It helps us remember that the life cycle impact
could be somewhere besides all the chemical and energy data that we collect.
A link to the full TED talk is posted.
>> Another item that I find fascinating is the electric tea kettle,
which I found out that you guys don't really,
you don't do tea kettles in this country really, do you?
But that's really big in the UK.
97% of households in the United Kingdom own an electric tea kettle.
So they're very popular.
And if I were to work with a design firm, or a designer and they were
designing one of these and they wanted to do it eco, they'd ask me two things.
They'd say, Leila, how do I make it technically efficient,
because obviously energy's a problem with this product.
Well, how do I make it green materials?
How do I make the materials green, in the manufacturing?
Would you ask me those questions?
They seem logical, right?
Yeah, well I'd say, you're looking at the wrong problems,
because the problem is with use.
With how people use the product?
65% of Brits admit to over filling their kettle when they only need one cup of tea.
All of this extra water that's being boiled requires energy and
its been calculated.
That in one day of extra energy use from boiling kettles,
is enough to light all of the street lights in England for a night.
>> Wow.
>> But this is the thing, right?
This is what I call a product-person failure, but we've got a product-system
failure going on with these little guys, and they're so ubiquitous.
You don't even notice they're there.
And this guy over here though he does, his name Simon.
Simon works for the National Electricity Company in the UK.
He has a very important job of monitoring all of the electricity coming
into the system, to make sure there is enough so it powers everybody's homes.
He's also watching television.
The reason is is because there's a unique phenomenon that happens in the UK.
The moment that very popular TV shows end, the minute the ad break comes on,
this man has to rush to buy nuclear power from France,
because everybody turns on their kettles at the same time.
>> [LAUGH] >> 1.5 million
kettles seriously problematic.
So imagine if you designed kettles, you actually found a way to solve this
system failures, because this is a huge amount of pressure on the system.
Just because the product hasn't thought about the problem,
that it's going to have when it exist in the world.
Now, I looked at a number of kettles available on the market and found,
the minimum fill lines,
the little piece of information that tells you how much you need to put in there,
was between two and five and a half cups of water, just to make one cup of tea.
Now, this kettle here is an example of one where it actually has two reservoirs.
One's a boiling chamber and one's the water holder.
The user actually has to push that button to get their hot water boiled.
Which means because they're all lazy, you only fill exactly what you need.
And this is what I call behavior changing products.
Products, systems, or services that intervene and
solve these problems up front.
>> This gives you an introduction to life cycle assessment.