The day I imagine the climate crisis solved is the day where it’s common practice to re-use any plastics or metals in the household. It means refillable stations at supermarkets and online sales collecting then refurbishing their products into new products regardless of their sector or industry: clothing, furnitur, food deliveries, Health & Beauty etc.
In today’s blog, we’ll be exploring what companies are doing to be more sustainable/eco-friendly, whether they are going far enough in their approach and the origins of “consumer electronics”. We’ll cover topics including:
Is sustainable Engineering going far enough?
Are companies doing enough to go green or are we simply greenwashing?
What can Engineers do to create more sustainable/eco-friendly products?
Are we heading to a new design philosophy?
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What are Engineering firms doing to become more green and sustainable?
Sustainable engineering should revolve around the idea that materials we mine from the Earth are communally owned by everyone: we only temporarily borrow these materials to better improve our lives.
Raw materials shouldn’t be used once, in a product, then discarded into a giant hole in the ground, never to be seen again. We should see them as we once saw single-use plastic bags… something that we can reuse and repurpose.
How do we get there?
Governments are taking the issue more and more seriously. They are slowly introducing new legislations to back environmental campaigns as we’ve already made a good start at recycling stations and the “Right to Repair” act coming in for household goods. However, like many, my fear is that we are not implementing change fast enough.
There is still a mountain of cheap and disposable electronics that enter the market every day through marketplaces such as Amazon and Alibaba. All of these products were originally designed by Research & Development teams somewhere around the globe.
The question I want to explore is “What are Engineering companies doing to drive forward a sustainable future?” If we’re designing products to only have a shelf life of a couple of years then we’re still adding to the problem rather than actioning change.
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What can we do?
It’s a question that’s haunted me for the last 5 years... What can I, as an engineer, do to make products more sustainable?
Despite the doom and gloom portrayed in the media, companies are taking positive steps:
Pulp paper packaging
Eco-friendly ink
Carbon Fibre recycle
Metal and plastic recycling
Waste collection
Repairable products
The Agency of Design created a very interesting article running through their own revelations when exploring the idea of designing out waste in household products. The project looked at the end-of-life for electrical products and designed alternative methods to make use of the materials within the product. The article is very enlightening and I highly encourage you to read it.
They identified that there is no “one size fits all” solution to the problem but instead, there can be a number of solutions for the same problem. They took three different design philosophies: The Realist, The Pragmatist and The Optimist - each demonstrating a different strategy to create circular material flow’ and it’s worth reading the article to see exactly how they accomplished this. Each design achieved the same goal but with three separate design philosophies which highly impacted what the end product was and three separate methods that a business can re-collect waste.
It’s certainly worth checking out as we won’t be talking too much about their innovative solutions but rather their research during their environmental deep dive.
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From the Agency of Design’s research, they found that recycling centres are not as well equipped for household waste as we originally hoped. At recycling centres, whilst steel and aluminium could be separated well, plastics had mixed results with quite a low yield. Circuit boards - which is generally known to be valuable due to their precious metals - similarly had a low yield. They were put through a shredder then smelted to extract any precious metals from the mixture.
“It revealed a hard truth - That there is no point designing a product for disassembly if it’s going to go through a shredder.”
The core reason for this was that there is very little incentive for a manufacturer to spend more time designing a product for end-of-life as ultimately it is the recycling centres that benefit rather than the manufacturer themselves. A factory's primary motivation is to manufacture a product as quickly and cheaply as possible. Typically anywhere between 100K to 1M units are produced during the lifecycle of a product, so a $0.10 increase in price to make it more recyclable can cost $10K to $100K. We’ve talked in previous blog posts about how competitive consumer electronics are and how customers are reluctant to pick up the cost on their end.
Increasingly we are seeing are the discussions around fundamentally changing the design philosophy that engineers and manufacturers should follow when creating new products.
Fortunately, we are heading in the right direction as the conversations currently taking place are trying to drive change. The change looks to be the beginning of a fundamental shift in design philosophy. In the next two or three decades, we will see this changing shift in mainstream products where circular design is integral to the product. Right now we have certainly gotten better at making products look futuristic and sexy but fundamentally they all end up in the landfill.
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Has it always been like this? What did we do in the past?
To understand the future we must also look to the past, what did we do previously to get ourselves into this mindset? Let’s start digging deeper into the different design philosophies of products and how they changed throughout the previous 50 years.
We are all familiar with cheap products that break quickly but there was a time when products lasted a long time and it was the standard i.e there was a time before consumer and disposable plastic!
Going back to 1950 - 1960s, Japan began their journey of post-war recovery and embraced core principles from W. Edwards Deming and Joseph M. Juran with a core focus on the statistical significance of data; this turned major Japanese manufacturers from producing military goods to producing civilian goods for trade.
Edward Deming focused on Japan due to his frustration with American managers; once the war came to an end most programs for statistical quality control were terminated and product quality in America took a nose dive down.
Joseph Juran saw the beginning of this Japanese movement and joined the effort as he foresaw that Japanese goods would overtake the quality of goods produced in the United States by the mid-1970s.
With the Japanese Government teaming up with both Edward Deming and Joseph Juran, both experts in the field of quality control and manufacturing - this created a new Japanese strategy representing the “Total Quality” approach. The approach relied on product inspection and focused a lot of time on improving all organizational processes within a company by investing in people in the organisation. This way, employees felt safer highlighting issues and problems within designs and could work together to overcome very complicated issues that would normally be ignored or not identified early enough in the design stage.
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This resulted in Japan becoming the world leader in Quality Control and ensuring products did not break. Their discoveries were so cutting edge that in the 1970s that they started to heavily influence Quality Control practices globally. It was one of the biggest changes in the design philosophy that has affected every single person since the 20th century.
Japan’s obsession was centred around how to design products to last 20 - 30+ years, rather than 2-3 years. How do you make products last a lifetime so that we don’t have to be constantly purchasing new products to effectively have the same functionality? Engineers took pride in their products lasting decades with many of us still having working models of CD players, walkmans and early gaming consoles.
Japan and Japanese quality control put the whole world on the back foot. Nowhere else did products last as long nor known to last longer than a year, let alone 10 or 20 years for consumer electronics.
We’re all still familiar with the connotations around Japanese design and manufacturing still to this day - they are arguably still market leaders in this approach with many other countries not too far behind, including China, the US and the UK. With Japanese manufacturing now taking up a large portion of the auto and electronics industry, America was in crisis in 1980. Any product produced outside of Japan was far inferior to those created in Japan. The American’s response to this wasn’t until 1987 where they introduced their own “Total Quality Management” process in the form of ISO 9000 series of quality management standards that is still in use today.
Simultaneously, in the 1980s there was a huge shift in design for products to be cheap, quick to assemble and disposable - think disposable cutlery, plastic straws and plastic water bottles - the height of plastic waste; arguably 40 years on, we are still feeling the ramifications of the generation prior and what methods worked for them to make money; this created two streams of product design philosophies that are still widely used today.
Today - we take pride in getting mammoth projects delivered on time and on budget. Time and budgets, largely dictated by shareholders who ultimately want to see their products sell out and make a return on investment.
How do you, as a company, want to make money? Tried and tested methods that are on the backbone of plastic waste or innovating with the environment in mind? This is a question we all have to answer, in one way or another regardless of what industry we choose our profession. A future where it’s not the idea of “disposable” products nor customers “Consuming” products then throwing them into the landfill.
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Returning back to the question… What does the future of design hold for us?
The answer is within circular economies and designing products built to last or be re-used are becoming more mainstream, especially compelling the youngest generations being born.
What’s the balance and what does the future of design hold for us? I’m still not convinced that we’ve yet to discover the perfect balance - or there are products out there that achieve the balance but are not accepted by mainstream consumers.
I think the future of electronics is within circular electronics and really fixing this gap between recyclers and manufacturing companies. In the future, responsibility has to be placed on electronics companies, sellers or distributors who will have to bridge this gap and the pressure is certainly growing from consumer groups.
Products that have these “green features” such as pulp packaging will change from a “pleasant surprise feature” to the normal where all mainstream products must adhere to these features: forcing companies to innovate once again to push towards a greener design - in another 5-10 years. I fear that the progress will once again be too slow and by 2030 - when the Paris Sustainability Agreement comes around - we will be shocked by the lack of progress and how much more we need to do.
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What needs to be done:
Circular design - with products being re-used for a second, third or fourth life.
Recycled plastics and metals should be accepted as the norm within product design.
Manufacturers should sponsor and source from companies who remove plastic or metal waste from our oceans, forests and landfills.
Companies should be aware of their greenhouse gas emissions and have plans to offset them.
Services should be transparent with how their services affect the environment. E.g BrewDog beer is aiming for net Zero carbon emissions whereas other beer companies cause more emissions.
Consumers should prioritise products that use recycled materials and prioritise products that will last a number of years.
Product designers should answer the question 'What happens to this product in 10 or 20 years?' end of life shouldn't be ignored.
There needs to be a big push in innovation at recycling centres around machinery but also educating designers.
Engineers should be taught early the green design principles and how to work with recycling companies for end of life design.
Currently, we are still a while away from being able to educate ourselves around recycling and how to implement them into designs. The recycling industry is quite behind due to how difficult it still is to acquire the information directly from credible, data-backed sources. Right now you’ll get more information from visiting a recycling centre and talking to them in person rather than what’s found out on google.
During our consumer electronic design story at Ardencraft, we’ll be sharing stories of our experiences in not just new product design but also recycled materials. We hope that publicising our findings will encourage others to do the same.
I hope you enjoyed reading this blog as much as we enjoyed writing about it. If you have any questions or would like support on converting your products to greener design principles, please feel free to reach out.
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