Back to the drawing board: how good design can eliminate waste
From charging for the use of aircraft engines to waste-free supermarkets, experts share ideas for breaking the cycle of unsustainable design
Tracey Rawling Church, director of brand and reputation, Kyocera
It is commonly accepted that 80% of a product’s environmental impacts are determined in the design phase, making it the obvious place for an intervention. However, the ecological goal of durable products that are easy to repair and disassemble conflicts with the economic imperative to drive down manufacturing costs and drive up customer demand.
Most products compete on price and most consumers would rather replace a £100 product every three years than a £200 product every 10 years. Because of this, many manufacturers are locked in to a mentality of “build it cheap and sell another one when it breaks”.
One way of breaking this deadlock is servitisation; charging for use of a device rather than selling it outright avoids the need for the customer to pay upfront for the benefit of resource-efficient design. If design is considered from a product-service system perspective, rather than focused purely on the hardware, more commercially viable outcomes are possible.
One example of successful servitisation is Rolls Royce providing aircraft engines on a fully managed service, covering the cost of all parts and labour when the engine is due an overhaul and charging its customers on the basis of flying time. A number of companies are now also providing energy-efficient LED lights for offices on a “pay per lux” contract. This has helped to overcome the barrier of LED lights being much more expensive to buy outright than conventional alternatives, even though they are less expensive over their extended lifetime. Kyocera’s managed print service offers another example of the product to service shift, providing access to hardware, document management software and service support on a “pay-as-you-go” basis.
Chris Sherwin, head of sustainability, Seymourpowell
The introductory video to the RSA’s Great Recovery project explains its inspiration as visiting a recovery facility and seeing a recycler physically struggling to remove the compressor (the most valuable part) from the back of a fridge. It became apparent how upstream decisions made by fridge designers can massively affect material recovery and recyclability at the end of that fridge’s life.
This is bang-on-the money in expressing that a circular economy is a question of better design. Circularity, reuse and recycling can be “designed-in”, or “out”, at these early design stages. I’d go a design-step further though, in calling for designers to focus not only on how stuff gets made to be remade, but what that stuff actually is.
Circular design should concentrate not only on the design of better recovery infrastructures, new recycling technology and materials reuse, but also on the questions of what the product should be, how it works and how it satisfies customer needs in more efficient and effective ways.
These are the fundamental questions of designing for the circular economy; how we reimagine a new generation of products and services, rather than retrospectively correcting today’s poor design. That may be less about fridge dismantling, and more about the design of better food storage, smarter packaging solutions, meal management and preparation, healthier and more sustainable diets, food ordering and scheduling.
In the end, circular thinking invites us to revisit and rethink almost everything from first principles. What a creative opportunity.
Alban Forster, director, SLR Consulting Limited
When it comes to packaging, there are a number of potential solutions for designing out waste. Some require legislation to enforce and others can be driven from deeper collaboration between retailers and manufacturers.
Emerging cutting-edge laser techniques can identify plastic types and segregate for reprocessing; but one has to question whether there should be an enforced rationalisation of permissible plastics or bioplastics so that the associated on-costs are not borne downstream. Limiting options for manufacturers to use biodegradable packaging or materials easily retrieved and reprocessed will address the issue at source.
To move towards more reusable packaging, there needs to be a major systems shift. Manufacturers should develop a packaging free logistics chain to the consumer, delivering materials such as flour, sugar and washing powders in bulk to supermarkets.
Brands are likely to resist this change because much of the value of branded goods is in the perception of quality through the packaging and brand associations. However, one way around this could be through providing (branded) re-useable containers, so that brand presence is communicated in a new way.
There is space for genuine disruption here but this needs to be balanced with health, safety and hygiene issues, and of course, major physical changes within supermarkets to respond to different methods of retailing. It could however, drive considerable value through the supply chain and create significant cost savings for the customer, let alone environmental benefits.
Reprocessing packaging is largely about achieving economies of scale so there will always be a tension between local, as opposed to centralised or regional reprocessing, which may involve more transport impacts which could be managed with sustainable transportation.
The biggest challenge with all these discussions is that waste cannot be viewed in isolation. Waste becomes a major issue and cost downstream but the decisions to affect real change need to happen upstream within a much more transformative mindset.
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