What is the carbon footprint of a cinnamon bun?
In which I try once again to make my students' work relevant to a larger audience.
I teach sustainable design to students of the Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University). It’s a one-term optional course for third and fourth-year students, which is pretty ridiculous; it should be a full-year course for first-year students and baked into every course they take, but change is slow.
I have always felt that having students produce work that only I see is silly; these are smart adults doing interesting stuff, and I wanted to share it with a larger audience. I have tried a number of different things over the years;
I assign book reviews every year; the students pick whatever they want to review and submit it in an identical format with a section for an outline, relevance, and opinion, with ratings out of 5. A dozen years ago, some students set up a website, and every year it was a huge amount of work to post them all, and I don’t think anyone ever looked at it. I gave up on it a while back but looking at it now, I regret not continuing with it. Check it out here.
Two years ago, I thought I would build an encyclopedia of carbon, assigning 95 different topics each year related to climate change and the carbon crisis. With the help of journalism student Michael Witkowicz, we built another website that nobody has ever looked at; The submissions were wildly inconsistent in quality, so I only put up a portion of them that I was willing to share, but it is still only half done; we also ran out of energy. Again, it was a lot of work that nobody saw.
This year I decided to just make it easier and have some fun. My new book, Carbon Upfront, is all about the importance of embodied carbon; this is understood in architecture now but is not well understood by the general public. I asked my students to pick something and follow it from the source to their homes. They then were to do an infographic-style one-page document and a tik-tok-length 3-minute video.
There is a hilarious range of products, from cigarettes to cruise ships, with cinnamon buns and roses in between. It is sort of like Mike Berners-Lee’s How Bad are the Bananas? book which inspired it, but a completely random selection of items.
Transportation seems to have been a problem for many students; many assumed that all products coming from Asia were flown over, and others get the math wrong; I think Matthew here had one watermelon in the truck, though 23 kilograms of emissions might even be high for that.
But these are easy to digest, often surprising, and sometimes fun. I will share the best ones here and not worry about building fancy websites that nobody looks at. And when you eat your next cinnamon bun, you can worry about the calories or the sugar, but the carbon footprint is a not-too-terrible 325 grams.