 I love the story of stuff. I think all of us need to watch it every six months just to remind ourselves of so many things that we don't think about. Annie Leonard went on to make more such videos like the story of solutions and others on consumerism. The true cost of bottle water. You'll see the links in the reference tab on the course platform. You know, these are really things we cannot not afford to think about, especially when we design for sustainability. We have to be conscious about the planet's limited resources and focus on materials and processes that aim for zero waste. And we have to think about how we change the way we produce and consume and how we distribute, how we recycle. And this is really where all the three Rs come in. The three Rs reduce, recycle, reuse. Exactly. You know, the story of stuff was made in 2009 and things are even worse today for sure because even though the video was made for a U.S. context, it applies equally so for our environment today. We are losing natural resources like forest cover at top speed, industries are polluting air, water and soil. Tribal populations are being displaced by corporations that have no right to that land. In India also the economic model has been largely wasteful in terms of being a linear model. You take resources from nature and you design these products, make them and ship them to the customers. And it has a certain planned duration of use. After that it needs to be replaced by other products. So the consumption is largely wasteful and a lot of the end-of-life products just end up in the environment, not in a form that nature can process it. And therefore it becomes disruptive in some ways and also destructive to the environment. So that's why I think the conscious designer needs to think more in terms of sustainability and be more sensitive to the damage caused to the environment. So here we are not only talking about responsible consumption of resources, can those products be designed in such a way that some parts of it can go directly into nature and be processed by nature and some other parts of it can be reused or repurposed or recycled so that the waste stream is reduced and it doesn't disrupt the natural cycle. And therefore the outputs are recycled, reused in such a way that it closes in. Yes, the purely economic approach did not look at closing the loop between the inputs they were using and the waste being generated. Right, and it's not as if suddenly the old way of doing things has vanished. Design for sustainability in the contemporary industrial context is yet to become widespread. It's not a way of thinking that exists at the moment. And it exists only in some pockets where people are becoming environmentally conscious and socially conscious but largely people are not concerned about the future of the planet that we're leaving behind. Where people don't care or don't care to know, there is an attempt to bring in laws that regulate these matters. Yeah, you know, but there are always people opposing these laws and are looking for loopholes that may allow evasion to some extent. And in fact, legal measures may not always have the measured or the required effect that we're looking for. I think it requires a change in thinking, you know, in the way we think about the planet and resources. And in fact, a recent move in sustainability has been towards lean thinking. Lean thinking became a very important aspect to consider, especially on the economic factors of cost, quality and lead time. This was largely successful for many of the Japanese car manufacturers grabbing a huge market share because of the way they designed their products using lean thinking. These key principles guide us when applying lean techniques and tools and it became a new way of thinking for both product design and for manufacturing. So Tesco is one of the largest supermarket chains in the UK and Terry Lehi, who is the former CEO of Tesco, explains how lean thinking is applied for sustainability in the context of the chain's operations. And it's a huge supply and distribution network that links the farmer with the home consumer. It's time for a pause as you go to the next tab and follow the link.