What is Sustainable Technology

2011

Sustainability beyond Technology: Philosophy, Critique, and Implications for Human Organization, 2021

This chapter introduces four different ways to perceive technology and technological development in relation to sustainability. These are (1) optimism, (2) pessimism, (3) neutralism, and (4) holism. In addition to and alongside introducing the four perspectives on technology and sustainability, four contemporary fallacies surrounding technology are presented. These fallacies are (1) technological development reduces environmental impacts (the decoupling fallacy); (2) technological development benefits everyone (the equity fallacy); (3) technological systems and technological development are autonomous (the autonomy fallacy); and (4) the phenomenon of technology and technological development can be rationalized entirely (the intellect fallacy).

2011

TAPUYA. Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 2022

The technology of need: technology of sustainability? Hyper competitiveness accelerates the pace of innovation and generates an impressive increase in the number of products that are introduced in the market daily (Harvey and Griffith 2007). Nevertheless, most of these products are not designed to satisfy basic needs and their distribution among the population is uneven, increasing social exclusion. The technological systems (Hughes 1987) in which innovations take place have, in many cases, evident features of unsustainability. This is because there is an increased use of raw materials and energy to manufacture consumer goods (tangible or intangible)especially those oriented to satisfy the consumption aspirations of a little fraction of humankind. This is supported by an important rise in the capabilities of knowledge production, posing a paradox: on the one side, more efficient technologies are developed allowing the increase of industry and services efficiency which can result in a reduction of the environmental impact. On the other side, it increases the possibility of nature appropriation and transformation, mainly by the intensive exploitation of resources, both traditional (e.g. iron, bauxite, copper, coal, petroleum, limestone, etc.) and new ones (e.g.rare earth, coltan, Lithium salts), and the growing generation of new waste polluting. Therefore, outputs are often unsustainable. This leads to questioning the current sociotechnical structure and the need of exploring alternatives that, inevitably, must inducea rethinking of the notions of technology, production, and consumption.

2018

HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

2000

Trumpeter, 2002

A review of Aidan Davison's "Technology and the Contested Meaning of Sustainability". Albany, NY: State of University of New York Press, 2001.275 pages, notes, index, no bibliography

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 2000

This paper revisits some technologies that, in the 1970s, were considered as 'low-tech' alternatives to mainstream versions, but more recently have been developed using high-tech elements. This change from alternative to advanced is analysed as a process called sociotechnical mainstreaming, whereby technologies are transformed by the dominant R&D institutions and/or industry. The paper aims to clarify what is involved in such processes of mainstreaming, and how they aff ect the fate of the alternative technology legacy, not only in terms of being ecological but also their production being craft-based, decentralised and with some form of local control. This is explored through three examples: wind turbines, electric cars, and ecological architecture. Four mainstreaming processes are identifi ed: pragmatic, expansive, dominant design, and conceptual. More empirical research is called for to further develop the concept of mainstreaming.

2018

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