LCAs

Governments can increase the usage of LCAs (Life Cycle Assessment) through following ways:

1. Promoting, funding and granting research activities on designing and improving LCA tools that are conducted in the universities and research institutions. This way increasing the number and the quality of the tools would be supported by the government, this way the use of LCAs will be indirectly icreased.
2. Coming up with environmental certificates that are similar in logic to quality control certificates or sustainability indexes. In other words globally accepted environmental standards for each product and supply chain can be formed. Assessing of environmental impact and environmental impact can be done gradually obligatory, and that would have a positive effect o increasing the usage.
3. After the above policy, there can be done additional regulations which have monetary impacts on the firms either like taxes or premiums according to the data and measurements gathered from the LCA tools.
4. For the assessment of environmental impacts through LCAs the government can support third party consulting companies which will act like auditors in the financial system. So this policy has to be well analyzed and designed in order to be fair and transparent.

I would like to choose the second way primarily. Creating an environmental quality standard would support the developments of LCAs at the same time broadening their usage.

Social Networks

1. BUSAS - Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Su Altı Sporları Klübü (Boğaziçi University Scuba Diving Club)

I am a member of BUSAS. Below is the flow chart of BUSAS. In the blue arrows you can see the human flow, and in the red arrows you can see the information, regulation, obligation and promotion arrows. Currently I am on the Experienced Divers (Passive) node.

BUSAS is a university club which offers scuba-diving and free-diving trainings, international certificates. The club reguarly organizes activities and long trips in which the main focus is diving. It is a relatively small network due to the fact that it is not open to outside world namely only Bogazici University are allowed to enter and take responsibilities in the organization. The finance and the administration of the club is managed internally, şn addition to that there is a unique activity in the club which is the club educates the members internally. There are no external professional paid trainers. The trainers are all students, assistants or professors (also former ones). BUSAS has an administrative and a social room in the campus, a storage room for the equipments in the campus, a mailing list, webpage, and a monthly published magazine called Derin (eng. Deep).

The dependency relations can be seen from the red arrows. During the club activities active experienced divers have responsibilities on the newcomers and they take directions both from the alumni and the current board. After some time experienced divers have the possibility to become a member of the board. If that is not possible than they retire. After becoming a passive experienced diver there is no turning back to the board, however most of the activities remain open to the passive divers.

Board is responsible for everything that happens in the club. Directly they give the trainings to the newcomers and experienced divers, they manage the administrative works, and  indirectly they regulate active experienced divers and manage the secondary administrative works.

After some time the board members become alumni. I this position if they choose to stay or live close to the club they continue holding their administrative rights, they are always welcome to the preceding boards' meetings and actually they can interfere the decisions.

2. BUMK - Bogazici University Music Club

This is network for all the students in my university which have interest in music. They do not necessearily have to be able to play a instrument. The society has a central board mechansism and a pack of sub divisions which have also their own boards and mechanisms. The general board is responsible for revising the planned organizations, controlling financial operations and representing the board. Sub divisions have the responsiblity of organizing events and activities. These might be concerts and festivals, or workshops and studio rentals. 

The club reaches the students rhrough these events during the year and intensively on the main area of the  campus at the beginning of the year. Inside the social network the relationships are maintained through social gatherings or mailing list. Also it is common to share announcements related with issues other than music like house rents, job opportunities, course advices etc.

Personally I use this social network to know and meet different musicians of my age. Also I use to have some students there but this time my students we can say.

Nokia Video

In the class we watched a documentary about the company Nokia trying to shift its production towards China. During the film we watch the adventures of Ms. Hanna who is the main employee on the mission of analyzing the various supplier alternatives and then reporting and presenting the outcomes to the board members. We watch only one of the supplier alternatives which was in fact not selected by Nokia to form business relations. There are many interesting points and inferences I had drawn from the movie, and in this entry I will try to depict them in addition to addressing the two questions given in the class.

The main question is that is it possible to import the moral and ethical standards from Finland (Europe) to production system (business life) in China?

Most of the video contains scenes like how poorly Chinese workers are living. They may be regarded as somewhat modern slaves with all their boring and monotonous duties, unpaid overtimes, no labor rights, no labor contracts, poor housing conditions with unhealthy bathrooms, toilets and kitchens,  no rights for emotional feelings, and much more which we all have seen reminded me the famous (nationally) Turkish TV series "Arena" we used to have when I was a child. The brave journalist was discovering and revealing all the illegal and filthy activities of many companies or workstations from a wide variety of industries from drug dealers to bakers, from white women traders to museum administrations. But the difference was they used to be filmed by hidden cameras, naturally. In Nokia movie I sensed the same feeling that the Finnish lady and her Chinese advisor are trying to investigate and depict every problems they can observe and point the findings out to the camera. This situation is also in correlation with my personal experiences from living abroad in Europe, namely it is quite common for a person coming from a developed country to directly and immediately catch the problems or inefficiencies (sometimes stated as low hanging fruits) they see when they arrive in a less developed country. I believe the important thing is how to make use of that findings. In short term it is quite economically rational for firms from developed countries to make the investigations like Nokia has done and then analyze the findings and choose the best supplier best fits or promises to be able to best fit the company standards. But since we are living in the post-colonial age, as an individual I would like to see the deeper issues as well. In the 21th century the humanity have started to talk about other interests than finance; environment and sustainability are two of them. I don't know if one day organizations from developed world will arrive in non-developed world for improving their standards not just for maintaining their own organizational images but in addition for environmental and social responsibilities. Development should be global if a sustainable global growth is intended. Otherwise I think Nokia's selection of suitable Chinese supplier is just a small thing in whole the system. I think so because at market and sector level it is unclear that significant percentage of customers will decide not choose Nokia because it has connections is China, since there are almost none which does not have some their facilities in China. This is somewhat a norm for our modern industrial world. I see this video, as well many similar things from the corporate world, as a sustainability game in order to convince the society that company cares about sustainability. It is hard to define the boundaries and see the real picture.

SES

The social economical system I am going to introduce is located in Aegean coast of Turkey. The name of the place is Alaçatı and it is inside the borders of the third largest city of Turkey, İzmir. Alaçatı is actually a village of Çeşme town. Çeşme has for a long time been one of the popular holiday places in Turkey, and for the last decade Alaçatı has become the first place among Çeşme's villages. The area called Çeşme has several other holiday places within half an hour reach from the town center.

Alaçatı can be characterized for its local, constant and stable wind. The geography has a special feature that the valley and the river feed the local wind and at the coast relatively strong blows occur. For that reason even before Alaçatı was as famous in local tourism as today it has been known by the windsurfer's from all over the world. The reason why the village has become this famous has different reasons than the local weather. Roughly I can summarize the reasons as; old stone houses and tiny streets, specialized restaurants offering both local and innovative cuisine, growing number of artist who live in the village.

Actualy as you can see in the map above, Alaçatı has to be thinked of the composition of two different interests; first one is the windsurfing tourism which is located on the bay, and second one is the ethnic tourism which is located ten minutes of driving away from the bay. However for the last two years there has been projects which mainly focusing on exanding the second type of relatively luxurious tourism onto the calm and protected sports tourism. The aim of the project recent projects is to transform Alaçatı into a canal town like Venice in Italy. There have been made a lot of promises and naturally a lot of discussions and complaints.

For the surfers Alaçatı is also a paradise, especially for the beginners. This is because of the shallow waters that expand into to sea about 100 meters, which enables for beginners to practice more effectively and delightfully. Advanced surfers especially during the stormy weathers also enjoy the bay. There are several competitions held one or two of them internationally recognized.

Port Alaçatı which is the name of the marina founded 15 years ago have lived through a significant expansion in the last decade. The expansion had side effects on the surfing tourism due to the increasing traffic inside the bay, and also smells caused by the decontamination activities of the facilities. Port Alaçatı is also the major player of the canal paradise project.

As a SES Alaçatı can be summarized as follows:


Resurce System:

• Alaçatı

Resource Units:

• Wind
• Sea and Beach
• Authenticity

Users:

• Beginner Surfers
• Advanced Surfers
• Daily economy tourists
• Luxury tourists
• Yachters
• Local residents

Governance System:

• Municipality of Alaçatı

Currently it can be stated that Alaçatı is in the Reorganization phase of a system. The new policies involve debating with different interest groups. The effects of the new constructions have to be analyzed carefully if the richness of the area is wanted to be sustained.

Learning Experiences with EMS

The developing an Environmental Management System (EMS) during the class was a good experience for me. Since I am new in social sciences it was quite interesting to have a group discussion about a subject about which we all had limited information and prior knowledge, and no valid data. Nevertheless as the Production Department team we could come up with acceptable answers to the questions. It was interesting to observe that the vision statements were partly common for all four groups and every team had added one more vision statement which was more focused and slightly different than the others. The answers given to information needed and information provided and routine collection show that it is possible to some extend coordinate the information flows and exchanges with the ideas stated during that very short time. For some of the information needed where there is no ready information provided the flows should be negotiated and formed if this study were to be extended and applied to a real life case.

Industrial Ecology Inspired Puzzle

In this post I will try to come up with a industrial-ecology inspired puzzle and then provide three alternative explanations for it. I have decided to choose a puzzle from my home country which I thought would be interesting for my mostly European classmates to listen. Having grew up with the stories and memories from my elders such as Turkey was once one of the several countries which was capable of its own needs and economically independent in terms of food and agriculture, and also having been in the Netherlands for a couple of weeks, which is famous for its very efficient and mechanized agriculture and which has the third ranking in the world despite its low population and land inspired my puzzle. Here it is:

The national agriculture and animal husbandry activities in Turkey is decreasing over years, and the country has started to import its several once characteristic goods such as such as wheat, cattle, olive oil, tea, watermelon, etc.

1. The country has unsuccessfully performed in the agriculture technology race among the past 30 years. From the other point the western countries have invested in research and development activities and technological development with enough funds and human power. That may be the reason behind favoring importing rather than farming because the first one is more profitable and rational people always choose the most profitable alternative.

2. The people are lazy. They are living under a nice weather without the motivation of searching for a growth in economy. They are not trying to improve their quality of seeds over years. They rather decide to use the imported seeds which are ready to use easily.

3. Turkey was poorly governed by incapable leaders, and they have given so many privileges and compromises to international companies and other countries. They deliberately left the farmers alone without giving them any support to survive in the competition in the market. (This explanation might sound rather extreme, it is partly because I am sharpening the phrases but it is actually what is being argued in the country in some groups. Well, I hear you saying conspiracy theories are beyond our subject but I have decided to add it because as always it is interesting to hear.)

Introduction, Impressions

Greetings, welcome to my blog which is created with the motivation from one of my courses I am taking in TU Delft. The name of the course is Social Systems: Policy and Management, and it is in the Industrial Ecology master program. As an exchange (visitor) student in this class and the course, I think after all these years of tough mathematics, this will be an excellent opportunity for me to extend into social sciences. It has already started with this blog, which is my first blog ever, and together we will see what will happen in the future.

Social sciences were always my close interest, however I had not had the chance to interact with them in an academic format. With my background in Industrial Engineering and specialization in System Dynamics, this course will be very useful for my desire in creating scientific and valuable work with combining social sciences, natural sciences and engineering.One of my early impressions on Industrial Engineering during my bachelor years was something like that: why do we have to use these same, old, one dimensional, and sometimes unhealthy objective functions? In engineering what we are working on are complex, very difficult; however, well defined and well structured problems, and because of that we are able to acquire some results which can be expressed in numbers. But the structure is built according to the objective functions I mentioned before, to write in words they are either maximizing profit or minimizing cost and sometimes maximizing revenue, so it is not surprising to have results from an usual model telling the analyst to keep on operating with fossil fuels for the next 50 years: We do not even have to run the model, since it is all well defined mathematics. (Note: In many applications these models and methods are excellent) What happens if we take out the sovereignty of the cost accounting from our models? Then it is not well defined anymore and it is hardly to get any exact solutions. The problems become even more complex and more difficult. This might a problem for some people, but I do not think the same way. Coming to my first impressions in social science perspective on industrial ecology: I think it is better if we try to understand the system; its flows, stocks and causal relations; and then make critical and creative efforts in designing our policies with it. As the famous saying depicts we have to favor for doing the right things.