how many milliliters of water were needed for you to drink your daily breakfast juice? How many kWh? How many grams of CO2? Where was it produced? By Whom? How? Do you know? Do you even care?
The plain fact is that today it is virtually impossible to get hold of such data. At most we can feel good if we see a little green frog on the label right next the the bar code but that's about it. Knowing how many resources were needed to produce a product or service is beyond our current capabilities. Or is it?
We live in a complex economy (check Cesar Hidalgo's TED Talk). The products and services we give for granted are consequence of an intricate economic network that has been evolving for millennia. The coffee cup I'm currently enjoying while writing this blog needed coffee beans from some place closer to the equator. These, in turn, needed someone to buy the seeds, fertilizer, people to harvest, petrol to transport it, a logistic network to import it into the U.S., an industry that creates plastic cups, and so on. It is a network in the sense that each item needs other items to exist and everyone is connected, directly or indirectly. From the coffee bean farmer in Kenya to the software engineer in Mountain View, California.
As sensors keep falling in price it becomes feasible to start storing such information. It is the byproduct of the Internet of Things. For example, say we started recording the amount of water, kWh, kilograms of phosphate and fish food consumed to produce one kilogram of tomatoes. As discussed in previous blogs, one could safely say, although it might take some investment in sensor technology, it is possible to have such information. Imagine some farmer did the same with their wheat production and another did it with their dairy production. The same is true for flour production, storing each and every input that goes into their system. That is, what happens when each and every economic entity records the required inputs to produce one unit of production?
If we went to a restaurant and ordered for a pizza it would now be possible to know how many milliliters of water were required to produce it. This would be a simple consequence of joining the dots in the economic production. We know the pizza needed x grams of flour, y grams of cheese, z kwh of electricity, so much water and so on. In turn, one gram of flour needs so many grams of wheat , so many milliliters of water and so many kWh. One gram of wheat needed so much kWh and so much water. And so on, as long as you want to keep going (or so many hops in the economic network). To put it graphically, we would be constructing a tree.
Obviously, I wouldn't expect you to grab a calculator every time you go for pizza. However, if everyone followed a given protocol and made the information public an algorithm could construct the tree and give you the estimated number. If enough organizations started to do this, it would start becoming evident which ones would operate out of an open system. Some products would give you the exact number and others don't. In the same way "blood diamonds" where stigmatized by society, it would be nice to start demanding environmental accountability for the products we consume. Some companies, such as Patagonia, are starting to lead by example and take responsibility for the entire supply chain.
Additionally, if this system is in place, it would be nice to have something more intuitive. Instead of looking at the back label we could use our smartphone to tap into the economic graph and get back the information that we need. For example an interactive graph with color code for the level of resource utilization or just color coding if we are in a rush.
The point is that, given our current technological development, we should start demanding clear environmental accountability. Vertical Farms have the opportunity of delivering a product that knows exactly how much resources it is using. It can start building an organic informational economic network from the bottom up.
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