, the company ordered a substantial amount of testing on silicones' effects, both on organisms and the environment. Typically, silicone was found to be chemically inert, failing to cause harmful reactions in rats, monkeys, or even human embryonic cells. With such characteristics, silicone seemed the perfect candidate for use in medical applications, for instance, in synthetic coverings for burn patients and in a coating on needles to ease insertion.
To encourage research in this area, Dow Corning opened the Center for Aid to Medical Research (CAMR) as a source of silicone for in-house and independent medical researchers. Thus, in the early 1960,'s Dow Corning supplied Texas plastic surgeons Frank Gerow and Thomas Cronin with silicone for their medical implant device research. Gerow and Cronin, using Dow Corning silicone, invented the first silicone breast implant as a device to aid women who had undergone mastectomies. At that time, the Food and Drug Administration had no regulations governing implantable devices. Companies like Dow Corning had to determine the safety of devices on their own. The surgeons conducted clinical trials of the implant prior to product introduction in 1964. In the next several years, the implant grew popular for cosmetic surgery as well as reconstructive, and Dow Corning cornered both markets.
Through their Center for Aid to Medical Research, CAMR, Dow Corning also invented many other important medical devices. For example, first introduced in the late 1950’s, Dow Corning created the hydrocephalic shunt, a silicone valve implanted in a child’s head to relieve the effects of hydrocephalus, "an excess of cerebrospinal fluid in the cranial cavity causing enlargement of the skull and mental retardation". In 1952, Doctors F. E. Nulsen and E. B. Spitz originally developed the technique of treating hydrocephalus by inserting a valve into the skull, diverting the excess water from the ventricle to the jugular vein. Later, they used a shunt valve developed by a Dow Corning employee, with encouraging results.
The original Cronin implant was developed for use by mastectomy patients to replace ones made of sponge, which tended to harden and appear less natural over time. This new mammary prosthesis was a breast-shaped silicone sac filled with silicone gel. The sac was in elastomer form, and the gel was high-density. The elastomer had a much more tightly woven atomic pattern, which kept the gel inside the sac. The gel was firm, yet pliable, so that it successfully simulated natural breast tissue. With over 10 years of research already completed on it, silicone was a natural candidate for use in breast reconstruction. In addition, it had already been utilized in other medical applications, such as the hydrocephalic shunt and life-saving pace-maker. These cases could provide information on the long-term effects of silicone on the host.
1962 marked the first implanting of a mammary prototype. For the next two years, selected surgeons used the implants in clinical trials to obtain information on their performance, both long and short term, before Dow Corning took the Cronin implant fully to market in 1964. Additional support for the implants was found in the hydrocephalic shunt’s performance , since it used the same elastomer. By 1962, about four-thousand shunts had been placed in children’s brains without any apparent ill effects.
Also, in 1962, the National Institute of Health funded the Battelle Memorial Institute to conduct research on the stability of silicone implants in animals, among them, SilasticÆ, which was used in breast implants. In particular, the study concentrated on the polymers' tensile strength and elongation, along with the reaction of the implant site to the polymers. (Tensile strength is a measure of the polymer’s pliancy.) The studies used mongrel dogs as test sites, implanting samples of all five materials in each. The plastics were recovered after six, eleven, and seventeen month intervals. Their tensile strength was recorded before implantation and after each removal, to track any loss, along with any elongation due to implantation. After 17 months, SilasticÆ showed little decrease in tensile strength and slight elongation. At the same time as the introduction of the Cronin implant in 1964, Dow Corning contracted Food and Drug Research Laboratories, an independent research company, to complete more long-term testing on the implants, which had already been followed for two years in the clinical studies and seventeen months in the Battelle study. Results encouraged the continued use of silicone in medical implants, especially in mammary prostheses.
Although implants were first targeted at mastectomy patients, even Cronin and Gerow would have been able to foresee a market for breast enhancement as well. Thus, other manufacturers developed similar implants, in response to a market which grew as women opted for cosmetic breast procedure. However, Dow Corning, where the implant originated, remained the industry leader.
In 1968, Dow Corning started updating the breast implant, a process that would take approximately seven years. First, they developed a seamless envelope, which provided a smoother finish and a more natural appearance. Now came the tough part. Doctors were requesting a softer, more natural gel formulation, so the breast implant product team went to work. Research scientist Jack Roberts worked on the new gel formulation.
By the first half of 1971, he had found one, and sent it for preliminary toxicity testing. Dow Corning employed a standard, widely used chemical test involving human embryonic cells. The experimental gel was introduced to some embryonic cells, to investigate if any of them changed. Although the cells rarely reacted adversely, they did so when introduced to this gel. However, such a reaction did not necessarily indicate that the gel was unsuitable for medical use. Dow Corning had two options: complete a large, expensive battery of tests to determine if this gel was suitable for implantation, or substitute a similar polymer into the original test.
Dow Corning chose the second option, since Roberts already had a gel similar to the first. Although Roberts' second gel overcame the embryonic cell hurdle, it also had to undergo a penetration test to measure its stiffness. For example, the gelatin we eat is a fairly stiff gel. Roberts and associates allowed a weighted probe to descend for a span of time into the gel. The farther into the gel the probe made it, the softer the gel. After tracking this characteristic in the second attempt gel, Roberts found that this gel was growing softer over time. This tendency was undesirable for an implant gel, since softer consistency could cause more diffusion. Also, if the implant ruptured, more gel would migrate from the area of implantation. Thus, this gel, too, was rejected.
By June of 1974. Roberts had joined another product team, and Kim Anderson had joined the mammary prosthesis team in his place. She was a chemist by training and had been with Dow Corning since February of 1970. Taking over where Roberts left off, Anderson sought to understand the objectives of her mission clearly. As the team members explained to her, they had been trying to develop a more responsive implant gel, one that more closely simulated the behavior of actual breast tissue. Originally, breast implants had been designed for women with mastectomies. Now they were being used increasingly for cosmetic reasons. Dow Corning's competitors were marketing new gels, softer and more responsive, partly in response to this increased need.
An important restriction given to Anderson was to include only ingredients in her gel formulations that had previously been safety-tested, and/or had successful medical implant histories. This meant the new gel would be a conservative design, which should ensure a safer implant for the customer. By January of 1975, Anderson and the Implant Development team (PMG) had created a product with a more responsive gel that passed the embryonic cell reaction and weighted probe tests.
Dow Corning geared up to engineer a major effect on the breast implant market with this new, improved product, creating a special Mammary Task Force to complete the final development of this new product for marketing by June of 1975. However, Dow Corning knew that two more questions had to be answered before the new gel could go to market:
While Anderson had been working on the new gel formulation, she had simultaneously addressed a manufacturing issue. Presently, the gel was divided into Parts A and B for production, with the ratio of ingredients needed A to B at 100:1. This incongruent ratio would not allow for true simultaneous production in Dow Corning’s batch processing. (Since a batch of A required 100 times the number of ingredients as B, it took much more time.) In order to improve efficiency, DCC asked Kim Anderson to divide the batch ingredients for production more equitably. Her work ended in the masterbatching of the gel, with the ratio of ingredients needed A:B a much more equitable 3:1, allowing for improved efficiency in production. The new gel formula could essentially drop into this new process, and the question of whether Dow Corning could manufacture the new formulation was easily answered in the affirmative.
Anderson and the development team moved on to the second question, concerning the safety of the product. In addition to Anderson, other scientists on the task force included a biocompatability expert along with Anderson's laboratory manager. Chemists and biologists disagreed on the second question. In the chemists’ opinion, no additional testing of the new gel was needed, since it utilized only components which had been previously tested and used in medical implant devices. In contrast, the biologists argued that, since the softer, more responsive gel was made from a novel combination of familiar ingredients, it needed further testing. The biologists recommended to management a two to four week study of the worst case scenario, the insertion of silicone gel without any elastomer envelope. This kind of study simulated a situation where there was total leakage, with silicone flowing freely throughout the body; no human being would ever experience this. The studies would be performed in monkeys, rats and rabbits. In the interest of safety, Dow Corning delayed production until the biologists’ tests had been performed.
In March/April 1975, the results of a Dow Corning two-week study on the effect of silicone gels injected subcutaneously into rats and monkeys were delivered. The current Cronin gel acted as the control gel, and the scientists at Dow Corning tried out three new gels, including the New Production gel, the one they tentatively planned on producing; an experimental High-fluid gel; and a Low-cross linker gel. Specifically, Dow Corning wanted to investigate any tissue reaction, tendency to systemic migration, or differences in general response to the gels among the rats and the monkeys.
One iteration of the study produced an increase in the silicon in the axillary lymph node of the rats, but this result could not be replicated. No "grossly observable" tissue reaction in the monkeys was seen. However, in at least one monkey, gel moved from its original implant site. Another monkey was injected with the same formulation at multiple sites, and the gel migration result was replicated. Although this was an experimental gel and not the one tentatively scheduled for production, Dow Corning was concerned, and narrowed the acceptability criteria to rule out this gel and others with similar formulations.
In addition, Dow Corning also contracted out the requested rabbit study to Biometric, an independent research laboratory in New Jersey. The experiment involved the four gels previously discussed, as well as 28 rabbits, certain of whom were to be sacrificed after 7, 14, 21, and 90 days to reveal what, if any, effects the injected silicone gels had on them. At the end of the first twenty-one days, the only negative effect was a moderately acute inflammatory reacton at the implantation sites. This reaction was less in the twenty-one day rabbits than those sacrificed after seven and fourteen, so the inflammation appeared to decline over time. Overall, the test results had proved positive. Eager to get its implants out, Dow Corning asked Biometric if the test could be shortened by 10 days without incidence, and Biometric answered in the affirmative. After 80 days,
The majority of implant sites were entirely free of any reaction at all. These histopathologic changes observed during the 80 day course of this study were, in our opinion, due to the trauma of implantation and not due to the test gels.
Thus, the extra studies were complete and could be added to the collection of independent and in-house research on silicone already available. Anderson knew that the product team had been working for upwards of four years on this project, and it seemed like the new gel’s time had come.
John Swanson was the one permanent member of Dow Corning’s Business Conduct Committee and therefore played an important role in shaping and maintaining the company’s award-winning ethical policy. His wife Colleen decided to get the new Silastic breast implants in 1974. Almost immediately afterwards, she started to have a variety of symptoms--migraines, lower back pains, rashes and fatigue that plagued her for years. In the late 1990s, her daughter told Colleen about a television program in which another woman with similar symptoms blamed them on Dow Corning implants.
Now Swanson was caught in an ethical dilemma. At work, he listened to his colleagues complain about lawsuits like the Stern case, in which the plaintiff was awarded 1.5 million dollars in damage on the grounds that Silastic implants had caused her auto-immune disorders. They also expressed concern about the Food and Drug Administration’s new role in regulating medical devices. The FDA was asking all breast implant manufacturers to prove their devices safe and effective, or face a moratorium on further sales. At home, Swanson heard Colleen’s accusations that the company he worked for her had hidden the true risk of her implants. She wanted them out--right away.
John Swanson was in a position to see the breast implant problem from both the standpoint of a woman who felt the implants were destroying her body and from the perspective of the company that had created them and saw them as a safe product, given the scientific evidence. Here was the classic hero’s call to an inward journey, in which he would have to exercise moral imagination to decide whether his wife was right, or the company he had worked for--or whether it was possible to reconcile these two opposing views in any way.
For Dow Corning, this was a great opportunity, too. The managers and employees believed they were virtuous. The breast implant was created in response to a surgeon’s need, and the company followed an expanding market. Of course they wanted to make a profit, but they also felt they were providing a service, particularly to those women who had mastectomies.
Therefore, the company felt blind-sided by the controversy surrounding its new breast implants, and were not prepared for the wave of public outrage. Dow Corning’s ethical practices had been the toast of business schools for over a decade. Dow Corning’s Code of Conduct included the following statement:
We are committed to providing products and services that meet the requirements of our customers. We will provide information and support necessary to effectively use our products.
We will continually strive to assure that our products and services are safe, efficacious and accurately represented for their intended uses. We will fully represent the use and characteristics of our raw materials, intermediates and products--including toxicity and other potential hazards--to our employees, suppliers, transporters and customers.
Dow Corning’s policy committed the company to total honesty and integrity, and this policy was reinforced by the Business Conduct Committee, on which John Swanson served. When I first met with Barie Carmichael, Vice-President and Executive Director for Corporate Communications at Dow Corning, to discuss doing a case, she seemed surprised that I saw ethical issues in the scientific testing the company had conducted. If the science said the product was safe, that was the end of the story. But she was coming to realize that, "We were naive. This is a company in the middle of a cornfield in Michigan. We were not publicly traded and didn’t have to answer to public stockholders. And we were naive about politics and did not fully appreciate how Washington, D.C. worked, or how politics could affect the company. Not only that, but most of management saw the implant issue as a scientific one, not one of communications".
But science, as John Burnham and others have shown, is not held in universal esteem by the public and in some quarters, is even seen as a tool used by the powerful to oppress groups that are underrepresented in the scientific community--like women. The case of Lise Meitner and dozens of others show how hard it has been for women to break into what for years has been a primarily male fraternity. Is it any wonder many women felt suspicious about Dow Corning’s scientific claims--especially when other ‘scientific experts’ appeared to disagree?
According to Carmichael, Dow Corning was not surprised that some women were skeptical of the science. What surprised the company was that these individual reports of suffering seemed to carry more weight than scientific studies. Dow Corning did not value emotional ways of knowing as much as scientific ones. They also did not pay much attention to anecdotal reports of problems with the implants, preferring scientific data. Dow Corning was learning the importance of case-based reasoning the hard way. Real cases of human pain are more salient to the public than mountains of scientific evidence.
In 1991, a jury awarded Marian Hopkins $7.3 million in damages against Dow Corning on the grounds that her implants contributed to connective tissue disorder--even though she had been diagnosed before having implants . In April of 1992, the "Food and Drug Administration announced that breast implants filled with silicone gel would be available only through controlled clinical studies and that women who need such implants for breast reconstruction would be assured of access to these studies" (Kessler, 1992, p. 1713). This decision was interpreted by many women as meaning the FDA thought breast implants were not safe, when in fact the agency really intended to keep the product off the market until more testing could be done. The Hopkins suit and the FDA moratorium led to a wave of lawsuits that forced the company into bankruptcy. Colleen Swanson’s was one of them.
Here we go back to the issues we discussed at the beginning of Chapter 2, where we talked about science and truth. A relativist might argue that scientific truths are always the product of social negotiations. A sociologist with a more realist bent would amend this statement to say not solely the product of social negotiations, but negotiations can and should play an important role in what counts as truth--especially when this truth has important policy implications.
The scientists at Dow Corning were realists; they felt that they had the data and were astonished that anyone else could have failed to see it as they did. They did not realize that in order to establish a scientific fact, it is not sufficient to let the data speak for itself; one has to build a network of allies, and as the network grows, the scientific knowledge is transformed . As we will see below, studies of rats and monkeys were gradually supplanted, in terms of importance, by human epidemiological studies.
Irwin & Winn argue that, in general, "science...misunderstands both the public and itself" . Even within science, the process of creating consensus can take years, as in the controversy over continental drift . Indeed, in some areas of research, a single experiment may involve a large network of collaborators and funding sources and take as much as twenty years to complete .
One of the characteristics of scientific development that most plagues historians is the enormous diversity of viewpoints that can continue to persist long after it appears that a consensus has been reached. The difficulty arises not only because consensus is never total, but also because of the fact that consensus always means the consensus of a particular community. Scientists make up many communities, and these communities vary by subject, by methodology, by place, and by degree of influence. Science itself it s polyphonic chorus. The voices in that chorus are never equal, but what one hears as a dominant motif depends very much on where one stands. At times, some motifs appear dominant from any standpoint. But there are always corners from which one can hear minor motifs continuing to sound (Keller, 1983, p. 174).
One of the ‘minor motifs’ was Barbara McClintock’s work on gene transposition in corn, which was not integrated into the dominant consensus, or paradigm, for almost thirty years (see 2.2). The cold fusion case is also instructive (see 3.1). Initially, other scientists claimed to get a cold fusion effect, though the effect itself was a moving target: was it mainly temperature? did it include neutrons and increased tritium levels? did it require heavy water? Eventually, most of the scientific community concluded that there was no validity to claims for the existence of cold fusion, but Pons and Fleischmann continue to work in this area and receive funding from industrial sources . This ‘minor motif’ may lead to a new discovery, but as of this writing, it looks like a consensus over cold fusion has been achieved in the space of a few years.
Similar time-frames and complex networks can be required for epidemiological studies on health issues (Angell, 1996). One example is the controversy over whether silicone breast implants cause cancer, which began in the early 1980s and peaked in 1988. By 1993, animal, epidemiological and clinical studies showed no carcinogenic link and a consensus was achieved. It took about a decade for a consensus to emerge in this area, helped by the fact that the controversy shifted to other conditions, like autoimmune disorders. In their obligation to prove safety, Dow Corning and other implant manufacturers were confronted with a moving target; one problem like cancer would get settled as another like autoimmune disorders arose.
Irwin & Winn argue that the boundary between science and the public is uncertain and often re-negotiated during controversies . Cases like the Swansons’ might have helped Dow Corning anticipate where the controversy was shifting and develop strategies for further testing. According to Keith McKennon, who became CEO of Dow Corning in February of 1992, Swanson raised the possibility of a meeting between McKennon and Colleen. McKennon thought it was a good idea; this was an opportunity to meet directly with someone who was having a problem with silicone breast implants.
On March 19th, McKennon took Dow Corning out of the breast implant business. He also provided $10 million in funding for more research, provided up to $1200 a piece in financial aid for women whose doctors recommended that their implants be removed and tried whenever possible to talk to women . But Colleen remained suspicious of McKennon’s motives and did not want to meet with him.
John Swanson and McKennon eventually had a second meeting, at McKennon‘s request. McKennon had finally heard about Colleen’s lawsuit, filed three months earlier, and he was angry. He would have liked to have talked with her. According to Swanson, McKennon asked what Colleen wanted-- ‘a zillion dollars?’--and offered to discuss a resolution . McKennon says he might have asked whether Colleen really wanted lots of money or whether there was another way to resolve the conflict. Swanson had moved into the legal, adversarial mode, in which you cannot afford to trust the other party, whereas McKennon was still searching for a more cooperative solution.
Colleen did eventually settle her lawsuit with the company, and John retired in 1993 with full benefits, to work as an ethics consultant and criticize his former employer. The conversation that never took place between Colleen Swanson and Keith McKennon might have represented a missed opportunity for Dow Corning to get a better understanding of the reasons why an intelligent woman who had every reason to be loyal to the company thought one of its products was causing her major health problems, and why she did not trust the company’s efforts to deal with the problem.
Richard Hazleton, who took over the job of CEO and Chairman of Dow Corning in June of 1993, had Swanson in mind when he asked,
How do you respond ethically to someone who is questioning your ethics? For instance, the major contributor to a book that has just been published about the breast implant controversy is an ex-employee who actually played an administrative role in the Dow Corning ethics program. He and his wife firmly believe that her current illness is due to her implants. That belief has led him to question the ethics of decisions and actions, some of which he was involved in, and some of which he wasn’t.
On the other hand, there are ethical questions around this individual’s actions. For instance, what were his responsibilities to act on his convictions while he was still employed at Dow Corning rather than two years after he retired? What were his obligations, while still an employee, to investigate his concerns regarding the company’s conduct and find out whether the accusations were true rather than waiting to raise them in a book for which he will be compensated? (.
Did John Swanson do enough to help the company he loved cope with its growing Frankenstein monster? Consider Gioia and the Pinto case, discussed in 4.3 above. Gioia played his role of Ford’s recall coordinator according to the schema and scripts he had learned; he was never able to step out of them and imagine how the problem would have looked to someone outside the organization. In Swanson’s case, the reverse seems to have happened. Understandably, he started looking at the problem from the perspective of his wife Colleen, adopting an outsider’s schema. He would have been well-positioned to try to see the problem from an inside view, as well--to try to understand why the company believed this was a safe and effective product, despite the experiences of women like Colleen. I do not mean to place too much burden on John Swanson, a decent person trying to do his best in a difficult situation. He knew he had a conflict-of-interest on the breast implant problem and tried to walk a tightrope that would allow him to do his job while offering his wife the support she deserved (see Byrne, 1993, for more details).
I think most of the people at Dow Corning were decent, also. Virtue is a necessary but not sufficient condition for moral action. Swanson might have been able to help his company understand why so many reasonable people saw their product as a monster. McKennon and Hazleton, in turn, might have helped Swanson see that, scientifically speaking, there was no monster. What some customers and outsiders saw as a monster other customers and company insiders saw as technological progress. Virtue needs to be complemented by moral imagination, by the ability to switch between perspectives and ultimately transcend them to arrive at another point of view. Could Keith McKennon and Colleen Swanson have worked jointly to create a compensation program that would have addressed the needs of dissatisfied customers without admitting that sicilone implants could cause disease? Dow Corning is moving towards such a policy now (see footnote below).
In the wake of the FDA’s moratorium and the wave of litigation, McKennon had to decide whether to take Dow Corning out of the implant market which was still only a small percentage of the company’s overall business. At first glance, this looks like an ethical no-brainer--until one considers patients with mastectomies who relied on Dow Corning to supply a product for which they felt a genuine need. As one women said after her mastectomy,
You just didn’t feel like you’re all there, you know, you just, it, my clothes didn’t... fit. It was just that, you know, I looked so sunken in, you know you could tell that I didn’t have anything...I came home from the hospital and my husband said, "Let’s see what you look like," and I said "No." I said, "I cannot believe what I look like, what a person looks like, what a woman looks like without breast tissue. And I just could not wait till the day came that I could have something done" .
After getting her silicone implants, another mastectomy patient described her feeling as follows:
So I just wanted to, sort of, to look like I did before I started this, and I’m very happy with the result...And I just think it’s, it’s sort of a self-esteem...thing for a woman, you know, it makes you feel like a whole person...? .
A 1991 study suggested that about 90% of the mastectomy patients were satisfied with their implants and about 95% of the augmentation patients were satisfied with theirs . Even so, in March of 1992, McKennon announced that Dow Corning would leave implant business and would fund a $10 million research program to determine the effects of silicone in the human body. McKennon also announced a fund for women who were unable to afford the removal of implants.
Dow Corning pulled the product, sold the medical devices part of their business and declared Chapter 11 in May of 1995, after an effort to settle the huge number of lawsuits (almost 20,000) failed. Was this just desserts for a company that had produced a faulty product, or a victory of superstition over science?
John Burnham lamented that by the 1980s, "science probably did not exist any more at the popular level. Superstition did" . Similarly, Marcia Angell, editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, portrayed this controversy as a victory of superstition over science.
The breast implant controversy shows every sign of continuing on its irrational course for years. Only an unyielding commitment to scientific evidence can stop it, and that does not seem very likely, given the money and passions involved. If all parties had accepted the discipline of evidence at the outset, the controversy would never have reached such proportions. It would hardly have gotten off the ground. But without a commitment to objective data, people were free to believe whatever they liked. Instead of basing their conclusions on the evidence, they willed the evidence to their favored conclusions (Angell, 1996, p. 209).
What does the ‘discipline of evidence’ show? The only way to determine whether silicone implants pose a health risk in humans is to conduct epidemiological studies. In such a study, one compares a sample of women with implants with a sample who have none, to see if a significantly higher proportion of the former have a disease or complication than the latter. Several major studies of this sort were conducted recently, focusing on what is called ‘connective tissue disorder’--a broad category of auto-immune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus that can cause the kinds of symptoms experienced by Colleen Swanson.
In 1994 the Mayo clinic reported that 749 women with implants did not show a greater rate of connective tissue disorder than a similar group without implants. Similarly, in 1995, a Harvard Medical School questionnaire study of 1183 nurses with implants, including 876 with silicone implants, again found no association between implants and connective tissue disorder. The most recent and comprehensive study, conducted again by the Harvard Medical School, involved sending questionnaires to 395,543 women involved in the health professions, of whom 10,630 reported having implants. In this case, there was a small but significantly greater chance that women with implants would report connective tissue disease, at a rate of about one extra case of disease per year for every 3000 women. But even this very slightly higher rate could be explained by a tendency for women with implants to overreport symptoms because of the controversy surrounding implants--or, conversely, for women with implants to refuse to participate in the study because their attorney’s advised them not to. The only way to be certain is to check medical records. Whenever this has been done, no relationship has been found between silicone implants and diseases (Angell, 1996).
Earlier in this book, I referred to 'willing the evidence to fit one's favorite conclusions' as confirmation bias. Angell saw most of the signs of confirmation bias in the plaintiffs and their attorneys, fueled by the prospect of multi-million dollar awards.
But there was a kind of confirmation bias on the part of Dow Corning. Not a bias in terms of scientific evidence, but in terms of moral imagination. The company took the scientists’ view: if the data showed there were no problems, then everyone would agree. For the women like Colleen Swanson suing the corporation, the ‘data’ was their pain. Many of the women discounted the science altogether; others, looking at the fact that Dow Corning had funded many of the studies, thought the science had been bought from a Kuhnian standpoint, this might be evidence that the two sides are holding incommensurable views, meaning that they literally cannot understand one another. On the one hand, you have scientists like Marcia Angell and Kim Anderson, who think of themselves as seekers of truth. On the other hand, you have women like Sybil Goldrich who believe that the Kim Andersons and Marcia Angells have been bought.
Dow Corning was also surprised by the FDA’s finding that they had not proved the product safe. From a Popperian standpoint, the FDA presented Dow Corning with an impossible dilemma. In the same way you can never prove a theory true, you can never absolutely prove anything will be safe--tomorrow, you might discover an unanticipated interaction with other drugs, or chemicals, or a new medical condition. (Popper here borrows from Hume’s classic critique of induction). A company following Popper’s dictum would only be able to say that, given everything we know at this time, there is no evidence that this product is unsafe, but that we will continue to test for any possible future problems.
David Kessler, the head of the FDA at this time, defended this decision by noting that the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1976 required "a positive demonstration of safety--and the burden of proof rests squarely with the manufacturer" (Kessler, 1992, p. 1713). ‘Positive demonstration’ is vaguer than proof, and may allow for more ‘wiggle room’. Kessler goes on to deal with the classic Popperian/Humean criticism: "It is never possible to predict with certainty how a device will function 10, 20 or 30 years after its implantation; however, even basic characteristics that have some value in predicting future performance, such as tensile strength and fatigue resistance tested through cyclic loading, are missing in this case .
Popper brings us back to the crux of Dow Corning’s dilemma. They felt that they had done state-of-the-art testing and found no serious problems. Furthermore, given the long track record of silicone, they had reason to believe no major problems would emerge in the future. Kessler and the FDA felt the company had not done adequate testing to support this view.
One of the problems with research into implants is that new potential hazards kept being hypothesized. First there was a concern with cancer. After that was dismissed, scleroderma became a concern. Then it was connective tissue disorder. Epidemiological studies take several years, although one can sometimes ‘piggyback’ onto an existing study, searching for evidence of known diseases in the medical records and correlating them with implants. But such records do not contain information on new disorders like the special silicone syndrome hypothesized by Mark Lappe (1993) and Nir Kossovsky (1993), who developed their own theory--that silicone, an inert substance, can get coated with proteins in the body and then denature these proteins, changing their shape. The body’s immune system would then attack these proteins, creating an autoimmune disorder.
Kossovsky tested his theory by running a standard, but very difficult, test for antibodies (Taubes1995). In March of 1992, the Autoimmune Disease Center at Scripps Research Institute sent him blood he could test, from:
The blood samples were sent blind, meaning Kossovsky didn’t know which were which--he had to send his results back to Scripps, then they would tell him whether his test distinguished between women who had implants and autoimmune disease and woman who had no implants and autoimmune disease. If his theory were right, the test should show more or different antibodies among the 10 women who had implants, presumably because the immune system was attacking the proteins that were denatured by the silicone.
There were no differences between the no-implant and implant blood samples. Kossovsky’s test did distinguish between women who had autoimmune disorders and those who did not, but this had nothing to do with his theory. The initial result, therefore, was a disconfirmation of Kossovsky’s hypothesis.
He rejected the result. Instead, he took the Scripps data on 40 women with his own data on 249 women with implants and 47 healthy women who did not. He reported that 9 of the 249 women with implants had scored higher on his test than any other women in the sample. These 9 women showed no real distinguishing symptoms, but Kossovsky concluded that they were suffering from some kind of silicone-related disease, supporting his theory. But even if he did the very difficult test properly, a result of this sort could be due to the difference in sampling size between the groups--he was comparing a group of 249 to groups of 47 and 40, and so the 9 women in the larger group were equivalent to about 2 in the smaller ones. If he had taken a larger sample of women without implants, he might have found a few had scores on his test as high as those in the top 9 of the implant group (see 2.3.8.1). Combine this ambiguous, positive result with the negative Scripps result and the best one can conclude is that more research is needed, preferably by an independent lab.
Instead of continuing research, Kossovsky took a cold fusion turn and applied for a patent for his new blood test. He promptly marketed it as well, targeting trial lawyers who were looking for clients with breast implants or other silicone devices. Kossovsky also appeared in many trials as an expert witness. When lawyers for the defense asked to see his laboratory notebooks, he claimed they were lost in an earthquake. When results of epidemiological studies showed no link between silicone breast implants and autoimmune diseases, Kossovsky countered that the studies were not looking for the right kind of diseases--the breast implants might be producing some new kind of illness.
This example illustrates how confirmation bias can be maintained by a moving target: when studies disconfirm one relationship, simply propose another. Marcia Angell also points out that
Kossovsky’s observations...focus on one link in a long chain of postulated events. But before focusing on one link in a chain of possible causation, scientists usually first try to establish a connection between one end of the chain and another--that is, between the suspected cause and the disease. For example, first we found out that cigarette smoking is associated with lung cancer. Only then did scientists turn their attention to how cigarettes might cause the disease...In the breast implant controversy, there has been a tendency to do it backwards. Assuming there is a connection, some people have sought to explain how it works (Angell, 1996, p. 108).
Angell is defending an inductive model of science, here, in which interesting findings lead to hypotheses. In fact, the reverse quite often happens--interesting hypotheses lead to novel findings. There is nothing wrong with proposing a causal mechanism to explain a possible phenomenon--it could lead to focused research that would demonstrate the phenomenon. But Kossovsky’s results, like the early cold fusion claims, have not been replicated.
Kossovsky, Lappe and others were paid substantial sums to serve as expert witnesses in trials, testifying that silicone implants cause medical problems. The old discovery/justification distinction in philosophy of science would suggest that this does not matter--a scientist’s motives for introducing an idea have nothing to do with the truth value of the claims, which need to be independently tested. The important point is independently. The fact that Kossovsky confirmed his own theory could be dismissed as a bias motivated in part by financial incentives--not that he is lying, any more than Pons and Fleischmann were, just that he is human and more likely to see positive evidence in an ambiguous setting when there is a tangible reward.
Similarly, critics of much of the scientific research which shows no association between silicone implants and diseases have faulted the studies because many were funded by Dow Corning. The important question here is whether Dow Corning could buy the results it wanted, or whether the studies were genuinely independent. Marcia Angell defends the epidemiological studies on the grounds that they were published in refereed journals; the referees were not funded by Dow Corning. Furthermore, the studies are sufficiently detailed so the data can be inspected and criticized. Still, those scientists who cannot obtain funding may find it hard to participate in the debate--they may not be able to conduct studies of sufficient quality. Funding sources can create a kind of confirmation bias by leaving some voices out in the cold.-
Federal District Judge Robert E. Jones, overseeing breast implant cases in Oregon, appointed an independent panel of scientific experts to assess the evidence that silicone breast implants cause disease. Based on the panel’s findings, in December of 1996, Judge Jones ruled that lawyers cannot introduce evidence that implants cause disease since such evidence is not scientifically valid .
In effect, Jones was declaring that Kossovsky and other similar expert witnesses represented ‘junk science’. If this ruling is upheld, it will encourage other judges to appoint independent panels of scientific experts, rather than relying on the defense and the prosecution to find competing experts and see which side convinces the jury. Judge Samuel Pointer in Birmingham, Alabama, has appointed a national panel of scientific experts to answer two questions:
Thousands of cases have been consolidated under Judge Pointer’s jurisdiction, so this panel could have a great influence, though the Judge will decide how much weight to give to their conclusions. His second question suggests that he is trying to determine if scientific consensus is emerging on this issue. As of this writing, the American Cancer Society, the American Medical Association, the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons, the American College of Rheumatology, the British Council on Medical Devices and the Food and Drug Administration "have concluded that there is no evidence that silicone breast implants" cause any kind of autoimmune disorder .
A recent article in Science argues that, "the experts need to have appropriate credentials, including knowledge, neutrality, and diligence. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) now maintain a roster of potential scientific reviewers who are checked for conflicts of interest. The NIH, universities, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and other neutral organizations are existing resources to provide scientific guidance in the classroom. Scientific bodies should not wait for the court to seek advice: as scientists we should ensure that every court has at its disposal a listing of neutral experts with specified areas of expertise and acknowledgment of potential conflicts" .
The independent-panel-of-experts approach assumes that jurors and judges are not competent to decide what constitutes good and bad science. A complementary approach would be to make sure the public was better educated concerning the actual process of scientific investigation. This case shows how hard it is to understand the science, and how easy it is to manipulate to make it appear to confirm one’s perspective. For example, lawyers frequently would isolate single findings and results, whereas scientists know that one must look at a larger pattern of evidence--hence, their reliance on multiple epidemiological studies.
But this kind of research takes time. For example, a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) looked at the issue of what variables are confounded with silicone implants, and whether any of these variables were risk factors for connective tissue disease. Even if there were an association between implants and connective tissue disease, this would not necessarily imply a causal relationship. Another factor associated with both might account for the apparent relationship.
The JAMA study compared the characteristics of 80 women who had breast implants with 3520 women who had not . According to an American Medical Association press-release,
When compared to other women, the researchers found that women with breast implants were:
- nearly three times more likely to drink seven or more alcoholic beverages per week.
- more than 1.5 times as likely to be pregnant before age 20.
- twice as likely to have at least one terminated pregnancy.
- more than twice as likely to have ever used oral contraceptives.
- about 4.5 times more likely to have ever used hair dyes
- nearly nine times as likely to have had at least 14 sexual partners.
- much less likely to be heavy.
Of these factors, hair dyes have been associated with an increased risk of connective tissue disease. Therefore, any association between silicone implants and connective tissue disease might be explained by a third factor--the fact that women who undergo breast augmentation are also more likely to dye their hair.
More research will be needed to determine if there are other relationships of this sort. It is even possible that women with implants are more likely to engage in some behavior that reduces the probability of connective tissue disease, thereby masking any problems caused by the implants themselves. It is impossible to absolutely prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that no complex relationship between implants and some disease will ever be found. That is the nature of science.
How does this translate into advice for a company that wants to avoid what happened to Dow Corning? Based on this case, I would suggest the following:
1) Get potential stake-holders involved in the design process. Dow Corning felt it had done this--surgeons were intimately involved in the creation of the product, and also in the many modifications Dow Corning made to improve it. But there were other stake-holders, including the women who carried the implants and the FDA. For most drug manufacturers, interaction with the FDA is built-in. It wasn’t for Dow Corning, which was an insulated, privately-held company that had little interaction with government agencies or the broader public before this nightmare began.
2) Pay attention to cases. When women reported symptoms, even though the science showed no problems, the company should have been all over it, making a concerted public effort to find out what was going on, sponsoring more research, etc.--all without creating any impression that the company believed the product was flawed. Similarly, in the Pinto case, Gioia admitted that he should have paid more attention to isolated reports of fiery explosions involving the car On April 4, 1993, a six-year old girl in Ohio was mortally injured by an air bag which expanded when her mother hit another car. This incident was the first of a series of similar cases that signaled air bags could injure small children who were not wearing seat belts . But it was another 3 years and sixteen more deaths before warning labels were issued, and a debate over the cost and benefits of air bags still rages.
Anecdotal evidence can be an important warning sign. In the case of silicone breast implants, it is not clear that the warning signaled a real problem. A company needs to take anecdotal reports seriously without privileging them over scientific data. At the very least, consumers need to be informed of all possible risks. But how to do this without causing unnecessary panic, especially when the scientific evidence does not support the anecdotal concerns?
It would be refreshing if companies and regulators could be totally honest in a situation like this, saying that while the scientific evidence suggests no problems with silicone breast implants, some consumers do complain of symptoms like the following, and include a list and where to get more information. In our current adversarial system, this sounds like a ridiculously naive strategy, almost an invitation for lawyers to sue. But what if we adopted a different model, one in which stakeholders worked together to create a safer product? We will have more to say about this in the next section.
3) Document what you do as a company to anticipate and avoid future negative impacts. Barie Carmichael lamented the ‘killer memos’ that caused Dow Corning trouble in court. One example is a memo written by Chuck Leach to Bob Levier, head of biological testing at Dow Corning. Leach was concerned about research on the problem of capsular contracture. He noted that Dow Corning’s competitors were studying these problems, and noted that Dow’s customers among the plastic surgeons were asking whether Dow Corning was conducting similar research. Leach said, "I assured them, with crossed fingers, that Dow Corning too had an active contracture/gel migration study underway."
This memo was taken by the Associated Press and others as evidence that Dow Corning was lying to its customers, and it was used in court to discredit the company. Leach objected that he crossed his fingers as a sign of hope--he did not lie. He managed to get the AP to issue a correction, but the correction was published only in the Midland Daily News. .
Sometimes a ‘killer memo’ has to be written to draw attention to a problem--but the resolution of the problem contained in the killer memo should also be recorded. In this case, Leach pointed out that he knew Dow Corning had already done extensive safety research, but he was not sure whether the company had research under way to test a new hypothesis: that the well-known problem of gel-bleed might exacerbate the well-know problem of capsular contracture . In fact, Leach’s hopes were well-founded: research was under way on this topic. But the resolution to the incident was not remembered; only the ‘killer memo’.
4) Have a coherent framework for deciding whether new products will be harmful or beneficial, one that is easy to explain and justify to a broad spectrum of stake-holders. Dow Corning had a general code of conduct that included a commitment to "operate our facilities in a manner that meets or exceeds all applicable regulatory requirements. We will also plant and strive for continuous improvement in process efficiency, waste generation, and emissions to the environment.."
But these commendable goals were not accompanied by a philosophy like McDonough’s principles or the Natural Step that provided a mental model for how to accomplish them.
Consider the system of product classification developed by the environmental chemist Michael Braungart, who is the head of the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency in Europe and has formed a partnership with William McDonough called McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (http://www.mbdc.com/). Braungart classifies products into three categories:
Consider where silicone breast implants might fit in Braungart’s scheme. They are not consumables. Firstly, there are groups that regard it as toxic. As this section has shown, these claims are dubious, but research continues. The point is, when has one done enough research to show that a product is not toxic? For any system of classification, one can only work from the best knowledge available at a particular time. Silicone one of the most bio-compatible matrials, though it certainly could act as an irritant when it leaked.
Secondly, silicone breast implants should not be biodegradable, unless it could be guaranteed that they would not degrade over several lifetimes. The fact that silicone is relatively inert is an advantage from the medical standpoint, but not from the standpoint of converting wastes into food.
Could these implants become products of service which could be recycled by the manufacturer? The silicone in the implants would last well beyond the life of their owner. There are all sorts of ethical issues about how you would get the implants back after use. One could ask people to voluntarily donate the silicone in their bodies, in a manner similar to organ donations. One might even be able to offer some kind of discount for a willingness to recycle, although this raises all kinds of ethical issues about the wealthy and the poor. Should rich people be the only ones whose bodies remain intact after death? Should Medicare cover the cost of recycling? Even if some kind of voluntary recycling program could be implemented, not everyone would agree to it.
Would silicone breast implants have to be classified as unmarketables, on recycling grounds? Silicone is used in a wide range of implants: it "is a component of artificial joints and heart valves, shunts and other tubings, disposable needles and syringes, and contraceptive implants (Norplant), as well as testicular and penile implants. Indeed, probably no American is without some silicone in his or her body, put there by some type of routine medical care--such as injections with silicone-lubricated needles and syringes" .
Is there any alternative to silicone that would not have the same recycling problems? Implants made from triglyceride, a vegetable oil, are being offered as an alternative to silicone; this substance is used in intravenous injections; it can be metabolized by the body, but is also resistant to bacteria and fungi. Furthermore, Lipomatrix, the company that created it, is also including a code number on each implant on a miniiature microchip, which will facilitate an audit trail that can incorporate disposal. Therefore, implants made from triglyceride appear to follow the ‘waste into food’ analogy.
But it is not clear that soy, or any alternative, could cover the wide range of additional medical uses for silicone. One cannot have any medical device that would biodegrade in the body, nor can one recover such devices without patient consent.
Similarly, The Natural Step’s second principle holds substances produced by society should not systematically increase in nature. Again, silicone-based medical products--and all other silicone products--are likely to increase over time as human beings continue to use them.
It is not clear that either of these frameworks will work in the medical device area, in their present form. But remember that their emphasis is on continuous improvement--on adding environmental criteria to design and working towards them. Perhaps a way could be found to make medical devices that would take a long time to biodegrade--perhaps a thousand years--but would still eventually turn into organic materials that could be absorbed by the biosphere. Perhaps there should be some incentives for recycling medical devices, or at least a donation program similar to the ones for organs. Perhaps medical devices need their own classification system.
Having such a system or framework both forces a company to reflect and also provides a defense against future litigation and regulation. It shows that a company is not merely reacting to regulation, it is proactive--it has a long-range vision that promotes safety and sustainability. It is to be hoped that companies in the medical implant business will work with people like McDonough and Braungart on the development of such a system.
Did the legal system protected the public from dangerous substances in the case of breast implants? Evidence suggests that Dow Corning underestimated the risk of rupture and silicone leakage and that there may be a very small additional risk of connective tissue disorder. Was that worth a multi-billion dollar lawsuit, bankruptcy and taking the product off the market? If this is the model for how medical devices ought to be handled, it is hard to imagine many companies being willing to pursue this market.
In the Dow Corning case, the legal system severely punished a company for polluting the human body in the absence of any real scientific evidence. The recent book A Civil Action describes the opposite: a case where a judge decided that groundwater from a site where toxic chemicals had been dumped could not have reached an aquifer . An appeals court upheld this conviction despite the fact that by the time of the appeal, the EPA and the USGS had established that the waste site had contaminated the wells drawing water from the aquifer. Here again, the court ruled against the science.
Carolyn Merchant, in her discussion of the partnership model of relations with nature, cites examples of companies, environmentalists and other stakeholders that form partnerships. The network formed to create Climatex Lifecycle is an example of such a partnership; it included the EPEA, an agency that functioned like a combination of a regulator and a consultant; Rohner Textil hired the EPEA to tell it what standards to meet and help it figure out how to meet them.
Could there have been a partnership between Dow Corning and its unhappy customers, a sense of working together towards a just solution that would keep a product many women wanted on the market, while helping those who wanted to get it out of their bodies? The legal model demands an adversarial relationship in court. Any effort to reach out to the other side can be interpreted as an admission of guilt. Of course, part of the goal of the adversarial court model is to promote settlement outside of court. But even these settlements can be motivated more by a need to eliminate the expense and grief of gambling on a trial than by a genuine desire to cooperate with another party in a just agreement.
One alternative is an independent panels of experts, like the one Federal District Judge Robert E. Jones used in December of 1996. These panels are supposed to be neutral, unlike the experts hired by attorneys to appear in court. But a sociologist of science who takes a radical perspective on Kuhn might argue that such panels could never be unbiased: the would probably be composed of normal scientists who would support the current paradigm and would not even understand a radically different view (Pinch, 1997). Such panels of experts are really a statement about our lack of confidence in the ability of the judicial system to understand science. Certainly the record on patent controversies has been poor, with frequent flip-flops in decisions about who invented what depending on which court was considering the appeal (Lewis, 1991:Hanson, 1982).
Under ideal circumstances, scientific experts presenting evidence would not be committed to either party in a litigation and juries would be so well-educated in matters scientific that they could reach an intelligent verdict. As Jasanoff argues, participants in the judicial system need a better understanding of science and scientists and engineers need a better understanding of the judicial system (Jasanoff, 1995). Public understanding of science is essential in a democracy, and reinforces the need for improved education in the processes by which invention and discovery really occur (see chapter 5).
Dow Corning is attempting to work out some kind of consensual agreement with all stakeholders that will enable it to emerge out of Chapter 11. As Gary Anderson, Dow Corning’s President, said, "We are committed to continuing negotiations and hopefully achieving a resolution acceptable to all parties. We are also committed to compensating legitimate claims in our case based on implant rupture or problems caused by our products. But we continue to believe that sound scientific evidence should be the basis for resolving those claims."
A spur to this sort of agreement is a ruling by Judge Arthur J. Spector, of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Eastern District of Michigan, calling for common issue causation trials to resolve whether scientific evidence supports the claim that silicone breast implants cause disease. If this question is put to experts selected by an independent panel of scientists, the answer would clearly be no.
What if one had a moral framework and protocols that would protect one from almost any kind of possible future litigation, and that rendered regulation unnecessary? McDonough actually got started on his path to such a framework by the threat of litigation. He agreed to design a building for the Environmental Defense Fund, then found out they were going to sue him for any health hazards associated with the air in the offices. He carefully researched all the possible hazardous chemicals and materials, and made him realize how many ordinary products released gases he considered toxic.
McDonough’s is not, of course, the only framework one could use . Both Braungart’s classification system and the Natural Step are complementary frameworks that could potentially be applied to a wide range of situations, though as we saw in the last section, they may need modification to work for medical devices. Any such framework should establish standards that guarantee, given everything that could have been known at a particular time, any product would exceed current standards for safety and environmental intelligence. It would put the company on record as having the goal of restoring the environment, demonstrating a real concern with long-term consequences. The commitment would have to be backed up with policies that ensured employees owned the companies values. Potentially, such a system could provide at least some protection against future legal action. To see how such frameworks could be used to produce and evaluate actual products, we need to consider a series of cases.
Susan Lyons, Vice President of Design at DesignTex, a firm specializing in the design and manufacture of textiles for commercial interiors, wanted her firm’s next design to focus on sustainability. In February of 1991, she had helped launch a new line of fabrics called the Portfolio Collection, a design that evolved out of collaboration with famous architects, Aldo Rossi, Robert Venturi, and John Richard Meier. This collection was aesthetically innovative. Lyons wanted the next line to be about more than aesthetics; she wanted it to embody an issue.
Environmental responsibility seemed like a perfect choice. From a marketing standpoint, "green" design and manufacture were hot topics in the trade literature and she had been receiving inquiries from customers about how environmentally responsible DesignTex's products were.
But her desire to pursue an environmental agenda was not simply the result of customer demand. Ms. Lyons said she was raised not to waste. Her mother remembered the depression and "put her money where her mouth was before it was hip to do so", teaching her children to recycle and compost. She even rinsed out and re-used plastic bags! These values stayed with Lyons, who looked for an opportunity to apply them in the textile industry.
This new product line, thought Lyons, could maintain DesignTex's leadership in the commercial-fabrics design market. DesignTex was also a member of the Steelcase Design Partnership, a collection of design industries purchased in 1989 by Steelcase, a giant corporation located in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that manufactured office furniture and supplies. Steelcase formed this partnership to capture a market that otherwise eluded the firm. Although the company was able to mass-produce profitably, it was not responsive to customers such as architects, who demanded specialty or custom designs. Small, nimble and entrepreneurial companies were able to meet the demands of this growing market better than Steelcase, and DesignTex was such a company.
In order to maintain DesignTex's ability to respond to the rapidly-changing, custom design market, Steelcase permitted DesignTex's management to operate autonomously. In fact, as a fabric supplier, DesignTex sometimes competed against Steelcase for contracts. Steelcase typically brought in DesignTex as a consultant, however, in matters involving specialty fabrics design. Susan Lyons summarized the relationship, "DesignTex is very profitable, and Steelcase receives a large amount of money from DesignTex's operation with no oversight, so Steelcase is happy to let DesignTex do its own thing. However, this situation could change if DesignTex's profitability began to decline." By taking the lead in the market for ’green’ products, Lyons hoped DesignTex would maintain its autonomy.
Note here the mixture of motives that are often seen as separate: the desire for market leadership coincides with the desire to create a better world. There is a well-established market for ‘green’ products, exemplified by catalogues like Seventh Generation. But Lyons would be selling her new line in a furniture- fabric market that did not have a ‘green niche’. Lyons knew she "couldn’t sacrifice anything for green agenda"; the next Portfolio collection had to be as beautiful and durable as the last.
To launch her project, Lyons began surveying the trade literature, contacted yarn spinners who claimed to be environmentally "correct," and paid attention to competitors who were also attempting to enter this market. She contacted some of the 40 different mills that contracted with DesignTex as suppliers. In December of 1992 she became interested in a sample of a fabric product line called Climatex. Mr. Albin Kaelin, Managing Director of Rohner Textil AG, a mill located in Switzerland, sent Lyons a sample.
Kaelin had been thinking about environmental design for years. His backyard is an organic garden. On a recent visit, Kaelin took me to the summit of Santis, a nearby peak, to admire the Alps stretching away forever. I went to college in Los Angeles and recognized the ozone haze that smeared our view. Los Angeles is surrounded by impressive mountains, but they can often be barely discerned, great gray lumps in a brown haze of nitrous oxide. What would the Swiss Alps look like from here in twenty years, I wondered? You didn't need to be the mythical 'rocket scientist' to realize something had to be done.
Rohner Textil is situated in a corner of Switzerland a few hundred yards from the Rhine, which in turn empties into nearby Lake Constance. Rohner Textil was dyeing much of the fabric in house. This meant that it had to treat and dispose of its waste water, which, if not properly treated, posed a potential threat to the largest drinking water reservoir in Europe. The cost of meeting strict Swiss regulatory requirements was high. Therefore, Kaelin had to think about environmental responsibility.
The Rohner mill was the smallest component of a much larger enterprise: Forster-Rohner, a company that consisted of five European textile mills with specialties that ranged from socks to jerseys and embroidery. Embroidery was their largest segment, consisting of over fifty percent of Forster-Rohner's manufactures. In addition, the embroidery output was the largest in Europe.
Rohner Textil had a total of thirty employees. In order for such a small company to remain useful to the larger enterprise and be competitive in general, it needed to remain at the cutting edge of providing the most creative and high quality upholstery fabrics, like DesignTex. The mill needed to be able to adjust quickly to the demands of customers who wanted small lots of unique upholstery designs. They also needed to remain price-competitive, and Kaelin wanted to increase production.
One of the first steps was to improve their looms to high-speed, Jacquard looms in 1987. These new looms would have produced more noise and vibrations than the old looms. This was a major problem, since the mill long had been part of a residential neighborhood in Heerbrugg. The building had been constructed in 1912, and the former parent company of Rohner Textil, Jacob Rohner AG had occupied it since 1947. A kindergarten stood across the street to the east, and houses surrounded the mill less than ten yards away on the other three sides. The vibrations from the new looms would disrupt the neighborhood and force regulators to eliminate the evening shift.
Moving the mill was not a viable option. Land in the region was prohibitively expensive, and the mill’s current location was right next to the parent company, facilitating communication and cooperation.
Kaelin thus proposed to construct a special, independently-suspended floor on which all of the weaving equipment would be mounted. The floor would be designed to dampen the noise and vibrations. Kaelin succeeded in convincing Rohner to provide the necessary capital for the improvements. The new floor made the mill quieter than before the new looms were installed, and the looms increased flexibility, product quality and speed of production. With this new equipment, Rohner Textil was the first upholstery fabric weaver in the world to be able to produce fabrics with sixteen different colors in the weft, or crosswise, yarn. This ability permitted Rohner Textil’s designers to create fabrics with richer, more complex and more beautiful color patterns. Kaelin showed that one could increase production and improve product quality without compromising one’s ethical obligations toward the surrounding community.
An additional factor made Kaelin sensitive to environmental issues: it was expensive to dispose of his waste selvages. As the fabric came off of the loom the edges were cut to a uniform length and were sewn to secure the edge. Additionally, some fabric at the beginning and end of the fabric needed trimming to the proper length. These end-trimmings are the selvages, and they had to be disposed of carefully, because they were considered too toxic to put in a landfill. Some of the selvages were burned in the regional incinerator to generate electricity. The air pollutants were scrubbed before being released into the environment. This disposal procedure was very expensive. Overall, the waste selvages consisted of about thirty percent of the total environmental costs at Rohner Textil.
This cost was an extra burden for a company such as Rohner Textil which processed smaller lots of fabrics. For instance, Rohner might process a sixty-meter order for a fabric from which one meter of waste and selvages was generated. A company which processed larger orders might generate 2.5 meters of waste selvage for a 240 meter order. This meant that it was easier to distribute the disposal cost of the selvages to customers who ordered a larger lot size than those who ordered a smaller size.
In 1989, Kaelin realized that the only way to decrease these disposal costs was to pursue a more environmentally sustainable agenda. By late 1992 the mill had received certification by the German-based association, Eco-Tex. The institute, concerned with human ecology issues, tested Climatex for pH value, content of free and partially releasable formaldehyde, residues of heavy metals, residues of pesticides, Pentachorophenole (PCP)content, carcinogenic compounds, and color fastness. Having passed these tests, Climatex could bear the Eco-Tex trademark and was certified as containing no chemicals harmful to human beings and allergy-free. The process by which the material was manufactured was also free from harmful chemicals.
Such an approval constituted one of the most stringent environmental tests that could be performed on textiles at the time. This approval was an important step for Albin Kaelin and Rohner Textil; however, they had only slightly reduced their disposal costs. The tests did not certify that the products were completely ecologically safe outside the human sphere. Plants, domestic animals, wildlife, and ecosystems could be harmed potentially by the chemicals used in Climatex.
Here we return to one of the central ethical dilemmas of the environmental movement. Do we adopt what Carolyn Merchant calls an ecocentric view, in which ecosystems ought to be preserved for their own sake? Or do we adopt a homocentric view, in which the primary goal of environmental sustainabilility is to preserve human welfare? Eco-Tex standards were designed from a homocentric perspective, and Climatex met them. But one would have to do additional testing to be certain Climatex was also safe for the eco-system.
Susan Lyons asked Kaelin whether Climatex could be recycled. He responded that because Climatex was a blend of wool, ramie and polyester, no recycling was possible. Wool could potentially be recycled, if it were not treated with synthetics or dyes that made this impossible; ramie was a nettle and therefore also potentially recyclable. But when these two natural materials were mixed with a synthetic like polyester, they could not be recycled. In addition, recycling any commercial fabrics was questionable, because they were typically glued as upholstery, and the glue itself made recycling difficult.
But since the fabric was created without any chemical treatments, Kaelin pointed out that "...the yarn in the fabric can be burned without any damaging chemical reaction." He explained that the fabric released a large amount of energy when burned, and he proposed using this energy in the operation of the mill.
By the middle of 1993, Susan Lyons had several options to consider for an environmental design in addition to Climatex. One of the obvious ones was organic cotton. But in order to get a full range of colors, the cotton had to be treated with chemicals, and required dyes that might or might not be safe from either a human or environmental standpoint. Paradoxically, the consequence was that organic cotton, as usually treated, could neither be recycled nor composted. Patagonia had gotten around this problem by using natural dyes, but the range of colors was limited. The Esprit Clothing Company had also put out a promising line of clothing based on organic cotton. Lyons contacted Esprit, but this company’s designers felt uncomfortable with a collaboration that would take them into the commercial-fabric area. In general, cotton was a better fabric for garments than for furniture, which needed materials like worsted wool that could wear better under constant use.
An alternative solution using cotton was provided by Sally Fox, who spent a summer working as a hand-spinner for a cotton breeder and fell in love with the natural brown shades of cotton. Fox decided to try breeding natural cotton in different colors, strengthening the natural fiber so it could be spun directly without chemical treatment. The result was a natural cotton that needed no chemical processing. Furthermore, she was able to grow it organically, without pesticides. Potentially, it could end up being cheaper than commercial cotton, because of the high cost of treating and dyeing.
Foxfiber was another alternative for Susan Lyons, but again, it came in a limited variety of colors--Sally Fox was able to make shades like mocha brown and sage, but not the variety of colors furniture designers typically expect. Furthermore, the Foxfiber colors tended to fade. Washing would bring them back on garments, but furniture fabric could not be regularly washed in this way. Lyons wanted to make an environmental statement without sacrificing the full range of aesthetic possibilities.
Polyethylene Terephaltate (PET) yarn was another option. This yarn was made from recycled Coca-Cola bottles. Again, dyeing options appeared to be limited, though a range of colors was possible. Furthermore, what dyes there were contained environmentally ‘unfriendly’ chemicals. This meant that although PET was made by recycling, it could not be recycled itself. Finally, the suppliers were oriented towards apparel, not contract textiles of the sort used in furniture. Still, it told a good story about the virtues of recycling and had potential as a furniture fabric.
From a cost standpoint, Susan Lyons saw the options as relatively equivalent. From the standpoint of availability, Climatex had an edge because she knew Kaelin and trusted him to deliver. From the standpoint of aesthetics, organic cotton might have the greatest range, with Climatex PET and Foxfiber having more limited options, although in every case, it might be possible to work with designers to expand the available colors.
Which of these options would be best, if one put environmental sustainability first? In order to answer this question, Susan Lyons had to decide what environmental sustainability meant. Was being organic most important? If so, Foxfiber looked best. But what about waste? PET was designed to encourage recycling. On the other hand, Climatex could be used for fuel, thereby saving energy. Was saving energy the main issue? Everywhere she looked, Lyons saw trade-offs, and no obvious way to decide among them.
Lyons needed help deciding what counted as environmentally sustainable. The mental model behind the Portfilio Collection involved not only building a new fabric line around a theme, but also hiring a ‘high practitioner’ to guide development of the line. One name stood out from all the rest in the environmental area, as far as Lyons was concerned.
In section 4.4.1, we presented an overview of McDonough’s philosophy, in conjunction with his colleague Paul Hawkens. Like Susan Lyons, McDonough's concern for the natural environment began during his childhood. He was born in Tokyo and lived for a time in Hong Kong. It was his time in the Far East that opened McDonough’s eyes to the limits on water, food, and energy. He recalls that at his first school in the United States, his peers thought he was eccentric for shutting off dripping water and urging others to take quick showers . Even though McDonough was the son of a Seagram’s executive, his family had instilled a message similar to the one Lyons got from her mother. Nature abhors waste.
Susan Lyons knew McDonough’s reputation as the world’s foremost environmental architect. His architectural firm had created sustainable designs for a Wal-Mart store in Lawrence, Kansas, a daycare center for children in Frankfurt that allowed the children to manage the temperature through the use of shades and windows. He and Michael Braungart, one of the founders of Greenpeace (see 4.8.4 below) had written the Hannover Principles for the World’s Fair in 2000, "a set of maxims that encourage the design professions to take sustainability into consideration. They are descriptive of a way of thinking, not prescriptions or requirements" . These principles included eliminating the concept of waste and relying on natural energy flows and emphasized the interdependence of humanity and nature.
In October of 1993, Lyons and McDonough met. Reflecting on the meeting, Lyons said, "Two key principles hit home really hard, the idea that waste equals food and the idea of a cradle-to-cradle design, not a cradle-to-grave design." According to McDonough, in order to meet the waste equals food and cradle-to-cradle design criteria, the product had to be able either (1) to compost completely and safely, thereby becoming food for other organisms or (2) for all of its constituent materials to become raw material for another industrial product. Furthermore, one should not mix these two alternatives, or one would end up with a product that could be used neither as food for organisms nor raw materials for technology. McDonough was explicit: "I want a product free of mutagens, carcinogens, bioaccumulative and persistent toxins, heavy metals and endocrine disrupters". He described this method of design as "environmentally intelligent" because it involved having the foresight to know that poisoning the earth is not merely unfriendly, but unintelligent.
McDonough went to visit Kaelin in Heerbrugg, Switzerland shortly afterwards, in October 1993. Kaelin picked him up at the airport and on the way, was stunned by McDonough’s principle, "Waste equals food." He realized that his waste selvages problem could be eliminated if he pursued McDonough’s philosophy of zero emissions. If what was coming out of his factory was suitable to be food for biological cycles, he would have no disposal costs.
For both Lyons and Kaelin, McDonough’s waste equals food provoked moral imagination. Both saw that their prior mental models of environmental sustainability constituted only one of a set of possible views. Instead of trying to minimize wastes and work within a utilitarian system of trade-offs, one could work from a mental model based on the analogy of nature.
But coming up with a new mental model is not the same as making it work. Lyons and Kaelin had to reconsider all their options. According to McDonough, Climatex was no longer viable because it mixed the organic and technical nutrient cycles; you ended up with a product that could not be composted or recycled. PET had the same problem. According to McDonough, cotton was often raised in oppressive circumstances, so one would have to check carefully on how organic cotton was raised. Foxfiber would have fit McDonough’s criteria, but there was still the problem of colors.
The only way to meet all the design constraints was to come up with a new fabric. If Climatex could be altered to make the result compostable, then it would fit McDonough’s principles. Kaelin found that a mixture of wool and ramie would do the job. Wool was compostable, of course, and Ramie was a nettle, so it could be composted, too--if there was nothing in the dyes or the way the fabric was treated that would leave any toxic residue.
In order to be sure, every process used in the creation of the fabric would have to be thoroughly inspected and certified. McDonough suggested that his close colleague, Dr. Michael Braungart of the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency (EPEA) in Germany, could do this. In the 1970s, Braungart was inspired by the ideas put forth by the Club of Rome on waste disposal. He obtained a degree in Chemical Engineering because he saw this kind of expertise as a way of having maximum impact in this area. He met and married Monika Griefhahn, the founder of Greenpeace, and Braungart became the head of Greenpeace’s chemistry department. Greenpeace adopted an adversarial position towards industry, protesting practices that produced waste.
An opportunity for partnership came when Bruangart lowered himself down a smokestack at Ciba Geigy, to stop production until the company’s emissions permits were renewed. The CEO Alex Krauer approached him and asked if they could work together, instead of fighting. Unlike Swanson and McKennon , who were never able to work togehter in the breast implant controversy, Braungart and Kraauer began a path to collaboration.
Bruanguart founded the EPEA in 1987 so he could consult with companies like Ciba Geigy on improving theirprocesses and improving their products . Originally, the word ‘Enforcement’ was in the EPEA’s title, but McDonough convinced Braungart to change it to ‘Encouragement’ and the two began an active partnership in the 1990s.
In 1989, Braungart created the Hamburg Environmental Institute, a non-profit organization that would complement the EPEA. One of the first proejects was a system for cleaning up waste water in developing countries. Sewage-contaminated water is a leading cause of disease, globally. The Institute’s system involved digging a series of settlement basins that were specifically designed to recycle fertilizer and depended on a tropical climate. These tanks gradually became ponds with algae, plants and fish. The idea was to create a system that could be used in the poorest areas because recycling fertilizer would greatly reduce the amount of new fertilizer needed. In some areas, this system could even produce biogasses that could be used for heating. In this cycle, waste becomes food and energy and water is purified.
Alexander Graham Bell based his mental model for a telephone on an analogy to the human ear. Similarly, I think this system is an embodiment of Braungart’s mental model. Instead of trying to install expensive new sewage systems in poor towns, the Institute created a technology based on an analogy to nature that would treat water while providing food and energy. One could apply a similar mental model to the elimination of waste in other technological systems.
Braungart traveled to Kaelin’s mill in December of 1993. His evaluation required him to examine all stages of the fabric-construction process. Because the mill was involved with the fabric weaving, he also inspected the mill's suppliers: farmers, yarn spinners, dyers and twisters. Yarn spinners created a cord of yarn/thread from the pieces of individual material fibers, such as wool. Yarn twisters take two or more cords of thread/yarn and twist them together, producing a much thicker and stronger piece of yarn. Dyers added the colors to the yarn. Finishers added chemicals to the finished weave to make it more durable, flame resistant, static resistant, and stain resistant, if such qualities were required.
By the end of January 1994 Albin Kaelin had created a new blend of ramie and wool that he called Climatex Lifecycle. Kaelin had sent Braungart all of the security datasheets and production details pertaining to the chemicals and dye substances used in the manufacturing of Climatex Lifecycle.
At the beginning of March 1994, Braungart gave Kaelin and Lyons bad news. The chemicals used in the dye materials did not meet the design protocol. Furthermore, questions involved in the manufacture of Climatex Lifecycle’s dye chemicals could not be answered by examining the security data sheets, even though they had passed the Eco-Tex standards. To make certain every element of this fabric could become part of a natural cycle, Braungart had to gain complete access to the manufacturing processes of the dye suppliers. Dye formulas are closely-guarded secrets. The dye companies would have to open their books to one of the leaders of Greenpeace, someone not exactly known for his sympathy to large corporations
More than a fabric was at stake, here--McDonough saw this design process as one of the first steps toward a second industrial revolution. Climatex Lifecycle was going to be an existence proof of this revolution, an embodiment of the design principles that would constitute an answer to those who said, "But this kind of uncompromising environmental protocol is impossible to implement."
Initially, it looked as though the cynics would be right. Kaelin contacted Rohner’s dye suppliers and asked them to cooperate with Braungart. By the end of March, Braungart had contacted over 60 chemical companies worldwide; none had agreed to open their books for his inspection.
Fortunately, Braungart and the EPEA had consulted with Ciba-Geigy in 1991 and 1992, advising them on how to improve their products. Braungart was able to persuade Ciba Geigy to open its books by arguing that if there were nothing toxic coming out of Ciba Geigy's factory, there would be nothing to regulate, and Ciba Geigy would not have to worry about unforeseen litigation due to long-term toxicity.
Here we come back to the issue we raised at the end of the Dow Corning section (4.7). Can a protocol like Braungart’s protect a company against future litigation and regulation? If so, it will have enormous economic as well as ethical benefits over the long run. But note the way in which implementation of this kind of protocol depends on a regulatory climate that encourages companies to innovate their way out of regulation.
Braungart conducted tests throughout April and May 1994 and found that only 16 out of the 1800 available dyes passed the protocol. Any color could be created from a combination of these 16 dyes, but when they were combined to create black, the resulting chemical reaction produced a chemical that would not pass the protocol. McDonough made a virtue out of this by comparing the Model T and Climatex Lifecycle: in the first industrial revolution, you could get any color as long as it was black, in the second, any color but black.
After overcoming this hurdle with the dye companies, DesignTex and Rohner made preparations to sell their product to a very large customer, Steelcase, which averaged a dominant 21 percent of the United States office furniture industry. Recall that Steelcase owned DesignTex, but gave it a great deal of independence--which meant that DesignTex could sell to Steelcase, or one of its competitors, or both.
Still a sale to Steelcase would be a big moral boost, as well as a financial milestone. Susan Lyons made arrangements to use the McDonough Collection fabric on Steelcase's award-winning Sensor chair, over one million of which had been sold from 1986 to 1990, and which was now considered an industry benchmark. This was an opportunity for the McDonough Collection to reach beyond any kind of ‘green niche’ market to a large customer base.
However, Steelcase introduced a new test required of all fabrics to be used on its furniture. Climatex Lifecycle had already passed or exceeded all International Standards Organization (ISO) and Swiss textile standards. The new Steelcase hurdle was not the result of a new standard, but a consequence of Steelcase's introducing robotics into its manufacturing processes. During the upholstering process for molded seating, robotic machinery gripped the fabric tightly and wrapped the fabric around the shells of chairs. The new test made sure that the fabric would not slip out of the robotic machinery.
Climatex Lifecycle failed to pass the new test: the ramie content of the fabric made the fabric unable to stretch in order to pass the new test. The test was ripping the fabric instead of stretching it. Lyons wrote to Kaelin, "Well, this is an adventure--everything failed on Steelcase... The reason for failure was cited as a lack of stretch in the filling direction. I am thinking that the ramie may be too rigid...".
At Rohner, Kaelin and the other textile technicians proceeded to make the fabric less rigid so that it could pass the new test. They tried a number of approaches, but the only ones that were successful involved adding chemicals to the fabric. The chemicals were applied after the fabric had been dyed and woven during the finishing process. The chemicals made the fabric more stretchable. The team came up with four different finishing chemicals that permitted the fabric to pass the Steelcase robot test.
All four chemicals were from Ciba Geigy, and were open to inspection by the EPEA. The EPEA approved only one, and the EPEA expressed its dissatisfaction with the addition of any chemicals. It could pass the EPEA protocols, but only with the caveat that Rohner would have to commit to eliminating it. Plus, the addition of the new finishing chemical meant that the fabric would now have to be re-tested according to all of the ISO and ACT standards.
K‰lin decided that it was more important to compromise the protocol just a little in order to have access to such a large market for the fabric. He decided to permit the use of the finishing chemical the EPEA had reluctantly approved and dedicate future efforts to eliminating it.
The economist and psychologist Herbert Simon has discussed how most administrators like Kaelin are more interested in satisfying than optimizing . Ron Giere has applied this approach to how scientists choose among alternate hypotheses . The McDonough/Braungart protocols focused on optimal environmental sustainability; instead of a set of utilitarian trade-offs between waste and economics, they seek no emissions. A satisficer in a similar situation might look at the set of alternatives that fulfill the minimum regulatory requirements, then rank them, and pick one.
Kaelin up until this point has been optimizing, searching for the absolute best solution. At this stage, in order to fulfill the demands of a customer, he satisfices, picking an alternative that fulfills the letter of the protocol. But he is not really a satisficer, because he remains committed to continuous improvement. The extra chemical was merely a stopgap measure to be used until Braungart, Kaelin and the rest of the team found something better.
The fabric was released to the public in a grand display at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in June 1995. It won "Best of the Show" award in Chicago in June 1995 at the NEOCON convention, the largest annual gathering of textile design companies. The fabric became available to the DesignTex sales offices in late August 1995. The sales force learned about the fabric by watching a video presentation of McDonough and listening to an audio tape conversation of Susan Lyons. Both presentations underscored the importance of the design protocol in creating "environmentally intelligent" products.
Initial sales reports from DesignTex and Rohner were very positive. Swiss TV dedicated two reports, one seven minutes, the other three minutes long, to highlight the operations of the Rohner mill in October 1995 and in April 1996. The product was introduced to the European Market in January of 1996. It remains to be seen whether it will serve as a model for a ‘second industrial revolution’, as McDonough hopes, but it is serving to inspire other companies to develop new environmentally sustainable products following the McDonough/Braungart protocols.
One day, during the Spring of 1996, Kaelin noticed on the shelf a dye auxiliary container bearing a label not from Ciba Geigy, the company whose chemicals had been approved by the EPEA for Climatex Lifecycle yarn. Paul Fluckiger, dyemaster at Rohner Textil AG, decided to substitute one of the dye auxiliary chemicals a salesperson offered for one they were currently using in their compostable fabric line, Climatex Lifecycle. The salesperson argued his dye auxiliary auxiliary contained no chemicals harmful to the environment and was much less expensive than the one they were currently. Fluckinger knew the salesperson was right. If Rohner Textil used this dye, the fabric would still be compostable, and it would now be a little cheaper to make.
Mr. Fluckiger believed he acted within his authority. His autonomy had been reinforced by Kaelin, who believed that employees with appropriate expertise like Fluckinger should be given the authority to take measures to improve quality in every process and product. Fluckinger was literally a dye Master, having gone through an apprenticeship to learn his craft as well as a formal degree program. Kaelin's management style was to act as a collaborator with his top-level employees, turning them into a team of leaders.
Kaelin thought that Fluckinger's judgment was probably correct, meaning that he understood the overall ‘waste equals food’ mental model; however, the protocol, required that all decisions affecting the manufacture of the fabric be checked with the EPEA. This problem relates to Roger Schank’s classic distinction between schemata and scripts, which we discussed briefly in the section on moral imagination (4.3). To review, a mental model is a kind of schema, in that it is a way of representing one’s expectations about what will happen. ‘Waste equals food’ became a principle which Kaelin translated into a mental model of the design process, based on an analogy to nature, in which all wastes are food for other organisms.
But mental models alone are not sufficient. One needs plans, heuristics and what Schank calls scripts, borrowing from theater, where actions among players are scripted in advance. Similarly, Schank thought a lot of our everyday interactions were scripted.
Kaelin was concerned that Fluckiger had fallen back into the "old" way of thinking. But the evidence suggests that Fluckiger understood the overall mental model that guided the development of Climatex Lifecycle. What he had failed to internalize was a new script that required him to check with the EPEA before making any decisions.
In order to invent a fabric, Kaelin had to create a network of suppliers, consultants, and employees. Like most such networks, Climatex Lifecycle’s was operating in a hostile environment . The textile industry was in a recession, companies near Rohner Textil were going out of business, the EPEA was a new, experimental organization, DesignTex needed to have Steelcase as a customer. Every day presented new challenges that threatened to destabilize the network. Each decision that impacted the network had to be owned by others.
As Fluckiger predicted, when the EPEA inspected the new dye, they approved it. But Kaelin realized he had to work harder to communicate the delicate balance between autonomy and scripted actions. Climatex Lifecycle was the invention of a system of distributed and shared cognition. There were certainly individual heroes and champions, but no one of them could safely be labeled the inventor. Therefore, decisions had to be shared.
This case does illustrate how moral imagination can be translated into action. William McDonough supplied Susan Lyons and Albin Kaelin with new mental model for creating products, based on an analogy to natural systems. This mental model had to fall on fertile ground for it to succeed. Both Lyons and Kaelin were capable of working together with McDonough, Braungart and others to create a network that would actually produce the new fabric, surmounting obstacles like the dye company’s initial resistance and Steelcase’s new tests.
At a number of these points, there one would have expected a temptation to abandon the project, or at least postpone it, doing further research while sticking with safer alternatives like the original Climatex. But one senses no hesitation on the part of Lyons and Kaelin; they were willing to make some compromises, like adding a chemical to satisfy Steelcase’s tests, but never considered abandoning the project.
In part, this is because both Lyons and Kaelin were in an ‘innovate or die’ situation. DesignTex depends on a steady flow of new products for its existence, and Kaelin needed a way to survive the recession in the textile industry--he needed to create a new market, and be the leader in it. But their decision to innovate in the environmental direction was a fundamentally ethical one.
Lyons and Kaelin are heroes, but not in the classic Campbellian sense of the lone innovator who goes on a voyage of self-discovery and comes back with a discovery or invention that transforms the world. McDonough is more in this mold, with his inspiring vision. Instead, Lyons and Kaelin are both people who would be very uncomfortable with the label ‘hero’; they work by creating networks and sharing credit with others. Innovation demands charismatic entrepreneurs who seize the pulpit and ‘lead the charge’ towards change; it also demands entrepreneurs who work out of the limelight, helping create and maintain the networks that make change possible.
One of the greatest threats to such networks is the urge for each individual to claim more than her or his share of the credit. Mihaly Csikzentmihaly’s interviews of creative individuals included people like Hazel Henderson, founder of Citizens for Clean Air, and John W.Gardner, founder of Common Cause, who have devoted their lives to bringing about a better world . One of the major lessons they learned was that they had to share credit and indeed, eventually step out of the way and let their fledgling networks learn to operate without them. If Climatex Lifecycle continues to grow and expand as a model for new products, it will be because newcomers to the network feel they can both help make the world a better place and receive credit for doing so.
The Climatex Lifecycle case illustrates the importance of waste equals food and cradle-to-cradle, not cradle to grave. Another one of the pluses articulated by Hawken and McDonough involves running off current solar income--or, as The Natural Step puts it, "substances from the Earth’s crust must not systematically increase in the biosphere." Climatex Lifecycle does not fulfill this principle; its manufacture produces no waste and due to the increased efficiencey of new equipment, Kaelin’s mill uses less energy across the board than it did a few years ago. Bu t Climatex Lifecycle would be even more intelligent if it were run off current solar power.
Conservation is one way to achieve the "run off current solar" goal and technology can help this process, via development of new energy-efficiency power generators, creation of new insulation materials and other important designs .
Another, complementary way is to tap into alternate energy sources like wind, biomass and the source of solar income. In the following sections, we will consider the tale of two inventor/entrepreneurs in the solar energy area, neither of them inspired directly by McDonough’s framework or The Natural Step, but both seeking to tap the sun’s energy in different ways for different markets.
While writing this morning, I was interrupted by a gurgling sound in the hall behind my office. It was my attempt to work from current solar income--a solar water heater, sold to me by an inventor/entrepreneur who seemed to me to have Campbellian qualities. I met A.C. Rich when he came to fix the installation of this solar water heater in our home. My wife and I had two children, and were concerned about the impact of our growing family on the environment, particularly as we were using cloth diapers and washing them ourselves. We will return to the installation and gurgling problems later, because they are important parts of building the network necessary for successful environmentally sustainable technologies.
Rich had an original design for a solar water heater that looked like it might help alleviate our concerns about the possibility of a global greenhouse effect. As a brochure from his company, American Solar Network, Ltd., said:
The average home water heater emits over a ton of hydrocarbon pollutants into the atmosphere each year, as much as the average car! A solar water heater can prevent over 1,400 lbs. of these pollutants from being emitted.
Rich also claimed, "If 50 percent of the homes in the United States had a solar collector, it would eliminate 12 large nuclear, coal, and oil generating plants."
Rich's salesman was careful to point out that statistics in brochures are not a sound basis for estimating the effects of a solar heating unit in a particular climate. In our part of Virginia, we might realize 50% of the gains that one would get in a climate with more sunlight. Still, we felt it was bound to reduce the amount of energy we consumed. The payback period, in terms of savings, would be five or six years; we were happy about that, but more concerned about the environmental benefits.
Our motive illustrates a fundamental problem with many environmentally beneficial technologies. The initial cost of Rich's system, with installation, was very high--around $2000 for the high-capacity system we bought. Most families could not afford this without a loan, and if they got a loan, they would have to be certain that the monthly savings on energy would equal or exceed their loan payments. There were obviously no guarantees.
So for us, and I suspect others who bought this system, it was an ethical decision, more than an economic one. But how many people are willing or can afford to invest in the environment in this way? To have a major environmental impact, systems like Rich's need to be on thousands of homes.
To put it in other terms, Rich could probably sell to a small, ‘green’ market, but the competition would be tough: catalogues like Real Goods are full of other solar designs. Like Lyons, Rich wanted to reach people who wouldn’t ordinarily have considered solar.
Rich called his system a 'Solar Skylite' because it looked like a skylight--it would not detract from the appearance of the house. Furthermore, the panels were made of plastic, not glass, which meant it was very light and relatively easy to install and remove. It also appeared to be low maintenance--all we had to do was add water once in a while.
Water sat in black plastic tubing on our roof, which had a good southern exposure, until it was warm enough to trigger a sensor that started a pump, which circulated the hot water around a tank that held the water coming into our house. The water in Rich's Skylite never came in contact with the water we used to wash diapers or take showers. The system worked on the exchange of heat between water on our roof and water coming in from the city, with the pump operating only when the water in the collector was significantly warmer than the water in the house. This is called a 'closed-loop' system.
His innovative design included two inventions. He had patented a 'floating valve manifold' which allowed the water to fall into the drainback tank whenever the pump was not operating, thereby preventing the water from freezing. When the pump started up again, a floating ball rose and closed an L-shaped joint which prevented water from falling into the drainback tank, instead forcing it into the solar collector.
He also patented vents in the solar panel which released steam when the water became too hot. In other words, Rich's system could use water and not anti-freeze, and the only thing we had to do was add a little water every now and then to replace what had vented.
Rich had a team of local contractors install our system. Plastic tubing ran down from the roof to our basement, where it went into a separate hot water tank. The water from the city came into this tank, where it was pre-heated by the water from the roof before it ran into our regular tank. The man who installed our system made a mistake--the pump that circulated the water on our roof began overheating almost immediately, and we had to turn it off. Rich came down personally to solve it, which he did by moving the pump from the top of the water tank to the side. His installer had followed a script that did not work for our situation.
I took this as an opportunity to ask Rich a few questions about how he came to be an inventor and marketer of solar heating systems. What emerged was a kind of Campbellian hero's tale, characteristic of many passionate inventors who are obsessed with their work. When asked about his motivations for entering the field of solar power, Al Rich answered, "As a young boy, I was aware that what I was 'going to do when I grew up' wasn't invented yet." But, he added, "I didn't know that I was going to invent it."
Born in 1950, Rich spent part of his youth as an auto mechanic. He liked to re-tool cars for speed and drag race them. In July of 1977, he took a job at a summer camp in Colorado, where he was asked to help install a solar water heater for the camp pool. He said he 'lit up' at the thought of doing this. He saw solar technology as a way of combining his love of tinkering with an emerging awareness of global ecological problems. During his college years, he became active in the environmental movement, organizing and participating in senior seminars and conferences. His exposure to environmental issues at school, as well as the mid-70's oil crisis, further developed his interest in solar power and the environment.
After graduation in 1979, Rich started selling a solar water heating system designed by his father-in-law. Rich was dissatisfied with the design, but his father-in-law didn't want to improve it, so he and Rich parted ways. Here we see the classic inventor, who is impatient with what is, looking always for what ought to be.
Recall that Bell also had differences with his father-in-law, Gardiner Hubbard; the former wanted to focus on the transmission of speech, while the latter argued that multiple telegraphy was the real opportunity. Bell eventually managed to convince Hubbard that speaking telegraphy was worth supporting, and Hubbard's support was critical to Bell's success. In contrast, Rich was not able to convince his father-in-law to support a novel design.
It was at about this time that the U.S. Government implemented the Energy Efficiency Tax Credit that encouraged energy conservation and the development of alternative energy sources. The 1973 energy crisis made the United States realize its dependence on natural resources, particularly fossil fuels. The OPEC oil embargo led to gas lines and huge increases in the price of oil, forcing Americans to conserve. In 1978, the U.S. Government and many states decided to implement tax credits for anyone who installed a solar water heater prior to January 1, 1985. Federal income taxes allowed a credit of 40% off the entire solar domestic water heater expenditure, up to a maximum credit of $4000. (A tax credit is a reduction in the total amount of taxes owed to the IRS. It generally saves more than a deduction, which is applied only to the taxable income, not the total amount owed.) A combination of increased energy awareness and the government tax credit led to a surge of growth in the solar industry. including the installation of approximately 950,000 active solar systems and 200,000 passive solar systems were installed during this period of remarkable growth in the solar industry. An active system requires electricity to run the pump that circulates the water; a passive system needs no energy other than the sun. Al Rich saw the tax credit as an opportunity to capitalize on his expertise; he founded his own solar services company, A.C. Rich and Sun, in July 1979. He also worked as a consultant and trainer for companies entering the solar market, and he installed the first two solar systems used by the United States Navy.
In 1981, Rich became the district manager for Sears Solar at
the Herndon, Virginia branch. The fact that Sears entered the
solar heating market is an indication of the expanded business
made possible by the Energy
Efficiency Tax Credit. Over the next four years, Rich succeeded
in making the Herndon office the top producing sales branch of
the company in the United States, selling a volume of $2.5
million annually. He was in charge of the management and training
of 53 employees from all areas of the company, ranging from sales
to installation. In 1985, however, the tax credit that had given
such a boost to the solar industry expired, causing Sears Solar
to be one of over 5,000 companies to close its doors.
After the end of the era of federal tax credits, American consumers on the whole were disenchanted with the high-priced, unattractive solar water heaters that were available. The poor reliability and prohibitive cost of these systems, coupled with rapidly declining fuel prices, spelled the demise of a vast majority of companies selling solar water heaters. Fuel prices had dropped from those experienced in the mid-70's, and the country became apathetic to matters concerning the conservation of natural resources.
Rich kept his company alive during this difficult period by taking out a second mortgage on his home, scrambling for backers, and obtaining grants from states like New Hampshire, which provided him a $14,900 grant under its Appropriate Technology Project in 1991. Although still based in Virginia, he installed his solar water heating system in several homes in New Hampshire as part of a model project and documented that it saved on heating bills. He was clearly committed to his invention and has sunk most of his own resources into it. He had an ambitious goal: "Henry Ford had a vision of an automobile for every family, and I have a vision of a solar water heater for every family." Here was an inventor who wanted to ‘do well by doing good’.
A.C. Rich and Sun continued to operate; it was one of the remaining four percent of solar companies to stay in business after the tax incentives were removed. Rich started servicing the solar water heating systems that were installed during the tax credit era. Over 1 million of these systems had been placed in homes between 1978 and 1985. This work made him acutely aware of the problems with existing solar water heaters; they were over-priced, unattractive, and cumbersome.
In 1987, Al Rich decided to use his expertise to design and market a new domestic solar water heater, one that would be less expensive and pleasing to the eye. Actual work began on the "Skylite" water heater in 1988. Al Rich created another company to further the development and manufacture of the "Skylite" system: American Solar Network, Ltd. (ASN), which was incorporated on February 2, 1989. This meant he could seek investors in his new product.
A customer’s needs are not given or discovered, but must be created. (Bucciarelli, 1994 p. 149)
When Al Rich decided to design his own solar water heater, he asked himself, "What do people want?" as well as "Is there a need?" In Rich's opinion, the answer to the second question was "Yes." For evidence, he cited words of one of his satisfied Skylite customers who said, "I had always liked the idea of solar water heaters because they could save my family a lot of money. My main objection to them is that, to me, they were ugly and far too expensive." Rich did not do a market survey to determine whether his invention was needed; instead, he set out to create a need.
William McDonough likes to remind his lecture audiences that design typically involves three components: cost, performance and aesthetics. This quote from a customer emphasized cost and aesthetics. Performance was also an obvious factor. To these components, McDonough wanted to add the kind of environmental intelligence exemplified by the Climatex Lifecycle fabric. Although Rich knew nothing about McDonough’s framework, he obviously hoped he was creating an environmentally intelligent product.
Rich’s experience suggested that most consumers thought of solar water heaters as expensive and unattractive, based in part on the fact that the tax credits had led to a proliferation of inferior systems which also failed on the performance criterion. Rich felt that if he could design and market an inexpensive, aesthetically pleasing, solar water heater, the customers would emerge. As he worked on his design, it occurred to Rich that his ideas might be patentable. On June 16, 1989, Al Rich submitted an application for his first patent. After almost a year of revisions and debates about the uniqueness of his designs, Rich was awarded his first patent, #4930492, on June 5, 1990. In 1993, Rich was awarded a second patent that detailed further improvements to his original Skylite product.
Let's take a closer look at Rich's system (see Figure 19). The water on the roof is heated in trhe Skylight solar collector, made of light, plastic panels containing tubes made of black rubber. When the water on the roof is warmer than the water in the’ Solar Tank’, a differential triggers a pump which circulates the heated water around the tank. Inside the tank is the water the household uses to wash dishes, take showers, etc.; this household water is transferred to the regular hot water tank, where it can be heated to the desired household temperature. Rich's system included a timer and a drainback tank so that water could be drained out of the system at night and during the winter.
Figure 19: Schematic for A.C. Rich’s Solar Skylite system.
Rich's goal was to make the system cheap and easy to maintain. He used plastic instead of glass on the panels to make them easy to install and remove, even though plastic reduces the amount of the sun’s energy that reaches the water on the roof. He used EPDM rubber in his collectors because this material was light, flexible and could withstand freezing. Rich also designed the solar panels to look like skylights, so they would enhance the appearance of a house on which they were mounted.
The system on my roof has worked reasonably well for about six years now. The Solar Skylite is designed to vent steam when the water on the roof gets too hot, and so the water level needs constant monitoring. So far as we can tell, the system has not leaked, though it made it hard to put in a new roof--we had to find a creative roofer who could work around our Solar Skylite, in effect sealing it into our roof. This means it would be very difficult to remove if we ever sold the house. We have also had to pay for repair of the drainback tank, which developed a leak and whose fittings rusted and had to be replaced. These are the sorts of repairs many homeowners could make themselves, especially if the inventor were nearby to consult.
Al Rich’s original plan had been to mass produce the Solar Skylite, driving its costs below $1000 a system. He had a production facility set to go in Herndon, Virginia and a small pool of investors. Unfortunately, he never got the sales in Virginia, and we lost the benefit of local service and support.
One of the things Rich had tried to do to secure financial support was work with utilities in Virginia. Paradoxically, utilities have a strong interest in promoting technology’s like Rich’s that reduce power consumption. What utilities typically want to avoid is the construction of new power plants--the initial investment is high, and the payback long and uncertain. So utilities often encourage consumers to adopt technologies that will conserve energy, especially at times of peak demand for power.
In 1991, while struggling in Virginia, Rich heard about a Solar Domestic Water Heating Program, sponsored by the Sacramento, California Municipal Utility District (SMUD) which offered rebates and low-interest financing to customers with the goal of encouraging the use of solar water heaters. Consider an example. The cost of one of Al Rich’s systems in Sacramento, fully installed, would be $2850. The rebate to the customer would lower the cost to approximately $850 to $2,000 which SMUD would finance to the customer for ten years at $25 a month, or about what the customer would save in electricity. ASN would get paid up front for the full cost of the system.
As a result, Al Rich moved his company to Sacramento, California, in 1992 to participate as a contractor in the SMUD program. In addition to the financial incentives, the climate in Sacramento was perfect for solar collection.
Collaboration with SMUD spurred an increase in ASN's sales and revenues, even though ASN was in competition with other solar heating companies. Unfortunately, the program was shut down twice--once in 1992 for restructuring and again in 1993 to train the energy auditors sent out by SMUD. It was these auditors who provided the leads on which Rich and other solar contractors depended. Rich estimated that ASN lost over $150,000 as a consequence of these shutdowns. Furthermore, sales were far lower than he had hoped--an average of 1.5 per week, which was insufficient to maintain ASN. He was forced to sell an 80 percent stake in his other company, AC-Rich and Sun (ACRS), to pay off $25,000 in debts.
On February 15, 1995, a more serious problem emerged. The manager of the SMUD program accused ACRS of serious ethical abuses. ACRS installed and repaired a number of different types of solar heating system, not just those sold by ASN. One of ACRS's salespeople had recommended the replacement of at least two systems that were functioning well. The SMUD program provided insurance for faulty systems, and that replacement policy had allowed ACRS to file a claim with SMUD for replacing the systems.
SMUD put ACRS on probation without warning and based on what Al Rich felt were incorrect conclusions. Although ACRS was allowed to participate in the program, SMUD would pay for the next ten ACRS installations only if SMUD inspected and approved them. Furthermore, ACRS was not allowed to replace any damaged systems for six months. Competitors moved in to take advantage of this situation, and word spread that ACRS was not a reliable or ethical company. Because Al Rich’s reputation was tied up with both companies, the small trickle of leads for ASN systems dried up. Sales went from $108,509 in February to $55,169 in April, and the two companies shrank from 22 employees to 10.
At first, Rich was mortified and contrite--his reputation meant a great deal to him. But further investigation into the problem led him to conclude that the salesman had not acted unethically--he had simply made a mistake. This salesman had seen evidence of leaking and assumed it meant that the two systems were freeze-damaged. In fact, both of these systems used a drainback design similar to Rich's so when the temperature dropped, all the water was drained from the system. Therefore, they could not have sustained freeze damage.
Furthermore, the salesman was accused of wearing a homemade SMUD badge and representing himself as being affiliated with SMUD, rather than ACRS. But when Rich checked, he found out this was not true.
The opinion of Rich and his attorney was that the salesman had made honest mistakes for which ACRS and ASN should not be penalized. If the salesman’s bad advice had been heeded, and a new ASN system installed, then ASN and ACRS would have had to forfeit the cost of the system and installation. The SMUD manager should have held a conciliation conference before imposing penalties. Rich estimated his company lost approximately $50,000 from this incident alone. Eventually, he recovered $6000 in a settlement which recognized that he and his company had made a mistake, but not behaved unethically.
The problem here is somewhat reminiscent of the Paul Fluckinger case. The ASN salesperson (whose name, interestingly enough, was Joe Fleckinger) failed to follow the procedures outlined by Al Rich. Not only did he make a mistake on two systems, the paperwork calling for replacement of these systems was sent directly to SMUD without going through the usual internal checks at ASN. Like Kaelin, Rich had failed to communicate a complete understanding of the rationale for these procedures to every employee under him.
On June 6, 1996, Rich wrote to investors in his company, "Unfortunately, our major move across country has, for a number of reasons, not worked out. This last year and a half has been devastating, having gone from being Sacramento's 8th fastest growing company to virtual nonexistence, due to the effects of very serious SMUD errors...After installing about 500 systems in Sacramento, AC-Rich & Sun, was also a victim and had to go out of business in July of 1995."
But despite this devastating failure, Rich was ready to move on. He was constantly improving his design. New features included:
Rich hoped these new ideas, and others, would eventually help him reach a global market. Right now, he is barely scraping by. When my system gurgles in the background, I have to figure out why. Fortunately, the design is still holding up pretty well, but maintenance can be expensive if done by someone other than the installer, and all the local plumbers laugh at us.
This magnificent obsession is characteristic of inventors. They plow on, convinced that their idea is right, scraping by sometimes for years. Bell recognized the importance of his telephone before anyone else, Chester Carlson worked for ten years to find a backer for the process that became xerography , Whitcomb Judson and others labored for twenty years to create, manufacture and market what we now call the zipper . Perhaps all these inventors suffered from a kind of confirmation bias, from the failure to see the potential weaknesses in their vision for a new technology, but in their cases, this ‘bias’ turned out to be one of the keys to their eventual success.
The kind of confirmation heuristic these inventors employed might be labeled Lakatosian, after the philosopher Imre Lakatos, who argued that the ‘hard cores’ of scientific research programs that are protected by corollary assumptions. These assumptions can be modified in response to new evidence, but not the core ideas. All these inventors revised their technologies; for example, what we now call the zipper went through dozens of changes before it reached something like the form we are now familiar with. But all clung to their ‘hard core’ vision.
Similarly, both Al Rich and Albin Kaelin are constantly modifying and improving their technologies, but each has a core idea: in Rich’s case, that the sun should be used to heat water on the roofs of homes and in Kaelin’s, that fabrics should be compostable or completely recyclable.
Why was the former failing when the latter was succeeding? The markets for solar heaters and high-end furniture fabrics are entirely different, of course, so this is a problematic comparison. Nonetheless, I think in the end, regardless of the business, it comes down to networks. Lyons recruited McDonough and Kaelin who in turn recruited others into a powerful network that is constantly growing in surprising directions. Rich also tried to create a network, but he relied heavily on very small investors like us and when he found a larger potential backer in SMUD, he ran into difficulties--he still feels SMUD favored competitors over his company, and overreacted to any problems he was having.
Like Lyons and Kaelin, Rich wanted to reach beyond the ‘green niche’ market and sell to the kind of people who would not ordinarily put environmental concerns first. He knew he was addressing a real need, but he failed to consider all the energy-saving alternatives available for people that would be cheaper than his system--adding insulation, upgrading existing furnaces and appliances, and or replacing conventional hot water heaters with on-demand hot water heaters. Only a few romantics who were in love with the idea of getting power from the sun would take the risk and make the large initial investment in him and his system.
Lyons assembled a high profile network that included internationally-known figures like William McDonough, under whose name the product would be sold. DesignTex had a long track record of success with this sort of marketing strategy.
Invention is not just about devices; it is about networks that include technology. Part of the networking involves creating a need. Who needs a compostable fabric? Who needs a solar water heater? If it is only a few ‘green niche’ consumers, then there will be minimal environmental benefits. The Aramis system studied by Latour was primarily needed by the engineers; they kept its technologically pure original form and did not negotiate enough with those who wanted to turn a mental model into an actual system . Rich built a system, but even that important step is only one of the first in a long series of negotiations, if one wants to put the technology on most homes in America.
Rich's current plan is to go global. The greatest potential market for solar may be in those developing countries where thousands of people are 'off the grid'. A model of how to do this is provided by the Solar Electric Light Fund, which also provides a model of how you help customers with the steep initial cost of this new technology--a problem Rich will have to solve if he is going to market in countries poorer than ours, where many people are ‘off the grid’ and the need for power is consequently greater.
Neville Williams, founder of the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF), understood that the important question is not whether the developing world will be electrified, but in what manner? Williams noted that "even if they [the developing world] could afford to run the wires out from power plants, which is not economically feasible--we would pollute the world beyond imagination." Although Williams was not explicitly using the Natural Step nor the Hawken/McDonough principles, his efforts were consistent with running on current solar income ideal. He set out to demonstrate that technological change, improved standards of living and environmental respect are realizable and consistent goals, not merely utopian ideals. By using photovoltaic technology (PV) which harnesses the sun’s rays and converts them into energy, Williams was attempting to avoid the mistakes that the West encountered from its technological revolution: "If the Third World develops in the way we did, the world would be a wreck. The biggest threat to global warming and to greenhouse gases in the future is the unbridled development of the Third World because 70 to 80 percent of the people in developing countries don’t even have electricity."
Williams, who promoted renewable energy technologies for the Carter Administration, has traveled to over 50 developing countries. On such trips, Williams noticed how introducing electricity to developing nations drastically changes lives. However, at the same time, he was aware of the environmental damage done by previous conventional electrification efforts. For example, in 1990, carbon emission from fossil fuel burning in China was 661 million tons, or more than eleven percent of the world’s total. From 1950 to 1990, world aggregate nitrogen emissions from fossil fuel burning have increased from 6.8 to 26.5 million tons, and sulfur emissions from 30.1 to 68.7 million tons.
Williams concluded that individuals living in developing nations "don’t care about the environment," and only "care about getting electricity any way they can." This gets back to the fourth Natural Step systems principle: we ought to aim for fair and efficient use of resources with respect to human needs. The notion of fairness implies that people in developing nations have a right to the same kind of energy and amenities possessed by developed countries, and that it would be hypocritical to demand, strictly on moral grounds, that they use more environmentally intelligent sources of energy than industrialized nations. This is one of the divisive elements of the rain forest debate: developed countries that have already slashed and burned much of their forests demand that less developed countries save their forests to avoid global warming. Certainly it is in everyone’s interest to avoid global warming, but why should Brazil be expected to make up for some of the ‘sins’ of the developed nations? As we noted in a previous section, one solution is to have power companies like AES buy stretches of rain forest, in order to preserve them
For Neville Williams, the challenge was to show people in developing countries that it was in their own local interest to use solar power. To this end, in 1990 he founded the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF), a non-profit, Washington, DC based company whose goal was to help provide persons in developing countries with an environmentally friendly power source. SELF’s mission statement states that we must "address the issue of how 70 percent of the people in the Third World are going to get electricity without doing additional damage to the planet. Two billion people attempting to emerge from centuries of darkness into an electrically lighted future will be one of the critical issues of the 21st century."
Williams’ first goal was to provide environmentally safe electricity to China, a country where some 200 million persons had no reliable source of power. Despite economic growth in China during the 1980s of approximately 10 to 14 percent annually, energy growth was significantly lower, at 4 to 6 percent. The gap between energy supply and energy demand has been growing at an astronomical pace, and by the year 2000, sources predicted that there could be an energy shortage as high as 700 megatons (coal equivalent).
The growing gap between China’s energy supply and energy demand can be attributed to at least four key factors:
Despite relatively high energy costs, China still relied heavily on traditional fossil fuels. According to the 1994 Trade and Environmental Database :
[W]ith the rapid exploitation and high dependency of coal productivity, China is damaging not only the physical environment, but China is also creating health problems for Chinese people, and people in surrounding countries.
Since approximately 70 percent of China’s energy consumption comes from the burning of coal, it is not surprising that China’s energy use has posed large-scale environmental problems to the entire world and severe health risks to Chinese citizens. Increased emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO2) from the burning of fossil fuel have resulted in large amounts of air pollution. This pollution has been far from negligible. In 1988, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, an ailment caused primarily by SO2 (and cigarette smoking) accounted for 26 percent of all deaths in China. Additionally, lung cancer deaths have drastically increased.
Coal burning has also heightened carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, which has subsequently exacerbated global warming. Besides global warming, acid rain has been linked to fossil fuel burning in China, the effects of which are easily noticed in China’s urban areas:
When rain falls in metropolis cities in China, the pollution is clearly visible. Soot coats the pavement turning it into slippery muck, and turns the leaves a black-brown color . . . [Coal burning] has led to a rise in cancer and lung disease.
Even with such obvious health and environmental risks, little has been done to improve China’s energy problems. Plans for the construction of a new 2,640 mega-watt coal burning plant are underway.
Despite proof of toxic air pollutants and acid rain, China is making minimal efforts in converting coal burning plants to more environmentally safe methods.
Magiacha, a small village of about 200 families located in Tongwei County in Gansu, China, is situated about 1200 miles west of Beijing. In 1992, none of the 850 individuals living in the village had access to electric power. The villagers were not satisfied with their current power source. One villager observed:
We only had kerosene lamps, which gave us little light, like the stars do. It’s so difficult for us to do any work in the evening time. The most dangerous thing was when we got up in the morning, our noses and mouths were filled with black ashes . . . [Kerosene makes us feel] dizzy in the head and dim of sight.
Williams’ company found that for each photovoltaic user, over one quarter of a ton of carbon dioxide gas would have been produced by kerosene lamps supplying the same amount of light. In addition to the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions, finding an alternative to kerosene lamps will eliminate toxic, and potentially fatal fumes. In fact, 780 million women and children who are exposed to kerosene fumes inhale the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes a day.
He needed to act quickly. The task at hand for him was to be the first person to reach the non-electrified individuals in China because, as he notes "the first person to show up with electricity wins!" Williams thought that if he did not electrify these people first with an environmentally safe power supply, another group would reach them using conventional fossil fuel power, thereby augmenting a rapidly growing environmental disaster. While Williams might be the first person to introduce electricity, his clients were poor. He notes: "You’ve got to give these people a way to afford 20 years of technology, which is what a PV panel gives them . . . But the cost . . . is generally what these people make in a year."
PV technology is quite simple. Units harness the sun’s rays and convert them into energy. For the most part, the energy is environmentally friendly. However, since the unit requires a battery to store energy when the sun is down, disposal of batteries is an environmental hazard that would violate the principle that all waste ought to be recyclable.
Still, PVs seemed superior to other sources, in environmental terms. For example, on new source of power in China is the "Three Gorges Dam Project" located in central China, which will provide over 84 billion kilowatt-hours per year. The dam will operate by harnessing river currents, providing electricity without emitting pollution. The 1.2 mile dam will greatly contribute to China’s increasing electricity needs; however, various social and environmental costs would be incurred. Almost 2 million people will have to be relocated to complete the project, many of whom are farmers. Archeological sites will be covered with water, including almost all traces of the Ba, who date back 4000 years and are poorly understood; river wildlifewill be threatened, including endangered species like the Chinese sturgeion, the paddlefish and the Chinese river dolphin . The cost of the dam will exceed any other single construction project in history.
Williams also felt that PVs were superior to coal, in environmental terms-- even clean coal technology. Williams selected individual PV house units with a 20 Watt capacity. Solar energy can be produced in generating stations that serve multiple homes and villages; China was experimenting with this sort of technology in Tibet . But generating energy on the household level seemed like a good idea to Williams—expensive wiring and metering would not be needed, and each homeowner would be responsible for her or his own source of power.
Climatex Lifecycle was not only a product; it was also an ‘existence proof’, a demonstration of what was possible. Similarly, SELF’s PV units would be a demonstration--of the ‘benefits of clean, decentralized, renewable energy’. The days of the villagers would no longer end at sundown. This would allow children to have more time to read and become better educated. The units would provide energy for radios, a means of accessing information about the world. The villagers would become less dependent on oil or electricity brought in from outside, and more dependent on their own ability to maintain their PV units. Eventually, Williams hoped, maintenance, repair, improvement and even the construction of new units could be done by local industries.
But the $300 initial price, reasonable by Western standards, was equivalent to the villagers’ annual incomes. SELF could not, and did not want to be, a charitable organization--could not, because according to Williams, "there isn’t enough money in the world to give this stuff (photovoltaics) away" and would not because doling out electricity was inconsistent with SELF’s emphasis on individual responsibility.
The developing world is littered with charity technologies that were given to villagers and never used. A student of mine in the Peace Corps worked in a village in Zimbabwe where the villagers had to walk several miles to obtain water. There were at least two water tanks, installed by charitable organizations, rusting next to the village. No one had made the villagers responsible for this technology.
Part of responsibility is ownership--if I have made a significant investment of my own resources in a technology, I will take responsibility for it. SELF provides power only to individuals who have the financial means to purchase it. This philosophy encourages villagers both to conserve energy and to take care of their individual units. Additionally, ownership of property helps individuals in the developing world obtain a sense of pride. However,
No market structure yet exists to handle the required capital flows [for solar technology] . . . the emerging [solar] industry . . . has been plagued by poor access to capital. Only about 5 percent of rural households in developing countries have the ability to purchase a system outright with cash.
Magiacha was only a beginning for Williams; he hoped SELF would "sow solar seeds", facilitating initial purchases of PV units to begin the process of forming an independent solar market in China. One possibility would be to secure funding from the Chinese government which could be used to partially subsidize the PV units. Since the Chinese government already was subsidizing current grid extensions, it easily could direct some financial resources to purchasing PV units. Thus, instead of the Chinese government funding electrification projects that produce environmental problems, it could finance environmentally safe projects, that at the same time, would produce equivalent electrification results. In fact, since SELF argued that any extension of existing electric grid structures would require copper wiring at the cost of approximately $10,000/mile, subsidizing PV technology would also be cheaper, especially given the way in which villages like Magiacha are spread out. The Chinese government could do something similar to the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, providing down payments and low cost loans. But this would violate SELF’s concern with local responsibility--an especially important point, considering the Chines government’s human rights record in areas like Tibet.
Williams might also look to organizations throughout the world who spend millions of dollars to preserve the environment and promote humanity. SELF could first argue that all individuals are entitled to a decent standing of living, and that such a standard requires electric power. Thus, it would only be fair that Magiacha receive electricity. In fact, China had already electrified 85 percent of its citizens, mostly through electric grid extensions and out of fairness, some method of electrifying the rest of the country should be found. However, while most of China’s electricity comes from fossil fuel burning, as an alternative, SELF could push for private sector charitable funding of PV technology to preserve the environment. This would enable the village to be electrified in an environmentally safe manner and would take advantage of the millions of dollars donated to environmental and humanitarian organizations. SELF would simply act as a catalyst in securing funds to individuals willing to purchase PV units. The funding would cover only down payments, ensuring that the villagers would pay for their electricity on a monthly basis and subsequently allowing the villagers to take individual responsibility for their own electricity. SELF would provide zero interest loans for the difference between the subsidy and the unit cost. Still, this would leave individuals dependent in part on charity. It would be better to find another way.
Williams also considered securing working capital from environmental groups and governments to establish a "revolving credit fund" that provides zero interest loans to villagers who purchase individual PV units. SELF would use the initial capital to purchase units. SELF would then over the units to the villagers. SELF would collect a down payment on the units from the villagers, followed by monthly installments, thereby having the villagers pay for the entire cost of the unit. Payments would then be used to finance additional loans to other individuals wishing to acquire PV units. However, the villagers would need to pay back their loans in order for their neighbors to receive electricity and maintain the solvency of the revolving credit fund. In addition to providing more funding for other loans, the revolving credit fund also would promote borrowers to make timely, and sometimes early payments to allow others access to loans. The fund would grow as more people made their payments. Eventually, Williams hoped, SELF could exit China, leaving a growing solar industry behind.
Rich wanted every home in the U.S. to have a solar water heater. Similarly, Williams wanted every rural village in China to use photovoltaics. Both expected their goals to be achieved eventually by the free market. The difference is that SELF was a non-profit organization that wanted to ‘prime the pump’, getting the whole process started.
SELF completed a 1000 unit project in the GANSU region. It went very well and was capped off with a joint venture between SELF and the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory for 600 units.
China is not the only place SELF is trying to transform. Despite the end of Apartheid, South Africa is a country still plagued by widespread social inequalities between its white minority and black majority. While 74 percent of South Africans have electricity, 3.7 million of its citizens have no reliable electricity source. In rural (and predominately black) areas, only fifteen percent have grid electricity. Most of the electrification disparity between white urban and black rural residents can be attributed to two factors:
Such factors led the Energy Economist to report that
Apartheid still haunts South Africa’s energy economy. The country’s emerging democracy has inherited two systems . . . The largely white affluent minority expect and receive electricity at the flip of a switch. 2/3 of its black citizens have no electricity at all. Most live in uninsulated shacks, sweating in 30 degree Celsius plus temperatures in summer, shivering in winter, and breathing unhealthy air year-round.
The rural electrification problem in South Africa is consistent with SELF’s long-term goal of introducing photovoltaic (PV) power into lesser developed countries (LDCs), hoping to stimulate long-term, sustainable, independent PV markets. Will Cawood, a project manager for SELF, was given the task of heading up the South African project. As in China, SELF needed to choose a specific area in South Africa for an initial pilot project. The pilot project would assess the feasibility of a country wide PV electrification program and would hopefully provide the groundwork for the formation of independent PV markets throughout South Africa.
The Maphephethe region appeared to be an ideal location for the pilot project. The community of approximately 20,000 residents is on the East coast of South Africa and is 80 km west of the city of Durban. The region’s landscape is very mountainous, making access to it difficult during the summer, especially when rainfall amounts reach their average of 1000 mm/pa. Not only does the community lack electricity, it also lacks an adequate communication system: no telephone wires or significant cellular phone coverage.
One of the major problems in Magiacha was the large distance from the village to the grid. The nearest power-line was only 5 km away from Maphephethe. But neither ESKOM nor Durban Electricity, the utility companies responsible for conventional electricity in the region, had plans for extending the grid for at least five years, because the villagers could only afford, at most, 100 kWh of electricity per month. Grid extensions would therefore require ESKOM or Durban utility to incur large debts with a long payback period. SELF’s PV power seemed like a perfect solution to Maphephethe’s power problems.
The community’s leadership is vested in a young, progressive chief who has brought peace to the region after his father’s death. He has also been responsible for bringing fresh piped water to the community, thereby improving the standard of living in the community while simultaneously creating jobs for its citizens. The chief has also made his views on electrification clear, and has noted on several occasions that his goal is to see "electric lights shining forth from every kraal in his community." Since the cultural traditions of the community are strong, Cawood worked closely with the chief to establish a good relationship.
After working with the Chief, Cawood contracted with a group of researchers from the Energy & Development Research Centre at the University of Capetown to assess the receptiveness of the new technology from within the community. The team of researchers discovered that the Maphephethe residents were aware of the technological capability of harnessing the sun’s rays for energy. But most of the residents lacked specific knowledgeable of PV technology. Despite their limited awareness of PV technology, the researchers found that over 80 percent of the residents seemed eager to try the new technology.
To increase the community’s awareness of PV, Cawood obtained funding from South Africa’s Department of Mineral and Energy Affairs to install a 225Wp solar lighting system in the local courthouse, providing community members with a live presentation of how such power works. This demonstration gave Cawood a lesson in how technology has to become part of the local culture. The community center was relatively far from most residents, who did not like to travel at night--therefore, very few of them experienced the benefits of light after dark. Cawood realized in hindsight the funds would have been better spent on individual units.
He decided on an eventual goal of electrifying 75 homes in the village with 53Wp units costing around $550.00. While the 53Wp units provide less energy than a conventional grid extension, the PV units do support several lights and small appliances. The cost of each unit, $550.00, was a steep price for the community members, roughly equivalent to a year’s salary, but Cawood arranged for financing and loans through the KwaZulu Finance and Investment Corporation (KFC). KFC provided 3 or 4 year loans to PV purchasers at an interest rate of 16.5 percent, with a minimum 10 percent down payment. Loans for salaried workers were approved on the basis of their individual pay-slips, and such borrowers were encouraged to deduct loan payments directly from their salaries. For a non-salaried resident to acquire a loan, KFC needed to deploy a field staff to ascertain how a potential borrower intended to pay off the loan.
As more individuals secured loans and were able to afford PV, Cawood hoped that an independent PV market with financial support from an independent loan market would begin to develop. The next step then would be for SELF to leave the region, allowing loans to be presented to residents without external support. Cawood noted that "we hope this formula will . . . provide an answer for at least half of the 3.5 million South African families who have yet to receive electric service from the grid."
Results from the first six homes were encouraging. Before the introduction of PV, residents relied primarily on car batteries, which they needed to charge every 7 to 30 days. The charging stations were accessible only by bus, taxi or car and still required that the resident carry the 20kg battery on foot from the main road to his or her dwelling (usually between 100m to a few km away). Since most families only owned one battery and the process of charging took as long as a day, given the time for transportation and actual charging, a family could be without electricity as much as one day a week. PV provided a more steady and reliable source of power. Some households were using PV to allow their children to read and do homework at night. Two of the six households operated manual sewing machines at night with the help of PV light. PV held the promise of upward social mobility.
However, the new opportunities created by PV were not equally accessible to all: "in Maphephethe, it seems that the most powerful and influential people are empowered even further by the SHS brought into the community." The Mathew effect appeared to be in operation: individuals in positions of power such as the Chief and the tribal courthouse secretary and persons with permanent jobs such as shopkeepers and teachers were the purchasers of the PV units. Those who purchased a unit were saving energy expenses that other, poorer residents of Maphephethe incurred and also were able to improve their social standing by pursuing other projects at night. This solidified the position of the "upper" class in the community.
Electrification efforts in the Maphephethe community promised to decrease the social inequality between whites and the largely rural blacks. But they also threatened to increase social stratification within the community. The solution is to provide power for everyone, as soon as possible--partial subsidies, especially for those who do not have steady income.
The SELF cases illustrates how "run off current solar income" can be a strategy for rural areas in the developing world. Getting local people to own and take responsibility for the technology is integral to SELF’s philosophy. In this case, they do not have to buy into the sustainable schema--they just have to want power. It remains to be seen whether local industries will spring up to maintain these PV units, and even manufacture new ones. It also remains to be seen whether the PV units will continue to be used when the grid is eventually extended to areas like Magiacha and Maphephethe. Hopefully, the infrastructure will be present by then to keep solar power a viable supplement to the electronic grid, one that will give more independence to individuals and local governments as well as facilitating a more sustainable industrial revolution in the developing world.
Could Al Rich sell his technology in the developing world as well? The SELF cases is mostly about building networks of villagers, local governments and sources of financing--including organizations like the W. Alton Jones Foundation that fund SELF projects. Al Rich has had trouble building similar networks in this country--he would need to convince an organization like SELF to work with him.
If it exists, it is possible. (William McDonough)
The cases of ethical invention in this chapter suggest some additional generalizations about invention, design and discovery.
1. Invention and innovative design are often shared activities--successful inventors create networks.
Who invented the atomic bomb? Robert Oppenheimer? He created a network at Los Alamos that built the actual device, but he and his team depended on a huge network of others, including other major laboratories like Hanaford and Oak Ridge, military leaders like Leslie Groves, scientific discoveries made by Lise Meitner and others and catalysts like Leo Szilard.
Who created Climatex Lifecycle? Albin Kaelin’s firm, Rohner Textil, owns the patent, but he did not invent the fabric alone. William McDonough supplied the vision that inspired the project. Michael Braungart added expertise on the dyes and materials. Susan Lyons was a key catalyst, collaborator and financer.
There is no single inventor in either the invention of the atomic bomb or an environmentally intelligent fabric--no Alexander Graham Bell or Thomas Edison. A.C. Rich, the one true solo inventor we have considered in this chapter, was also the least successful. In contrast, what SELF invents is a network and a financing scheme--it uses standard, off-the-shelf technology in photovoltaics.
2. Moral imagination is an important way of coming up with new ethical frameworks and designs that will make a better world.
What does it mean to make a better world? In order to even think about this issue in a non-dogmatic fashion, one has to engage in moral imagination. Similarly, creative inventors have to be able to envision new mental models. An analogy to nature lies behind both Bell and Hawken’s visions for new technologies. In the former case, the result was the telephone, in the latter, a new model for how business ought to be conducted. The goal of both is to make a better world, but only in the latter is this goal articulated in a moral framework.
3. Ethical inventors have to develop or use a moral framework as well as technology, and make sure all members of a network own this framework.
Dow Corning had a Business Conduct Code and made great efforts to insure that all employees ‘owned’ it. However, this conduct code was seen as having nothing to do with safety issues in design: these would be settled by scientific testing. The Climatex Lifecycle network shows how environmental intelligence can be integrated into design. Much of this intelligence concerns the avoidances of threats to human health. Similar frameworks need to be developed as codes of conduct for the design of medical devices.
Al Rich had an ethical design idea, but not a detailed framework like the McDonough/Braungart protocols or TNS. Furthermore, he was not able to successfully instill his personal code of conduct in all salespeople or in SMUD.
Climatex Lifecycle embodies an ethical framework and was created by a heterogeneous network. At one point, one of Kaelin’s top employees made a decision that threatened this network; this employee had not internalized the values. In fact, heterogeneous networks like this are always being threatened by this kind of unintentional defection, which sometimes contains the germ of creativity: Kaelin’s errant dyemaster was right about the new chemical, and it was eventually adopted. It will be interesting to see how this network deals with increasing success, which sometimes drives network members to fight over who really deserves the credit for a new invention.
SELF also has a framework which it embodies in a network, not a device. In this case, not all the members of the growing network have to buy the philosophy--they just want power. SELF has to build ethics into the mode of delivery. Similarly, it is possible that Climatex Lifecycle might be bought by customers primarily for reasons of aesthetic and performance, not because it is ‘green’. But in both cases, the goal is to seduce people into environmental thinking by having them use environmental products, seeing their quality demonstrated every day. Ultimately, DesignTex and SELF seek to bring about a change in thinking via an existence proof experienced directly by customers who, in turn, will inspire other efforts to create similar products.
4. Ethical invention will provide models by transforming reflective cognition into experiential:
As noted at the end of Chapter 3, cognition is in the world; intelligence is embodied in devices. Similarly, environmental intelligence is embodied in devices like Climatex Lifecycle and energy networks like the one created by SELF.
Let us consider the framework created by McDonough and Braungart, for example. McDonough talks about design as a function of five factors: cost, performance, aesthetics, environmental intelligence and social justice. In conversation, Michael Braungart emphasized that environmental ethics should really be integrated into our idea of quality design. This suggests that McDonough’s last two categories should really be part of the first three. Environmental and social damage should be part of cost; designs that benefit the environment and others are more aesthetic; cradle to cradle designs perform better.
5. Trying to solve one global problem will involve trying to solve all of them.
The Donner party realized, too late, that they were not going to be able to cross the Rocky Mountains--the living ended-up eating the dead in order to survive. The image that sticks in my mind is of an 18-month old baby, crying by the half-eaten corpse of his mother. The people in this party were decent folks, but the ruthless logic of survival drove them to cannibalism.
Similarly, the Polynesians who settled Mangareva found a paradise—a lagoon rich with shellfish that also had trees and soil suitable for farming. All the island lacked was stone for tools, and that was available on nearby Pitcairn Island. But gradually, over a period of several hundred years, the islanders deforested their paradise, thereby losing much of their topsoil and their abilitiy to make canoes with which to fish. Modern ancestors of the few survivors describe civil war over the few remaining bits of arable land and widespread cannibalism, with the living digging up the corpses of the dead (Diamond, 1997).
The Donner party had backed itself into this box by a series of bad choices, including taking an experimental route south of Salt Lake on the promises of a guide, who left them in a lurch. Similarly, the Mangarevan islanders could have prevented disaster by exercising a bit of foresight.
Those who say global problems are greatly exaggerated may be right, and certainly some environmental extremists are guilty of crying wolf too often. However, long-term anticipation of possible consequences is the way to avoid getting stuck in a Donner party dilemma at a future date. The Donner party was warned not to take the new route by someone who had traveled it. Similarly, our species is often warned by its own behavior. Hiroshima was a kind of warning. The fact that there has been only one atomic war gives one hope, though the continued spread of nuclear weapons throughout the world is cause for concern.
The sustainability frameworks discussed in this chapter are an attempt to avoid a Donner party scenario, in which an overpopulated world faces limited resources and extensive pollution. Even if one takes the view that global resources are limited more by intelligence than by what is in the ground, the kind of intelligence we need must include this kind of anticipation of long-term consequences.
According to Mark Sagoff, in order to save the environment, we will have to eliminate poverty . Technology can help. SELF is an example--bringing inexpensive power to rural areas will increase the opportunities for education, sanitation and communication with the outside world. One of SELF’s goals is to gradually transfer the manufacture and maintenance of solar panels to local entrepreneurs.
On the face of it, Climatex Lifecycle may seem to have nothing to do with this poverty problem; it is a high-end furniture fabric that will be used only by the affluent. But it is manufactured by a small textile mill that is closely integrated with its community. The Rohner mill might be an example of the kind of business that could take off in developing countries, using materials like wool and ramie that could be grown locally.
War is another cause of Donner party scenarios that exist all over the world today. Refugees in Zaire and Rwanda are fleeing tribal wars. Refugees from Albania are fleeing a corrupt, feudal government that has collapsed into economic chaos. These examples illustrate the link between poverty, dictatorship and tribalism. The kind of dislocations that occur in Zaire and Albania have terrible environmental consequences.
The obvious point is that environmental sustainability is a challenge that cannot be tackled in isolation. Technology alone cannot solve problems like poverty and war. But the same kind of moral imagination that can produce an intelligent fabric could also produce an intelligent future. The first step in moral imagination is recognizing that one has assumptions about reality which constitute a view, or perspective. When someone refers to the realities of the marketplace or the inevitability of poverty, they are confusing a view with reality. Their view may correspond to much of the world as it is now constituted, but not necessarily all possible future worlds.
The major lesson of this chapter is that we are not obligated by the realities of business or politics to design a future that includes war, poverty and environmental degradation. In the immortal words of Walt Kelly, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
This page was last edited: Wednesday, July 14, 1999