Supply Chain Gang

Would you go into the kitchen of your favorite restaurant? It doesn't take too brave a foodie to say yes, but even the stoutest soul should cringe at staring his laptop in the face: That's because a new program out of MIT reveals your junk's hidden carbon content.

In a recent broadcast of Public Radio International's The World, Murray Carpenter made a tour of people who were throwing some light on the hidden costs of global consumption. Leonardo Bonanni of MIT has created an online system called Sourcemap that allows users to construct a model of any physical product's carbon dioxide footprint. The online model (of a shirt, or a dish set, or a pendant) consists of the built-in footprint from any source material and the emissions created to transport that material to the manufacturing site. The process operates fairly intuitively, but it also has some hidden faults and some hidden advantages of its own.

There is no database to list a product's many components (wool, iron, cadmium), or from whence each came. Users will have to do a little research.  But, after all that footwork it will come as less of a shock to find out that an average laptop (weight: 3.88 kg) produces 1,496.83 kg of carbon dioxide emissions, from over thirty sourcing sites that add up to a total distance of 368,042 km. Put into context, producing the average laptop creates 385 times its weight in carbon emissions, and the component parts collectively travel around the globe (at the equator) nine times. Every time you touch your keyboard you touch at least twenty different countries.

Authors like Douglas Rushkoff (Life, Inc.) point out that opening distant markets often comes at the cost of environmental and cultural degradation. Juggernaut businesses create poor communities that are less equipped to survive independently; countries become monocultures of industry, such as Cambodia, where by 2006 the garment sector accounted for 80 percent of all exports. To make matters less complicated, commentators like Joshua Kurlantzick give dire warnings of the 'fall of globalization' that will produce:

1. Poverty and rioting in Haiti (this was before the earthquake brought international aide)

2. Food shortages in countries that face new barriers for exporting food, counterintuitive though that is

3. Migrants coming home empty-handed, angry, and unemployed

and

4. Increases in the ranks of terrorist organizations abroad as angry migrants arrive home from the Persian Gulf, only to find solace in "Islamist organizations" that offer food, health care, and social services

Your locally grown grains support terrorist organizations? Well, not quite, but to punch a hole in the crisis blimp, globalization is not going to go away in our lifetime, for good or ill. While it's undeniably true that markets and information travel around the globe faster today than at any time in history, international markets have been around for thousands of years. People in the late Middle Ages continued to trade internationally, but at a drastically reduced rate from the height of the Roman Empire. Prosperity, largely at the hand of local merchants, actually increased to a point greater than at any other time before or since.

Streamlining markets and making regional trade a greater priority will increase the standard of living for most people, but only if blatant inefficiencies are monitored and corrected. Cultural exchange need not suffer from narrower global markets thanks to open access communication (hello, Chinese censors!), so Sourcemap away.

Then tell your favorite manufacturer to bring the goods on home.

Photo Credit: Pro-Zak via Flickr